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Front Matter, Social Transformations Journal Of The Global South

Social Transformations Journal of the Global South

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Politics, Trauma, Cinema: Archiving And Communicating Accountability, Jose Jowel Canuday

Social Transformations Journal of the Global South

Excerpt: Contributions to this issue take state-driven experiences of violence to account in two discursive grounds of communicating accountability, rights violations documentation and social realist cinema. These explorations offer distinctive thinking on how traumatic episodes in sociopolitical history are recorded, archived, and circulated for public interest examination, discourse, and action in a Global South context.

A Meso-Structure Reading Of Duterte’S Drug War As A Human Rights And Communicative Crisis, Augustus Ceasar D. Latosa

Social Transformations Journal of the Global South

Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte launched the drug war in 2016 to address alleged rising criminality. His directive to kill those who resisted arrest became a symbolic articulation of a policy that led to the deaths of alleged drug offenders, particularly among marginalized urban poor communities. While the drug war has been extensively examined in relation to public policy and governance, few studies have approached it through the lens of communication, particularly crisis communication. Using the culture-centered approach (CCA) as its theoretical anchor, this paper investigated how human rights non-government organizations (NGOs) as meso-structural actors made sense of Duterte’s “war …

Maternal Melodrama, Domesticity And Female Liberation In Dekada ‘70, Laurence Marvin S. Castillo

Social Transformations Journal of the Global South

The critically-acclaimed Dekada ‘70 represents one of the most prominent efforts in post-EDSA commercial cinema to narrate the experiences of revolutionary involvement in the context of the Martial Law era. The film is remarkable as an example of mainstream Philippine cinema’s mobilization of popular generic conventions to depict a politically charged narrative that touches upon the question of socio-political and personal liberation. In this essay, I revisit the film to examine how it deploys the subgenre of maternal melodrama in exploring gender and domestic relations as the springboard for the politico-subjective transformation of its middle-class protagonist under the violent milieu …

Cinema As Praxis: An Integrated Theoretical Framework For Philippine Social Advocacy Cinema, Herwin Benedictos Cabasal

Social Transformations Journal of the Global South

This theoretical paper examines social advocacy cinema in the Philippines as a form of counter-hegemonic cultural practice. Drawing on Third Cinema Theory (Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino), critical theory (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer), and participatory communication for social change (Paulo Freire and Thomas Tufte), this paper proposes Cinema as Praxis as an integrated theoretical framework for understanding how politically driven advocacy films operate through the convergence of cultural and political production, ideological representation and critique, and participatory communication. It argues that social advocacy cinema functions through interconnected dimensions: (1) production as praxis, in which collective and grassroots filmmaking constitutes …

Anthony Le Duc, Buddhist Environmental Humanism: Doing Good For Self And Others, London: Ethics Press, 2025, 259 Pp., Roderick Evans M. Bartolome

Social Transformations Journal of the Global South

Excerpt: Anthony Le Duc’s Buddhist Environmental Humanism: Doing Good for Self and Others is a significant addition to the current discussions on religion and ecology. Written by a Catholic priest and scholar deeply involved in interreligious dialogue and environmental ethics, the book provides a carefully constructed framework for how Buddhist principles can address ecological challenges. Le Duc currently serves as Executive Director of the Asian Research Center for Religion and Social Communication in Bangkok and is the Editor-in-Chief for the Religion and Social Communication journal of the research center. His institutional role and his location in Thailand give him a …

Tierras Celosas, Gery Vargas

Masters Theses

Tierras Celosas is a field study, a symposium presentation at Brown University, a belief system. It is a machine-object, a cosmotechnic tension, an ontological contradiction. It embodies resistance and release, failure, and reclamation.

Breathing With Water; Rebuilding Coastal Connections In Busan, Seri Kwon

Masters Theses

What does it mean to live on the edge? Every year, sea level is rising and massive storms are hitting the peninsula of South Korea. With each catastrophic typhoon comes significant social damage due to relocations and loss of life. To these disastrous events, the city seems to have only one response: tetrapods and sea walls. This defensive approach has blinded the public from the severity of the looming climate crisis and kept them ignorant of more productive ways to manage the shoreline.

