Tag: Philippine studies

Dynamics of Change and Continuity in Philippine Political Economy

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

Martial Law and the Marcos Restoration

February 23-24, 2023 via Zoom

Poster: Dynamics of Change and Continuity in Philippine Political Economy: Martial Law and the Marcos Restoration. Register at: https://msuiit-edu-ph.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1x1gtA7bRNG6W0irPdKT7A

The Department of Sociology,  Mindanao State University – Iligan Institute of Technology and Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University are convenors of the conference. Other institutions such as the Ateneo de Manila School of Social Sciences, Martial Law Museum, and the University of the Philippines – Diliman’s Department of Political Science are also co-convenors.

Conference website

Half a century after Ferdinand Marcos Sr. put the Philippines under the grip of authoritarian rule, his son is elected as the republic’s 17th president. The election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to the nation’s highest office, on the same year that the 50th anniversary of Martial Law is being commemorated, heralds a turning point in Philippine history necessitating a critical reassessment of the country’s darkest years in the 20th century. What has the historic authoritarian turn, embodied by the enactment of Martial Law, meant for the political economy of development in the Philippines? This question gathers particular significance as the return of a Marcos to national power fuels fears of historical revisionism, particularly in the portrayal of touted achievements of Marcos Sr. The deployment of political economy lens in assessing the consequences of Martial Law also enriches contemporary debates on industrialization, sustainable development, neoliberalism and global market integration, and inclusive growth.   

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Reading list: Manila

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

Manila reading list – 2022-08-31 (pdf)
Manila reading list (Google docs link)

From this edition onward I will also be making it available as a Google Doc file. If you would like to take part in maintaining the list, and would like to be granted editor access, please get in touch.

Countermapping v. epistemicide:

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

On the limits of neoliberalism, financialization, and gentrification

I will be presenting this paper at the Counter-mapping the City International Virtual Conference, organized by the Counter-Mapping PH Network, on 15 March 2022.

Critical urban scholarship has an unstated canon. The core concepts of this canon had been developed in response to North/Western experiences by North/Western experts, have been circulated and universalized through knowledge practices with roots in Empire, and now exert a distortive influence on scholarship from and on, the global South.

In this paper I propose an epistemic sense of “countermapping”: naming the ways mundane practices of critical urban scholarship reinscribe the cartographic practices of Empire, and showing how key features of present landscapes of class power and dispossession may be better described by explicitly Southern modes of knowing. 

Enclosed and deliberately-idled land is a persistent feature of urban Philippine landscapes. These are dispossessions: their presence means land is withdrawn from beneficial use, and they contribute to artificially-high land prices.
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