GeoHumanities

ISSN: 2373-566X (Print) 2373-5678 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rgeo20

Empathic Projections: Performance and

Countermapping of Sitio San Roque, Quezon City,
and University of the Philippines

Vanessa Banta

To cite this article: Vanessa Banta (2017) Empathic Projections: Performance and
Countermapping of Sitio San Roque, Quezon City, and University of the Philippines,
GeoHumanities, 3:2, 328-350, DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2017.1377096

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2017.1377096

Published online: 25 Oct 2017.

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Empathic Projections: Performance and Countermapping of

Sitio San Roque, Quezon City, and University of the
Philippines
Vanessa Banta
University of British Columbia

This article argues that empathy, as a crucial component of a feminist geographic research practice, binds
different people across different sociopolitical and spatial divides. I situate empathy and reflect on the
ways it could be felt and be made to operate differently in the specific context of Quezon City,
Philippines, and the neoliberalizing public state university from which the project emerged. It argues
that empathy can be mobilized as an affective mode of countermapping, specifically by creating different
itineraries into places and connecting spaces to forge new solidarities. Key Words: countermapping,
empathy, Manila, performance.

Since the well-publicized announcement of plans to build a new “nexus of commercial activity”
in Quezon City in Metro Manila, the resistant community of Sitio1 San Roque has come into
focus as the major impediment to the long-awaited completion of this 65-billion-peso develop-
ment project. The Philippine media has tended to describe residents’ protest actions against some
of the violent demolitions of their homes as “tension-filled” encounters between residents and
the police, perpetuated by unruly residents. In a news account of a July 2013 protest, for
example, despite claiming to have seen the “vulnerability of informal settlers,” the Philippine
Commission on Human Rights (CHR) proclaimed that San Roque residents simply “went too
far” by throwing human feces and urine at the “antiriot” police in the “violent clash” in front of
the Quezon City municipal hall (Lozada 2013). The visual media archive repeats this censure: It
is mostly comprised of photos of makeshift barricades and images of young men throwing rocks,
bottles, and human waste to keep the police away to protect their homes and families. The
repeated framing in news media text and image of the residents’ protest and resistance as hostile
and unlawful circumscribes San Roque as an “urban battle zone” in the heart of Quezon City.

GeoHumanities, 3(2) 2017, 328–350 © Copyright 2017 by American Association of Geographers.

Initial submission, July 2016; revised submissions, July and August 2017; final acceptance, August 2017.
Published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
 EMPATHIC PROJECTIONS 329