This thesis explores an alternative narrative for this coast. Working within a 75 year timeline, I propose …

Rural Dreams, Zongda Wu

Masters Theses

With the rapid development of urbanization in China, people's connection with nature has weakened, leading to an increasingly common phenomenon of nature-deficit disorder. The high-paced, information-saturated lifestyle of cities has further reduced people’s sensitivity to natural rhythms. This is especially true for the younger generation, who are accustomed to fast, dense information flows and find it difficult to slow down and engage meaningfully with nature, even when visiting rural areas.

This study uses the ruins of Puji Temple, located about 50 miles from downtown Beijing, to explore how spatial design can offer urban youth opportunities to reconnect with nature while …

Buddha, Resituated, Min Sun

Masters Theses

The Asian Arts Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art presents significant cultural artifacts in a minimalist, neutral environment that disconnects them from their original historical and spatial contexts. By proposing display techniques that emphasize the origin and background of objects, it asks whether audiences from diverse cultural backgrounds can be enabled to connect empathetically with and learn from the heritage represented by these objects displayed out of context.

This thesis explores how exhibition design can reframe decontextualized artifacts to restore cultural meaning. By unpacking the room chronologically and geographically, and drawing from the spatial language of the Yungang Grottoes, …

Between Sleeps, Cassidy S. Argo

Masters Theses

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Ecospiritual Entanglement, Ali Vedad Yüner

Masters Theses

Land breeds culture. It gives us the resources to thrive, and in that process we establish a relationship with its constituents. With a multitude of beings inhabiting the land, a complex web of relationships develop. Biology describes these relationships as food webs; the mass entanglement of organisms in a manner that each organism nourishes the other. These webs are not just mere scientific structures but rather an interpretation of existential connections that every organism in the world, humans included, are indebted to. Food webs are the first stepping stone in the formation of culture, as they account for the engagement …

Of Dolls And Jewels : Keeping As A Strategy Of Care And Belonging, Yuqi Fan

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I will discuss the psychology behind object attachment in the doll-keeping subculture by integrating doll language into contemporary jewelry. I researched the Chinese term “Pi” as an accurate way of explaining how doll-keepers are attached to their dolls. In this 21st century, the widespread use of social media and AI technologies have deepened people's reliance on virtual spaces, leading to emotional detachment in our society. Adopting the concept of “Pi” into contemporary jewelry, which encourages a shift in focus towards external objects, the practice of doll-keeping becomes a form of self-care that compensates for our current loneliness …

Comfort In Contradiction, Yanchen Zhao

Masters Theses

This research explores why modern visual experiences often feel hollow—why suburban McMansions imitate classical architecture and why luxury spaces feel staged. Instead of simply criticizing these aesthetics, I want to understand them: Why do we embrace symbols disconnected from history? What makes them feel familiar and comforting?

Using Jean Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality and Marshall Berman’s view on modernity, I examine how today’s aesthetics are simulations—designs that no longer refer to a real past but exist as self-repeating symbols. Everyday objects borrow classical decorations without structural purpose, offering a sense of tradition and familiarity without real historical connection. Modernity, while …

Ourcraft, Jie Wang

Masters Theses

Industrial-era transportation infrastructure not only bears witnesses to technological progress and urban development, but also carries collective memories and occupies central location in our urban fabric. Traditional urban renewal often tends to tear down and rebuild, but this approach ignores the inherent spatial value, cultural significance and potential contribution of buildings to community networks. As the original function of many such structures fades, they increasingly become physical and social barriers within the urban fabric, hindering interaction and cohesion between communities.

Gamification integrates playful spatial elements and interactive experiences, attracting local residents for leisure and engagement. Gamification, broadly defined, is the …

Bodies Collapsing Together... Together As Dust., Catherine J. Wang

Masters Theses

I welcome you to a pedagogy of collapsing bodies: the teaching and learning practice between surviving occupants of Institutions.

