Title: PHILIPPINE STUDIES CONFERENCE IN JAPAN (PSCJ) : Emerging Philippines: New Frontiers, Directions, Contributions

Venue: Center for Southeast Asian Studies Kyoto University Kyoto, Japan

Sponsored by the “Southeast Asian Studies Toward Sustainable Humanosphere” Research Program of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University

Date: 28 February-1 March 2014
Overview:

In recent years, the Philippines has attracted worldwide publicity as part of the so-called TIMPS (Turkey, Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines) emerging economies, thanks to good GDP growth, a booming stock market, a first-ever investment-grade credit rating, a favorable demographic, an expanding service sector, and remittance-powered domestic consumption.

Along with the country’s better-than-expected economic performance, other ground-level developments with local, national, and transnational implications—a deterritorializing and reterritorializing nation, global and regional flows and movements of people and ideas and goods, a contentious civil society, a vibrant cultural and artistic scene, extensive experience with democratization and decentralization, rapid urbanization, strong religiosity, a record of popular challenges against the state and People Power popular mobilization, a historic peace agreement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front—have prompted reappraisals of longstanding assumptions about the Philippine state, market, and society. Yet there remain pressing questions of persistent poverty and inequality, gaps between regions (both subnational and supranational), a large informal sector, decline of agriculture, “predatory” elites, a “weak”/“strong” state, “culture of disasters”, environmental degradation, corruption/rents and challenges for governance, human (in)security, territorial disputes with China and neighboring countries, and fragile attempts at industrialization.

All of these developments have sparked a series of “rethinkings,” “revisitings,” and “reconfigurations” in Philippine studies and area studies more generally. These reassessments offer not simply case studies of localized experience of globalization, but potential for generating new perspectives for understanding the relationship among state, market, society, and culture, as well as nationalism, regionalism and regionalization, and globalization.

This international conference aims to highlight the diversity of perspectives, debates, and practices that go into thinking about—and rethinking—Philippine politics, economy, society, and culture in historical, contemporary, comparative, regional, and transnational terms. The conference seeks to identify new frontiers for research and specify not only the directions but, more importantly, the contributions of Philippine studies to theoretically nuanced and empirically grounded area-based knowledge that is capable of being shared with people from other regions. Rather than viewing the Philippines as mere example, we see it as offering an important site and standpoint from which to make sense of the possibilities, limits, and challenges of a rapidly transforming world.

The keynote speakers for this conference are Professor Resil Mojares and Professor Cayetano Paderanga, Jr.

Provisional Program

Abstracts

For further inquiries please contact: pscj2014 at gmail.com