With this as context, I consider the role of empathy in a countermapping project that uses
performance to bring together people separated through spatial and social distance in Quezon
City, Manila, Philippines. I draw on my experience of collaborating on a project with a colleague
from the Geography Department of the University of the Philippines (UP), which combined
performance and countermapping. Together with students from the Theatre Department (where I
used to teach) and the Geography Department, we sought to present visual art, mixed media, and
performances based on interviews with residents and local activists from Sitio (community) San
Roque, a community of “informal settlers” near our university.
This project aims to contribute to the ongoing critical research on Manila that examines the
processes through which the Philippine state creates urban “fantasies” of highways, high-rise
condominiums, and shopping megacenters as evidence of economic development (Tadiar 2004).
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The dictatorial regime of the former President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, driven by global
and modernist ethos, espoused a type of urban development based on dreams of “beautification”
that involved the violent erasure of urban blight and “squatters” (Lico 2003; Benedicto 2015).
Lest we attribute the disappearance of communities like Sitio San Roque solely to globalization,
some scholars urge the need to take into account the “capital building strategies” of the
Philippine state itself (Shatkin 2005). Doing so will reveal the colonial underpinnings of
particular class ideologies that have influenced urban development heavily skewed to the
interests of the Metro Manila elite (Garrido 2013). Numerous public–private partnerships,
guided by the modernizing visions of large private developers and planners (Shatkin 2008),
facilitate the urban development of the city and engender the “forgetting” of places like San
Roque (Shatkin 2004). Thus, on one hand, we see countermapping as a means to expose some of
the mechanisms of urban development that legitimize what Ortega (2016) called a “neoliberal
warfare against informality” in a gentrifying Metro Manila. On the other, through its enactment
as critical spatial practice, we see countermapping as movement toward making visible the
disenfranchised urban poor whose stories of displacement remain understudied (Choi 2014, 9).
Drawing from art and performance to provide different means to apprehend, reimagine, and
engage with the city (Guazon 2013; Pinder 2005), we aimed to explore through countermapping and
performance how we could reconnect spaces, reestablish relationships, and forge new alliances. I
first place this against the dramaturgy of the local government and the university administration.
Their urban script, with its cast of visionary leaders and the middle class, excludes the working class
and the poor from the metropolis and the academy. I then briefly review relevant scholarly literature
on countermapping and emotional geographies to situate my analysis and locate how empathy in
performance can help us rethink some of the ways in which we view “participation” in counter-
mapping praxis. Next, I reflect on some of the ways in which we had to reorientate the project after
our visits to the community and challenges began to emerge working with our own students from the
university. I then describe some of the key moments of the performance that we created, not with the
intention of evaluating the performance or installation for its aesthetic merits, but with the aim of
framing different moments of the performance as “empathic projections”—performatives that bear
the potential of solidifying into more concrete activities or praxis oriented toward the urban struggles
of the residents of Sitio San Roque.
I see the project as opening up a conversation with critical scholars who theorize and enact
feminist research practice through a continuing critical interrogation of the role of affect,
feelings, and empathy. These scholars issue a critique of and counter to the liberal discourses
of empathy that fail to situate this feeling in its varying contexts, without losing sight of the
 330 BANTA

potential of empathy to bind different people across different sociopolitical and spatial divides.
We contribute to these ongoing efforts to situate empathy by considering how it can be felt and
operate differently in the specific context of Quezon City and the neoliberalizing public
university from which the project emerged. To critically interrogate empathy here is not to
assess whether it was successfully acquired by our students or colleagues; rather, it is to reflect
on the ways we could think of empathy not just simply as a given outcome of our academic,
research, and creative projects, but as a challenging process that must be put to work as a vital
and constant (and often unfinished) component to our countermapping.

PLACING THE PERFORMANCE

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Quezon City, the most populated city in all of Metro Manila, as it is often told, was born out of
the “Quezonian dream” of the first Commonwealth president of the Philippines, Manuel L.
Quezon. The city’s glorious beginnings are attributed to the creative and visionary leadership of
the first president. In addition to envisioning Quezon City as the seat of the national government,
Quezon had grand economic plans for the city. Seventy years after Quezon’s pronouncement of
his vision of an economically “productive self-contained” Quezon City, the local government
and private corporations continue to invoke a similar urban developmental model for the city.
This is made possible through the creation of the 250-hectare Quezon City Central Business
District (QC-CBD). With five distinct commercial, residential, and recreational districts, the
QC-CBD is expected to maximize the city’s “large parcels of land” and thus harness the area’s
economic potential. In 2009, Ayala Land, Inc., the real estate arm of one of the nation’s biggest
conglomerates, the Philippine National Housing Authority (NHA), and the Quezon City local
government forged a joint agreement. Through this public–private partnership, Ayala Land
would invest 65 billion pesos over a period of ten years to build Vertis North, a 29-hectare
premier, mixed-use business district composed of offices, retail spaces, a hotel, and residential
buildings. Vertis North is the biggest investment of Ayala Land, to be built on an area called
North Triangle, on “idle government land” supposedly owned by the NHA. To turn this idle land
into “productive use,” Ayala Land, the NHA, and the local government must clear the area,
home to 15,000 families of “informal settlers.”
The lives of Barangay San Roque residents have been forever changed since the plan for
developing North Triangle was announced. The experience of defending their homes against
forced demolitions, coping with mysterious “accidents” that led to houses burning down, and
escaping from the harassment by privately hired security guards are experiences far from the
“dignified” life former president Quezon envisioned for the city. The local government’s
historical records tell the story of the benevolent Quezon who intended to build housing for
employees and laborers in 1939 to address what would be the “population explosion” problem
of crowded Manila. Because of the former president’s reported “obsessive concern for the less
privileged,” a housing plan for the working class was devised to turn the rolling countryside into
a “working man’s paradise” (Quezon City 2016). This “dignified concentration of human life,
aspirations, endeavors and achievements,”, composed of both the rich and poor, was largely
aspirational because the price of land in Quezon City was far too high for minimum-wage
workers (Quezon City 2016). Quezon City essentially became a suburb for middle-class
professionals and government workers from Manila who became the “beneficiaries” of the
 EMPATHIC PROJECTIONS 331

