About Me
About Me
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Transdisciplinary Researcher & Artist
(Irvine, USA)
Transdisciplinary Researcher & Artist
(Irvine, USA)
My interests primarily lies in an epistemological framing of mining in the Bisayas, Philippines. I pay particular attention to a historically rooted impulse of world-making through various modalities: political dynasties, law, the state, and knowledge situated in and outside of these spaces and relations within the realms of epistemology, geography, and ecotheology.. As a collaborative process, my practice centers Bisayan epistemologies and lived experiences around extraction that tend to be obscured. I work with texts, maps, images, audio, and video recordings, including primary interviews and legal documents, which become source material for academic texts, public scholarship, and multimedia projects. While my main focus is the island province of Cebu in the Philippines, my interests spans a broader archipelagic context across Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
I am currently a Phd student in Global Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
* Fellow, Sectoral Transparency Alliance on Natural Resource Governance Cebu (STANCe), 2025-2026
*Visiting Research Fellow, Geography Department, University of the Philippines-Diliman, 2023-2024 (Ph)
* M.A. Sociology, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, 2023 (Us)
*Certificate IV Community Services - Technical and Further Education (TAFE) NSW, 2015 (Au)
* B.A. Communication, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, 2014 (Nl)
With a Dutch mother and a Filipino father, living between the Netherlands and the Philippines has informed how I view the world. I became accutely aware of narratives and events characterizing the 90s and the early aughts spanning the Philippines, Netherlands, and Europe more broadly. I also became aware of changes happening on Bantayan Island in Cebu, Philippines - my paternal home - including its impact on families, communities, and the physical geography of its place as an archipelago. This grounds my work spanning radio and public broadcasting, community-based projects on Bantayan Island, interviews with small-scale miners in the Kingdom of Tonga, artists and farmers in Australia, and my on-going work focusing on extractivism. My training in social work, particularly the counseling interview process, forms the basis of my ethnographic methodology and approach to research.
I have contributed articles and radio features to SBS Radio, Art Monthly Australasia, Kantor Berita Radio, and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art’s ‘Climates. Habitats. Environments.’ and exhibited at Firstdraft and 55 Sydenham Rd in Australia. I was a visiting scholar/artist at ‘Atenisi Institute (Nuku’alofa, Kingdom of Tonga, 2018;2019), Tropical Futures Institute (Cebu, Philippines, 2019), and the East-West Center (Honolulu, Hawai’i, 2020).
In the spring of 2023, I completed my M.A. in Sociology at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. I was the recipient of the Center for Philippine Studies’ Corky Trinidad Endowment Scholarship at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in support of my research on an epistemology of extraction.
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