Decidable Models of Recursive Asynchronous Concurrency

Asynchronously communicating pushdown systems (ACPS) that satisfy the empty-stack constraint (a pushdown process may receive only when its stack is empty) are a popular decidable model for recursive programs with asynchronous atomic procedure calls. We study a relaxation of the empty-stack constraint for ACPS that permits concurrency and communication actions at any stack height, called the shaped stack constraint, thus enabling a larger class of concurrent programs to be modelled. We establish a close connection between ACPS with shaped stacks and a novel extension of Petri nets: Nets with Nested Coloured Tokens (NNCTs). Tokens in NNCTs are of two types: simple and complex. Complex tokens carry an arbitrary number of coloured tokens. The rules of NNCT can synchronise complex and simple tokens, inject coloured tokens into a complex token, and eject all tokens of a specified set of colours to predefined places. We show that the coverability problem for NNCTs is Tower-complete. To our knowledge, NNCT is the first extension of Petri nets, in the class of nets with an infinite set of token types, that has primitive recursive coverability. This result implies Tower-completeness of coverability for ACPS with shaped stacks

Building Comprehensive Approaches to Combating Disinformation in Illiberal Settings: Insights from the Philippines

Citizens and civil society organizations in illiberal or, more perilously, authoritarian settings face distinct and particularly serious challenges in addressing disinformation and online harassment. Research on civil society groups in the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte suggests that assistance in these contexts should address local challenges faced by activists under threat of repression, build resilience, and facilitate crosssector collaboration in civil society

Queer Cosmopolitanism in the Disaster Zone: My Grindr Became the United Nations

This article reflects on the significance of cosmopolitan socialities and intimacies following disasters, and the opportunities and risks they offer for restorative and reparative action for survivors and their communities. Reporting in particular on the experiences of LGBTQ Filipinos in post-Haiyan Tacloban, I discuss how the presence of foreign aid workers in everyday social spaces provided opportunities for queer identity expression and social attachments. I argue that cosmopolitan socialities, including new connections initiated via mobile dating platforms, were embraced by LGBTQs for their potential to share and repurpose wounds after rupture, especially in a conservative small-town context where LGBTQ identities have been historically repressed. This article attends to the opportunities and risks of queer cosmopolitanism as an uneven experience between middle-class and low-income LGBTQs

Philippine Elections 2022: The Dictator\u27s Son and the Discoure around Disinformation

Social media was central to Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s electoral success, but not in the sense that his campaign had somehow unlocked their hidden features for technological brainwashing. Unfortunately, some pundits looking for quick rationalizations for his landslide victory in the May 2022 polls repeated much of the same explanatory devices from 2016. Many pundits had then attributed the wave of “surprise” populist victories of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Brexit in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump in the United States to what were hyped to be election-determining factors of social media-fuelled disinformation, troll and bot armies, and Russian influence operations

Toward an ordinary ethics of mediated humanitarianism: An agenda for ethnography

This article takes stock of the insights and approaches advanced by the last 15 years of critical research in humanitarian communication and distant suffering while arguing for a new agenda for ethnography. Ethnography lays bare the messy and fertile terrains of human experience and disrupts idealized figures of witness and sufferer, aid worker and aid recipient, event and the everyday. Bringing into dialogue the anthropology of aid literature and media and cultural studies, this article proposes three important shifts for future research: (1) a focus on processes rather than principles in production studies of humanitarian communication, (2) a focus on ethics arising from everyday life rather than from events of distant suffering, and (3) and a focus on the lifeworlds of the poor and vulnerable rather than those of witnesses

Improved Functional Flow and Reachability Analyses Using Indexed Linear Tree Grammars

The collecting semantics of a program defines the strongest static property of interest. We study the analysis of the collecting semantics of higher-order functional programs, cast as left-linear term rewriting systems. The analysis generalises functional flow analysis and the reachability problem for term rewriting systems, which are both undecidable. We present an algorithm that uses indexed linear tree grammars (ILTGs) both to describe the input set and compute the set that approximates the collecting semantics. ILTGs are equi-expressive with pushdown tree automata, and so, strictly more expressive than regular tree grammars. Our result can be seen as a refinement of Jones and Andersen\u27s procedure, which uses regular tree grammars. The main technical innovation of our algorithm is the use of indices to capture (sets of) substitutions, thus enabling a more precise binding analysis than afforded by regular grammars. We give a simple proof of termination and soundness, and demonstrate that our method is more accurate than other approaches to functional flow and reachability analyses in the literature

