Digital Commons Network^™

Poems From "Morpo", Jose Perez Beduya, Allan Popa

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.

Voice, John Bengan

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.

Carlos Bulosan And A Collective Outline For Critical Filipina And Filipino Studies, Michael Viola, Valerie Francisco, Amanda Solomon Amorao

Kritika Kultura

As an activist-scholar formation called the Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collective (CFFSC) we take the position that Carlos Bulosan is indispensable for an emerging multidisciplinary field that is equipped in defying the neoliberal onslaught against ethnic studies in the United States and the unbridled racism most evident in the ongoing US “wars of terrorism” that haunt people of color throughout the world. We take seriously Bulosan’s insight that “[I]f the writer has any significance, [s]he should write about the world in which [s]he lives: interpret his [her] time and envision the future through his [her] knowledge of historical reality” …

Manuel Blanco’S El Indio And The History Of A Rumor, Resil B. Mojares

Kritika Kultura

The paper explores the social meanings that can be elicited from tracking the history of a rumor. It takes as its example the nineteenth-century apocryphal story of an Augustinian friar who labored for years on a treatise on the character of the Philippine native (indio) only to leave behind, upon his death, a book of blank pages. Tracing the origins and passage of the rumor and unpacking the various interpretations of the story, the paper demonstrates what can be gained from the study of rumors in Philippine history.

Beyond The Innocence Of Globalization: The Abiding Necessity Of Carlos Bulosan’S Anti-Imperialist Imagination, Tim Libretti

Kritika Kultura

This essay analyzes Carlos Bulosan’s writing in terms of the way he works to develop an aesthetic that comprehends and cognitively maps the repetitive dynamics of US and global colonial capitalism. More precisely, the essay examines how Bulosan’s aesthetic practice both grapples with the question of how an individual and collective consciousness can grasp the systemic processes that condition experience and also how it fosters that consciousness in the way it represents the relationships among experience, the larger class and colonial dynamics that produce that experience, and the ideological processes that intervene in our comprehension of those dynamics. In developing …

Organic And Multicultural Ways Of Reading Bulosan, John Streamas

Kritika Kultura

This essay argues that students in introductory classes read America Is in the Heart more perceptively than most professional “multicultural” critics. Students’ indifference to the book’s genre, for example, allows them to see clearly the meaning and value of its Part One, and to read the closing paragraph not as a postmodern refusal of closure but as a step on the way toward reconciling “America” with the work of “becoming Filipino.” Such engagement with the book is an example of “organic” reading.

The Manong’S “Songs Of Love”: Gendered And Sexualized Dimensions Of Carlos Bulosan’S Literature And Labor Activism, Amanda Solomon Amorao

Kritika Kultura

This article takes the 2013 passage of California Assembly Bill 123, which mandates instruction on the Filipino contribution to the state’s farm workers movement in public education curriculum, as an occasion to analyze the gendered and sexualized dimensions of Carlos Bulosan’s literature and labor activism. The article considers the texts and contexts of America is in the Heart and Bulosan’s short story “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow” to demonstrate how Bulosan’s materialist, dialectical analysis also involves an incisive critique of the intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality. As Bulosan narrates the proletariat struggles of the manong generation, …

Performing Global At Intelstar: Figuring The Call Center On Manila Stage, Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco

Kritika Kultura

Set in Makati, the central business district of the National Capital Region, Welcome to IntelStar is a monodrama satirizing the call center industry in the Philippines. The performance is an exemplar in positioning a diasporic consequence of globalization vis-à-vis nationalism because it calls on a national sentiment to the extent that the play illustrates resistance to globalization’s economic and neoliberal attachments, often perceived as the destructive force of cultural diversity and uniqueness. In relation, the performance used a recurring trope in Philippine culture, which is called in the essay as the Americanization issue: the conception of the Filipino/a as a …

Beyond The Color Line: Intersectional Considerations In Chuah Guat Eng’S Fiction, Wai Chew Sim

Kritika Kultura

This essay argues that the work of Malaysian-Chinese author Chuah Guat Eng gives pause to the culturalism that dominates literary analysis. Articulated primarily through identity politics (the politics of recognition), culturalism’s self- understanding keeps at a distance other forms of social justice commitments including class struggle. However, Chuah spotlights their intersectionality in Malaysia and enjoins us to combine the two – to see the native population’s demand for economic parity and rural development as coterminous in some respects with the demands for recognition made by settler communities. In particular, Chuah’s Echoes of Silence (1994) points to the commensurability between socialist …

Ghostly Allegories: Haunting As Constitution Of Philippine (Trans) National (Cinema) History, Patrick Campos