From the villainizing of trans- bodies in K-14 public schools to the bodily removal of Palestinian discourse from universities, the 2025 presidential takeover of the Department of Education unearths systemic urgencies over the fragility, complicity, and agency of academic institutions—survivors of wars, recessions, shootings, climate disasters—that have always been collapsing. As long as educational campuses stage political and industrial performances, Institutional marriage to capitalism collapses the future of the university. Our architectural pedagogy shoulders this weight of confrontation: design education as …

Objects Into Things: The Ordinary Into Extraordinary, Michael K. Yirenkyi

Masters Theses

The most intimate experience of architecture starts at the scale of the object, from the slight grazing past the sofa to the painful bump of the toe against the legs of the sharply angled table. These objects have become a huge part of our everyday life and how we navigate the world around us, especially in the home where we spend the most time with them. Yet how many of us are truly aware when we engage with these objects. In a methodology deeply rooted in the design of objects into things, ideas investigated through this process are situated in …

Wooorrmmhooolleess, Kimberly Duck

Masters Theses

By now we all know that the internet is an integral part of our existence. One could argue that this online existence holds equal importance to our physical one. While the lines blur even further and Mark Zuckerberg can’t wait to cosplay the rich computer guy from Ready Player One, I choose to refrain from the existential dread that seems to be inescapable when thinking of the future nowadays. While we often associate the internet with portals (after all, we once called websites “Internet Portals”—in German at least), Wormholes more accurately capture the experience. Portals promise instant connection. But what …

Instrument, Elliott M. Romano

Masters Theses

I compose graphic design like I would a piece of music. Using input sources such as sound signals and noise algorithms, I create generative systems that alter or adapt typography and graphic form to output audio-textual compositions in real time. I call these systems graphic instruments.

In this book, I present a methodology for constructing and performing visual instruments as hybridized, real-time feedback systems, tracing a lineage of apparatuses as well as works of art and design that share a similar orientation. Through short-form essays and interviews with artists who operate between designer and performer, this thesis explores the …

Afrography: Scripting Futures Anchored In Culture & Community, Osmond Tshuma

Masters Theses

Latin and Arabic are the most used writing systems in Afrika, not only because of their functionality but because of colonial history. Colonialism established Eurocentrism as the standard, while Afrikan creations were marginalized and demonized. This thesis investigates various ways of reclaiming identity through typography using the concept of Sankofa, which emphasizes retrieving and learning from the past to build the future. By integrating cultural objects into designs and everyday visual language, we can challenge and reverse the demonization imposed on Afrikan symbols by colonial narratives.

The belief of Ubuntu, the philosophy that an individual’s well-being is intrinsically tied to …

More Than Her Othering Narrative, Jiayi Zhang

Masters Theses

Following feminist theory and spatial critique, this thesis challenges the kitchen’s traditional function as an enclosed site of invisible domestic labor. It reclaims the kitchen as an open, public, and empowering space. In so doing, it reframes it as a critical site of collective resistance, care, and community building.

Fall River, MA is a post-industrial city marked by disinvestment and food insecurity. This thesis integrates existing food pantries and public landscapes into a network of community kitchens using repurposed vacant lots and an existing bike path. These multi-functional spaces where food is grown, cooked, and shared, become an infrastructure of …

Foundations Of Belonging, Yerim Jang

Masters Theses

In the early 1900s, hundreds of thousands of immigrants displaced by World War II sought refuge in the United States, drawn by the promise of a new life and the hope of finding community in an unfamiliar land. To navigate the challenges of a new country, these immigrants formed ethnic social clubs that provided essential support, including housing, employment, and spaces for social connection. Over time, as later generations assimilated and established new identities, these once-thriving social hubs diminished, barely operating their original functions and transitioned into bars, event halls, or restaurants. Since the early 2000s, a new wave of …

The House At The End Of Time, Gyles Jose Antonio Ferrao

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the architectural potential of thresholds as spaces of psychological and metaphysical transformation, positioning the edge not as a boundary but as a generative spatial condition. Drawing upon Carl Jung’s conception of dream architecture as a symbolic map of the self, the project proposes a nonlinear exploration of architecture through layered references that operate across metaphysical scales. The house becomes a medium through which the liminal is made tangible, a temporal and spatial construct that blurs the binary oppositions of life and death, memory and forgetting, reason and absurdity, consciousness and the unconscious.