government’s housing projects, well positioned to take advantage of later developments, includ-
ing superior roads and transport services (Pante 2017).
Daily commutes to work, grocery runs to the Ayala-owned Trinoma Mall beside San Roque, and
day trips to the Quezon City Circle provide UP students and employees glimpses of social inequality.
The bigger contradiction, however, is less readily visible: The University of the Philippines itself
functions to attract and draw development into the city. It has fulfilled this role since the
Commonwealth government moved the university to its current location, the 493-hectare Diliman
estate, in 1937. News reports from that time show that government officials anticipated that the
university would generate an increase in population and business in Quezon City (Quezon City
2016). Today, UP, located north of San Roque, still figures prominently in the local government
plans to become the “center of gravity” (Aquino quoted in Dumlao 2012) of business and commer-
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cial activity in Metro Manila, and a draw for a sizable population of the “young, educated and
employable” (Quezon City Government, 2017; Figure 1).
The University of the Philippines is in fact the acknowledged “epicenter” of the knowledge
community district of the QC-CBD and is an important nodal point for business more generally
(Quezon City 2010). Major business areas have developed close to the university, with the UP

FIGURE 1. Map that shows Vertis North, the new business complex
that will sit atop Sitio San Roque. Top right of the photo is the University
of the Philippines campus. Map courtesy of Johnson Damian, Department
of Geography, University of the Philippines. (Color figure available
online.)
 332 BANTA

opening its own doors to major corporations for profit. The reductions in social spending and
massive privatization under structural adjustment programs since the 1980s have significantly
diminished the Philippine government’s funding allocation to tertiary education. Public univer-
sities such as UP are now forced to initiate their own income generation programs. To “increase
their self-financing capacity” (Guillermo 2007, 129), UP has increased tuition, begun privatizing
food and other services, and started leasing its “idle” land to Ayala. Ayala Corporation, for
example, has built UP-Technohub, an economic zone that has converted idle land to cater to
local and foreign outsourcing companies. Perhaps ironically, these companies also employ some
UP students who are forced to work outside their studies to pay the increasing tuition rates of the
university. Although there was protest against the construction of Technohub by residents of San
Roque and student activists from UP (Quijano 2011), this was largely ineffective. In 2013, for
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example, Ayala Land built another commercial complex called UP Town Center on UP land,
heavily advertised as an “industry and academic collaboration,” the “first and only university
town center.” What makes UP Town Center distinct from one on the other end of campus is its
blatant claims to “support for the needs of the community” by providing an interactive space
“conducive to free expression, skills development and discourse” (U.P. Town Center: An
Industry and Academic Collaboration 2016). This mission, according to Ayala, reflects the
university’s goals to foster the minds of the country.
UP’s opening of its doors to business is one glaring sign of the neoliberalization of UP over
the past years and has forced the university to employ rhetoric similar to Quezon’s. According to
the most recent development plans of the university, economic development for the UP com-
munity will depend on successful enclosure of UP space. In the next few years, UP aims to
secure all land titles and assets of the university to accelerate their commercialization (University
of the Philippines 2012). This means that “academic zones” must be “defined and protected from
illegal occupants” (University of the Philippines 2012). Although there also have been pro-
nouncements about the administration “working with the community” and that residents will be
“treated with sensitivity, compassion and social justice” (UP Strategic Plan, 25), UP officials
have remained silent on plans to relocate the many residents of the thirteen communities
considered informal settlements on campus. (Oblino 2017) These thirteen communities will
join Sitio San Roque in the list of areas to be demolished and then “developed” as part of the
Quezon City Central Business Development Plan.
I situate our project here in the context of the university to draw attention to what else is at
stake in the intertwined themes of countermapping, performance, and empathy. Increasingly over
the years, we have been faced with a shift toward a felt neoliberal cultural politics in classrooms
and department offices. Colleagues have noted the dwindling number of students from rural poor
areas and other regions and the sharp increase of students from private schools from Manila who
can afford the high tuition rates of UP. We witness how our students are pulled more strongly
into the commercial spaces of Ayala and away from the vicinities of San Roque and other
informal communities that surround our campus. Faculty members face the mounting pressure to
publish not only to keep their jobs, but to also gain the financial incentives granted to them if
they publish in internationally certified journals as a supplement to their flagging wages.
“Community work” such as engaging in projects with communities like San Roque does not
seem to align with what is considered meritorious scholarship according to the university’s
“globalizing” standards. Our project, in its exploration of the intersections of geography and
performance and art, is an attempt to begin critical discussions around what geohumanities could
 EMPATHIC PROJECTIONS 333