Kritika Kultura

By reading through the con–texts of Yam Laranas’s The Echo (2008) and Kelvin Tong’s The Maid (2005), the essay considers three Filipino genres that ironically gathered momentum at the time of the Philippine film industry’s crisis and decline in the 1990s up to the 2000s – the historical drama, the OFW (overseas Filipino worker) film, and horror. In the process, the essay constitutes an alternative map of Philippine cinema premised on inter-national transactions across states and film industries, on the one hand, and on the nodal and spectral bodies of Filipinas that network these states and industries, on the other …

Phantom In Paradise: A Philippine Presence In Hollywood Cinema, Joel David

Kritika Kultura

The Philippines’ experience with its last foreign occupant, the US, resulted in an entire clutch of problematic “special relations” that, coupled with the country’s responses to the challenges of self-government, ultimately led to a global dispersal of the population, effectively turning the Philippines into the major Asian nation arguably most reliant on its citizens’ overseas remittances. This paper takes the position that diasporic Filipinos, for a variety of reasons starting with the effectiveness of maintaining unintrusive presences in alien cultures (including the acceptance of menial positions), have possibly developed and have enabled others to perceive them as silent and discreet …

The Pitfalls Of Theatrical Consciousness, Lionel Pilkington

Kritika Kultura

Beginning with Frantz Fanon’s description of the problematic yet energizing effects of decolonization in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), this essay discusses the ways in which the theatre of modernity appears especially attractive to anti-colonial and post-colonial nationalist movements. This dominant and institutional model of theatre presents the colonized, not only as physically decorous, but as efficient and ready for work within a capitalist economy. The essay examines these propositions in relation to twentieth-century Irish theatre and drama. The second part of the essay examines the continuing centrality of performance and professional theatre within current discourses of neoliberalism and …

Marking "Austerity": Critique, Purpose And Perfromance, Victor Merriman

Kritika Kultura

This essay attempts to mark the current phase of capitalist neoliberalism, in order to create a space for articulation, in both senses of the word: there is a need both to articulate, as in to connect together ideas, events and their consequences, and to articulate, as in to voice the dynamics, contradictions, and injustices to which they give rise. As Shock Doctrine (Klein 2007), draped in Austerity’s mantle, enters the Common European Home, articulation as voice is an attempt to shatter, not silence, but the white noise generated by the mantra, “There Is No Alternative” (TINA). “Marking ‘Austerity’” sets out …

Translating The "No Man", Markus Locker

Kritika Kultura

On the premise that language is untranslatable a priori into another (Ricoeur), this essay suggests that the task of the translator is not only to translate what words express, but likewise what they do not express. The translation of the expressionless word (Benjamin) leads the translator into the realm of the self, imagined vis-à-vis language and culture. It is through the imagination that the self encounters the non-self (Fichte), i.e. the expressionless self that complements the expressed self. The ultimate task of translation—it is thus argued—equally requires the translation of the non-self, i.e. the poetization (Novalis) of the human confined …

A Pouring Out Of Words: Das Kapital In Bahasa Indonesia Translation, Ramon Guillermo

Kritika Kultura

Due to the recent global crises, Karl Marx’s fundamental work, Das Kapital (1867), has seen a resurgent interest. This renewed interest has also resulted in the production of several new translations of this work into various languages. It was quite a coincidence therefore that the first complete translation into Bahasa Indonesia was published as Kapital: Sebuah Kritik Ekonomi Politik in Jakarta by the Hasta Mitra Press in 2004. The translator was Oey Hay Djoen (1929-2008), an activist and former political prisoner on Buru island during the Soeharto Orde Baru regime. According to Oey, he used Ben Fowkes’s English translation for …

Lexical Creativity In Thai English Fiction, Pairote Bennui, Azirah Hashim

Kritika Kultura

Unlike some varieties of English in Southeast Asia, the notion that there is a ‘Thai English’ is debatable. This paper examines distinctive non-native features of a lexicon found in contemporary Thai writing in English to ascertain if English in this Expanding Circle country is developing its own linguistic norms. An analysis of features of lexical creativity in five short stories and novels is carried out to determine whether the characteristics found indicate that a Thai English vocabulary exists. An ‘integrated framework’ which combines concepts in World Englishes by Braj B, Kachru, Peter Strevens, and Edgar W. Schneider is adopted in …

Kambal Na Disyerto: Ang Kolonyal Na Kanon At Komersyalismo At Ang Panimulang Pagpapaagos Ng Mga Agos Sa Disyerto, Corazon Lalu-Santos

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.