The project conceptualizes architecture as …

Almost Architecture, Almost [ Other ] : Examining Approximative Methods Of Design Through The Lens Of Hydrologic Structures, Pateton Gonzales

Masters Theses

This thesis is centered in Gallup, NM, a border town to the Navajo Nation Reservation. The town exists amidst a growing water crisis in the four corners region, with around 1/3rd of the reservation not having a reliable source of running water within their homes. The entirety of the area relies heavily on stored groundwater in subterranean sandstone aquifers, with little to no surface water sources to replenish the water that gets extracted. Gallup itself sits in a small pocket, landlocked by the reservations checkerboard of ownership. Amidst an overall increase in scarcity and misuse, this thesis proposes approximation as …

Built For Belonging: An Exploration Of The Mutual Adoption Between Human And Home, Jillian Edwards

Masters Theses

In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Halton’s book, The Meaning of Things, they bring to our attention that ‘few English words are filled with the emotional meaning of the word “home”,’ and that many other languages lack even one word with the same connotation. So as one of the unique cultures that has verbalized and contextualized this deep connection to the home, it feels like our responsibility to interrogate it further in order to understand why it exists and how we can design so everyone can experience it. This thesis explores the transformation of space into home and a human into …

This Is How To Shoot A Gun., Rene Camarillo

Masters Theses

The textile work I have developed for my thesis is a curated exposing of the social interactions and violent phenomena of underprivileged realities. It investigates the theatrics of community violence, mechanisms of survival both through labor and bullets. Elements of my work are inspired by setting a scene through minimalistic installation and allowing you, the audience member, to become a spectator. With an emphasis on the injured form, the work incorporates identity-driven artifacts of my neighborhood back home. My garments in this graduate collection which are hand-patterned and self-sewn aim to represent victims, perpetrators and spectators of violence.

Subtle moments …

Till Tender, Karli R. Ehl

Masters Theses

Vulnerable, young, sensitive to pain, immature, not tough. These are some of the words and phrases that come up when you do a quick search of the definition of tender. I have felt every single one of these emotions over the past two years in depths I have not before. I have worked tirelessly, back and forth and in between, to try and figure out what it means to become oneself, while slowly untethering myself from the devotion to my Southern family. Trying to find the visual language for this process has transformed me into a tender being with no …

Gradiance: A Mindfulness Intervention, Kip Geddes

Masters Theses

People in cities live life at a fast paced forward march that results in a mental state called ‘hurry sickness’. This prevents them from living in the moment, which often leads to a disconnection to those around them. Mindfulness techniques have been proven to increase people’s levels of happiness and openness to the people around them. However, many people are too busy to practice these methods. My thesis looks at ways for mindfulness to intervene into their established routines. Illumination has been shown to promote mental well-being, either in therapy lamps, or circadian rhythm based lighting; the liminal spaces that …

Folding Horizons: Knitted Textiles For A Mobile World, Yutong Li

Masters Theses

We have grown accustomed to living in flux—moving between cities, countries, languages, and digital spaces. Life no longer unfolds in a straight line, but in fragments and transitions, never quite settling. In this restless rhythm—shaped by fast trains, shifting skies, and the invisible current of the internet—we find ourselves suspended in a vast, woven network. Connection is constant, yet motion is unrelenting.

This project begins with a question: how can textiles reflect this state of in-between? I imagine textiles not as fixed surfaces, but as responsive skins—adaptive, expressive, and attuned to change. Inspired by the tensions of contemporary life—surveillance, shrinking …

Patchworks - A Design Framework For Repairing Systems, One Patch At A Time., Jack A. Martinez

Masters Theses

Design interventions for social good often fall short—ineffective at best and harmful at worst. Even successful projects tend to have fleeting impacts. Despite prototyping, innovation, and scaling expertise, designers struggle to create lasting community change. Skills that drive capitalist markets remain underutilized in the social sector. Reducing barriers to entry in the design for social good field might foster a more equitable, service-oriented design practice.

This thesis examines how designers can collaborate ethically and effectively with community organizations to support their missions. It examines the challenges and benefits of applying a ‘patchwork design approach’ to social good through real-world partnerships. …