Local aid workers in the digital humanitarian project: between second class citizens and entrepreneurial survivors

This paper examines the experiences of Filipino workers recruited for technology and communications work by international aid agencies involved in the Typhoon Haiyan response. Filipino workers, many of whom were personally coping with the social and economic impact of this disaster, were hired on short-term contracts to test and implement various digital humanitarian innovations such as feedback and hazard mapping technological platforms. These workers were doubly marginalized: first, as tech workers whose work was viewed by aid officers on the ground as less substantial than that of food or shelter programs; and second, as local voices often drowned out by national and international colleagues. Moving beyond the usual figure of the cosmopolitan and adventure-seeking Western humanitarian acting on distant suffering, this paper draws attention to local aid workers’ aspirations for personal and professional mobility as they seize novel opportunities opened up by the digital humanitarian agenda. It outlines how the digital humanitarian project’s ambition to facilitate the inclusion of disaster-affected communities is fundamentally undermined by labor arrangements that doubly marginalize local aid workers

The Filipino Aid Workers of Typhoon Yolanda: A Commemorative Feature

According to project leader Jonathan Corpus Ong, professor of communication in University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Convenor of the Network, “The book aims to recognize the Filipino aid workers who gave voice to communities that they are part of. It captures the hard work, ingenuity, and compassion of these aid workers that made these humanitarian projects not only possible but even successful.” The book retells the stories of: Angelo Melencio (Plan International Philippines), John Vergel Briones (formerly IOM), Jerby Santo (formerly IOM), Aivon Guanco (World Vision Philippines), and Arnold Salvador (World Vision Philippines), who managed community feedback projects to enhance community engagement. Meanwhile, Janeen Kim Cayetano (Catholic Relief Services), David Garcia (formerly UN Habitat), and Mikko Tamura (Red Cross), who worked on hazard mapping initiatives. The book recounts not only the difficult stories of working in an emergency context, but also their personal challenges, including experiencing house damage from Yolanda themselves, losing jobs and switching industries, working with expats in large global aid agencies, and piloting technological innovations never before implemented in disaster contexts. At the same time, the book highlights the professional opportunities they experienced after their pioneering work, including leading international assignments and pursuing graduate studies in prestigious universities overseas. The book features evocative photographs from renowned photojournalist Geric Cruz. Book designer and National Book Award winner Karl Castro worked on the eloquent structure and typography of the feature

Pseudonymous Influencers and Horny \u27Alts\u27 in the Philippines: Media Manipulation Beyond Fake News\u27

This paper explores the limits of the frame “disinformation” when exploring the growing industry of pseudonymous influencers who occasionally campaign for politicians and seed crisis frames. Pseudonymous influencers in the form of parody accounts, meme pages, and romantic love quotes (hugot) accounts, and horny queer alt accounts have been able to evade disinformation interventions such as fact-checking because their media manipulation objectives are less focused on spreading false news and more directed toward signal boosting politically-slanted hashtags or promoting electioneering politicians. By mapping a diverse ecosystem of pseudonymous influencers in the Philippines, our paper contributes an important global South case study to understand the political economy of disinformation and the complicities of influencer industries with disinformation and “dark PR” (Edwards, 2021)

Conviviality as a politics of endurance: the refugee emergency and the consolations of artistic intervention

Against the impasse of despair in the public response to the refugee emergency, artistic interventions emerge to offer fleeting significant opportunities for restorative and reparative action. This article takes up conviviality as a conceptual tool to understand artistic interventions to the forced migration and asylum issues that variably aim for healing, empathy, and reflexivity. Drawing on comparative research consisting of interviews of artists in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States and textual analyses of their performances, we discuss specific motivations and diverse representational practices that aim to enact togetherness-in-difference. We discuss the potentials and risks of convivial artistic productions, which we argue produce a politics of endurance that, as Feldman has said, helps “people live better with circumstances they cannot change.