Gods, Monsters, Heroes, And Tricksters In Adelina Gurrea’S Cuentos De Juana, Rosario Cruz-Lucero

Kritika Kultura

Gurrea’s Cuentos de Juana (Juana’s Tales) may be read as a palimpsest of the whole of Philippine history, with its indigenous system of thought and knowledge refusing to be erased or overwritten but instead, actively engaging with its colonial history. Colonialism did not so much mean the loss of the people’s teleological world as its dispersion into the Spanish world of significations. Moreover, as a unit of Philippine literary history, Cuentos bridges the gap between Philippine indigenous cosmology (now called “folklore” or even “superstition”) and modern narrative traditions. It thus confirms the continuity of this history, despite the interruptions wrought …

Death, Event, And A Deconstruction Of Gihapon In ‘Flores Ni Maria Santisima’, Cyril Belvis

Kritika Kultura

This paper proposes a deconstructive reading of Flores ni Maria Santisima, a Hiligaynon novena written by Padre Raymundo Lozano and printed in 1867. Set against the economic bustle of nineteenth-century Iloilo after it opened port to foreign trade,the novena demonstrates a homological relationship between capitalism and the practice of spiritual accumulation in the Flores. Nevertheless,teasing out the liminality of this text undermines its self-assurance as a monologic triumph of signification.A recurrent word in the novena, gihapon (always) plays an important transactional role in the promise of a happy death. As an incalculable event which subverts anticipation, death is a call …

Nativism Or Universalism: Situating Lgbt Discourse In The Philippines, J. Neil C. Garcia

Kritika Kultura

Despite or precisely because of the fact that it is being increasingly globally invoked, the LGBT signifier bids us to understand its discursive performances in various localities, particularly in the global south, whose conservative traditions this form of politics most visibly challenges, at the same time that it can only do so translationally—which is to say, as a form of transcultural syncretism. More specifically, this paper offers a postcolonial reading of LGBT discourse in the Philippines, examining the confluence between the discourse of Western “psychospirituality” and the local idiom of interiority (kalooban), as evinced, in particular, in the minoritized identity …

Unraveling Ancient Andean Camelid Herding Strategies Using Multi-Isotope Analyses, Lucia Diaz

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pastoral communities around the globe form herding strategies based on traditional ecological knowledge to make sense of mutualistic human, animal, and environmental interactions. Pastoralists develop culturally specific traditional knowledge systems surrounding animals and environments that shape decision-making in herding practices and resource management strategies during times of crisis and change. To mitigate socio-political and climatic changes, such as conflict or competition over pastures, or flooding and drought, pastoralists convert local ecological knowledge into strategies including animal mobility across varying altitudes, pasture maintenance through irrigation and pasture rotation, and extended kin support for herding and caravanning. Previous archaeological studies have revealed …

Https://Faunalytics.Org/What-Vegan-Advocates-Can-Learn-From-The-Social-Spread-Of-Quitting-Smoking/, A. Polanco, J. Anderson, D. Nguyen, J. Winslow, A. Couture

Veg*n advocacy

Anyone who has been vegan for a while has likely seen how their diet and lifestyle can influence or spread to those around them. Yet if each vegan was able to create two new vegans, we would have likely seen more significant shifts in the rates of veganism (Our World In Data, 2022) in recent decades. This illustrates the difficulties of understanding social contagion—the process of information (including attitudes or behaviors) spreading throughout a group—especially in relation to veganism. By understanding social contagion better, advocates can improve their diet change outreach, possibly by mastering the art of “vegan contagion.” The …

What Vegan Advocates Can Learn From The Social Spread Of Quitting Smoking, Andrea Polanco, J. Anderson, D. Nguyen, J. Winslow, A. Couture

Diet

Anyone who has been vegan for a while has likely seen how their diet and lifestyle can influence or spread to those around them. Yet if each vegan was able to create two new vegans, we would have likely seen more significant shifts in the rates of veganism (Our World In Data, 2022) in recent decades. This illustrates the difficulties of understanding social contagion—the process of information (including attitudes or behaviors) spreading throughout a group—especially in relation to veganism. By understanding social contagion better, advocates can improve their diet change outreach, possibly by mastering the art of “vegan contagion.” The …

Achieving Inter- And Transdisciplinarity In Ecohealth: Insights From A Rodent-Borne Disease Project In A Polycrisis Era, Isabelle Arpin, Clémence Massart, Vincent Bourret, Guillaume Castel, Valeria Carolina Colombo, Jana Eccard, Jasmin Firozpoor, Maciej Grzybek, Heikki A. Henttonen, Herwig Leirs, Andrew Mcmanus, Ben Roche, Tarja Sironen, Vincent Sluydts, Peter Stuart, Annetta Zintl, Nathalie Charbonnel

Publications

Introduction: Inter- and transdisciplinary research (ITDR) is increasingly promoted to address “wicked problems”, particularly in health sectors adopting approaches like Ecohealth. Our Ecohealth-inspired project on rodent-borne diseases, initiated just before the COVID-19 pandemic, provided an opportunity to evaluate ITDR implementation.