mean and how we might begin to practice it in the context of urban Metro Manila. As we found
out, though, this requires rooting questions of critical pedagogy and praxis within the geohu-
manities in the specific context of our neoliberalizing university.

COLLECTIVELY MOVING THROUGH: RETHINKING PARTICIPATORY

COUNTERMAPPING

The tensions, limitations, and challenges in participatory mapping projects have been the subject
of many scholarly works in the field of critical cartography. Although most works affirm the
power of maps to counter and to make geographies concealed by the dominant hegemonic maps
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visible, serious concern also has been expressed that maps as objects reinscribe colonial
exclusions or reinforce neoliberal governance policies (Schroeder and Hodgson 2002;
Wainwright and Bryan 2009). Sleto (2009) suggested that theories of performativity provide
ways to go beyond the paradox formed by “apparent contradiction between emancipatory goals
(through visibilization) and cartographic violence (through erasure) of counter-mapping” (926).
For Sleto and the others, this theoretical turn enables a more processual understanding of maps
wherein we examine instead how maps are “brought into being” through context-specific
mechanisms that involve “embodied, social and technical” practices of cartographers, partici-
pants, and institutions (Kitchin and Dodge 2007). This expands the scope of cartographic
analyses to not only the making of maps, but also other practices such as reading or the
“audiencing” of maps as constitutive of the “continuum” of participation (Allen et al. 2015).
Taking the view that maps are practices and are “always mappings” (Kitchin and Dodge 2007), a
“genealogy” of a map’s “unfolding life” will provide us a way to see how maps and its iterations
continue to be “at work in the world” through the ways in which their meanings are debated,
challenged, and negotiated (Kitchin, Gleeson, and Dodge 2013).
Directing our attention to the relational components of the process of map making also brings
us closer to the work of feminist cartographers and geographers who continue to argue for the
inclusion of bodies and emotions as constitutive to spaces that are mapped (Kwan 2007). In this
body of scholarly literature, emotions are given due recognition as “socio-spatial mediation and
articulation rather than as entirely interiorized subjective mental states” (Davidson, Bondi, and
Smith 2005, 3). Urban geographers in particular lay bare the different and complex “affective
practices of place-making” of city residents including youth, poor, and homeless; these scholars
demonstrate that although we can trace the city inhabitants’ movements in and between their
“assigned” spaces, they also rewrite and remake alternate spaces of city living (Cloke, May, and
Johnsen 2008; Duff 2010; Smith et al. 2016). Till (2012), for example, underlined the affective
practice of mourning, memory work, and care of inhabitants of postcolonial “wounded” cities as
enacting an “active citizenship” toward creating more socially just cities. For Till, retheorizing
postcolonial cities as “wounded” opens up pathways for rethinking dominant Western urban
theory.
Our project is understandable within these two literatures, but also pushes the notion of
performativity and mapping further by explicitly bringing mapping into performance, and by
unpacking the many challenges of the making of this performance or map. The challenges we
encountered in bringing our students to San Roque and “requiring” their participation, their
“feelings of resistance” to listen, encounter, and join the urban poor residents of San Roque
 334 BANTA