Methods: We employed a recently developed semi-quantitative evaluation method to measure our project’s success in achieving ITDR and analyzed factors influencing this achievement.

Results: The project showed strengths in system description, team task allocation, and data sharing, but had lower scores in engaging societal actors throughout the project cycle.

Discussion: We identified the underexplored influence of problem wickedness as a …

The Significance And Impact Of Traditional Naming Practices In The Meru Community Of Tanzania, Wariaeli Ismaeli Pallangyo, Eliakimu Sane

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

In Africa, names are not assigned arbitrarily. They are deliberately chosen to reflect communities’ social, economic and political understandings. The Meru people, residing in northeastern Tanzania, near Mount Meru, identify themselves through ethnic names that embody their cultural practices. This article examines the significance of Meru traditional names, variations and their enduring value in increasing globalisation and cultural homogenisation, drawing on data from the Meru community. Employing a case study design, qualitative data were collected through focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews with 49 participants recruited using snowball sampling. Thematic analysis, facilitated by Microsoft Excel, was utilised for data transcription …

Leadership Strategies Indigenous Canadian Entrepreneurs Use To Sustain Their Business, Sherry Tyeesum Mattice

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Indigenous Canadian small business entrepreneurs face a high risk of failure within five years of operation. These entrepreneurs encounter challenges such as limited access to capital and skilled employees and must develop strategies to sustain and grow their businesses. Grounded in the theory of constraints, the purpose of this qualitative multiple-case study was to explore strategies employed by Indigenous small business entrepreneurs to effectively sustain their businesses beyond 5 years. The participants were six Indigenous small business entrepreneurs in British Columbia who implemented strategies to sustain their businesses beyond 5 years. Data were collected through semistructured interviews and by reviewing …

Examining The Internet Hunting Styles Of Violent Sexual Predators Who Rape And Murder Their Victims, Rebecca Meyers

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The proposed study sought to explore the impact of the internet on the hunting styles of sexual predators who sexually assault and kill their victims. A sample of 32 cases, divided equally among offenders who used the internet to target adult females and those who did not use the internet, was used for the study. The findings showed that various internet-based platforms were used for targeting, including dating apps such as Grindr, Match.com, Meetme.com, Tinder, Craigslist, Sex chat rooms, Kik Messenger, and BDSM sites. Three themes emerged about the impact of the internet on the hunting styles of sexual predators …

Taking A Bite Out Of Shark Week: Discovery's Csa And Csr Messages, Kari Mortenson

Theses and Dissertations

The present study looks at how companies use corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social accountability (CSA) messages differently. This study uses Discovery Channels Shark Week as an example by utilizing a grounded deductive analysis of Discovery's X, formerly known as Twitter, posts from 2015-2020. This timeline was chosen thanks to Discovery partnering with the non-profit organization Oceana in 2010 to create more informed and conservation minded content. The posts on Discovery's X account during each Shark Week from 2015-2020 were examined. Each were coded for themes, Other, CSA, or CSR, and additional frames for those themes. The frames gathered …

Hyperglycemia Causes Differential Change In Macrophage Population In The Lacrimal Gland, Conjunctiva And Cornea, Saleh Alfuraih, Amy Tran, Lois Kim, Rais Ansari, Ajay Sharma

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Background: Due to its location, the ocular surface is exposed to environmental microbes. Innate immune cells including macrophages are first line defense against infections. In vitro exposure to high glucose as well as diabetes-associated hyperglycemia has been shown to affect innate immune cell function and population. The present study was designed to examine the effect of diabetes-associated hyperglycemia on the lacrimal gland, conjunctiva and cornea macrophage population, phenotypic changes and cytokines/chemokines.

Methods: Mouse model of Streptozotocin-induced diabetes was used to induce hyperglycemia. Immunostaining for CD11b and F4/80 was performed to stain macrophages in whole mount cornea, conjunctiva and 50 µm …

Memories Of Resistance To Slavery In South-Eastern Tanzania, Nancy Rushohora

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

This paper examines the historical representation and memory of slavery in Tanzania, arguing that the current curriculum predominantly employs a Marxist lens that emphasizes the economic dimensions of slavery while overlooking the complexity of resistance. The study’s objective is to present a more comprehensive understanding of Tanzanian slavery, focusing on forms of resistance at Mgao, a 12th–18th century Swahili site. Methodologically, this study draws on ethnographic accounts, documentary sources, and archaeological findings to uncover diverse acts of defiance, including seeking refuge, negotiating relocation, and engaging in violent confrontations. The results reveal that resistance was a widespread, multi-dimensional phenomenon in Tanzanian …