redirected us to countermapping performances as spaces for dialogic empathy. The active

participation of students, colleagues, volunteers, allies, and future countermappers could not
be assumed. This contributes to ongoing critical reflections on the challenges of community
engagement and processes of countermapping (Parker 2006; Young and Gilmore, 2013). These
critical reflections also offer insight into the potential and pitfalls of empathy. I argue that
ensuring that the actual work of mapping continues guards against facile claims of cofeeling
with the communities we work with. In its place, we might consider practicing an ethics of
accountability (Roy 2006; Rankin 2010) through the cultivation of a critical empathy.

CHANGE OF PLANS
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We turned to the practice of countermapping for the ways in which it can be mobilized to
counter and challenge maps produced by the state or those in power (Figure 2). These latter
maps fail to take into account significant information so that indigenous or disenfranchised
groups can claim their legal rights to territory or resource access (Peluso 1995). Drawing on
critical geographic literature that has intervened in the ways in which we view maps as means of
producing new ways of knowing the world (Harley 1989; Wood 1993), we were determined to
do a countermapping of the space of San Roque. We wanted this countermapping to reveal the
fact that far from being “idle” land, North Triangle is home to 50,000 residents, many of whom
work in Quezon City and its vicinities. Instead of using conventional maps and other geospatial
technologies, we brought our students to San Roque with the aim of exploring how we could
build a repertoire of mapping practices that includes and outlines both our students’ and the
residents’ embodied understandings about and movements in and around the spaces of UP and
San Roque (Kwan 2007; Figure 3). If maps are practices and are “always mappings” (Kitchin

FIGURE 2. One afternoon inside San Roque. From within the com-
munity grounds, one could see the office of the ombudsman right across
San Roque. Images courtesy of Jomel Duran Reyes, MA Student,
University of the Philippines. (Color figure available online.)
 EMPATHIC PROJECTIONS 335

and Dodge 2007), we hoped that the project we had planned would initiate an embodied practice
of being in space and moving together toward a common goal (Figure 3). We knew that not all
of the students were ready to protest in the streets, and our most immediate goal was still to help
residents claim their rights to the land.
After our first day bringing our students to San Roque, we realized that we needed to shift our
plans. My colleague and I, together with our students, were cramped inside Nanay Rosa’s tiny
home. Nanay Rosa, with half of her face hidden behind the bright pink curtains she tightly
clutched, stood below a world map hand drawn by one of her children and recounted stories of
several demolitions experienced by San Roque. Nanay Rosa moved to the city from a rural area
with her husband and children to find work in 1985. To help out her husband as he slowly built
their small home, Nanay sold rice cakes in the street. When her husband died, she was left to
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find ways to support her family on her own. She remembered vividly how the empty land of San
Roque helped her. She fed the whole family with the 100 pesos per day earnings from her
harvest of water spinach that she planted on the empty lot beside her house. Due to a few family
tragedies and an unsuccessful attempt to become an overseas Filipino worker, Nanay Rosa and
her family have not had the opportunity to leave San Roque. Today, unable to make ends meet
for her two sons, Nanay Rosa sews rags to be sold on the street, the only thing she could do
alongside her activist work as a fierce leader and spokesperson for KADAMAY (Kalipunan ng
Damayang Mahihirap) or the National Alliance of Filipino Poor.
I listened to how Nanay Rosa answered questions patiently, but firmly. In the distance, we
could see the trucks of Ayala, and some residents have already fled and vacated their homes. The
motivation behind fighting what looked like a losing battle simply did not make sense to our
students. When a few students asked why accepting money from the NHA or the Ayala
Corporation (there is no certainty on the part of residents about which institution representatives
are aligned with) is not considered a viable option by many residents, Manang Rosa asserted:

FIGURE 3. Theater and Geography students from the University of

the Philippines listen to KADAMAY member and resident Richard as he
takes them to different demolished areas of Sitio San Roque. (Color figure
available online.)
 336 BANTA

We do not need money to overcome poverty. They say, “You are poor, but you don’t want money?” I
tell them that not because I’m poor, money is all I’m asking for. I think about what’s good for many.
You have money, but you don’t have a house? This is why I would just like to stand by what we
think is right and true—How will the government give us a housing project?2
After listening more closely to Nanay Rosa and, later, other residents’ specific demand for
housing (or good relocation housing), new questions emerged that did not necessarily fit what
we first intended to do. At first, we planned to gather stories of residents and employ what
Wainwright and Bryan (2009) called the “cartographic-legal strategy,” which is often used to
launch a legal battle for recognition of property ownership and rights to land by indigenous
groups. Our interviews, however, revealed that most residents know that they are not in
possession of legal titles with which they could potentially fight the state. Also, a good portion
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of the population of residents do not even claim to have a home there because they are only
renting a bed space in the makeshift houses of San Roque. Fully cognizant of their status as
rural–urban migrants and therefore as “settlers” on the land, the residents we talked to defied
expectations because what they wanted was not merely the piece of land where their houses sat.
The residents demand proper housing and reject the relocation housing the city government
provides for them in exchange for demolishing their houses. Also, Nanay Rosa and other
members demand “on site development” for San Roque from the government. San Roque is
their home and must be the site for their livelihood and development.
Two dilemmas emerged for us: What exactly were we countering? Nanay Rosa redirected our
attention to what would be one of the biggest and most overwhelming questions for our project:
How could two academics and their students help the residents of San Roque with their fight to
demand appropriate housing for their 50,000 residents from the local government? If we
consider the “intimate geopolitics” of forced eviction and resistance in San Roque (Brickell
2014), how might we extend the scope and scale of the project to include other issues that go
beyond the “territorial defense” of homes in San Roque? What would be the sharpest and most
tactical line the project could take then? In other words, if we were to choose just one or a few
tactics to take on, what would be the most strategic in terms of “concrete gains” for the struggles
in Sitio San Roque? Before we could answer this, we needed to address the feelings of most of
our students who were in attendance that day. One student labeled the residents’ demands as
“simply asking for too much.” For this student, to ask for housing; more equitable fees for rent,
water, and electricity; and provision of other government services in San Roque was an
excessive demand for justice. Although a few verbalized and showed signs of being moved,
we also heard questions and proposals for solutions from our students that seemed to conflict
with the residents’ aims and perhaps belied their middle-class understanding of the situation. A
graduate urban planning student, for example, diagnosed that the biggest problem of San Roque
is the poor construction of their shanties. Another expressed strong skepticism precisely because
he claimed to be familiar with Nanay Rosa’s organization and its leftist orientations; for him,
protest and struggle meant “trouble,” which would achieve nothing. We realized that we needed
to add our very own students to the list of friends, colleagues, and other members of the
audience we needed to convince to work with Nanay Rosa and other residents of San Roque.
By mentioning these challenges here, I intimate the limitations of community and participa-
tory countermapping projects as a pedagogical strategy (Sleto, 2009; Wainwright and Bryan
2009; Elwood 2010; Smith, Ibanez, and Herrera 2017). Objectives of the community members,
 EMPATHIC PROJECTIONS 337

their lives, availabilities and constraints and the capacities of the project, and even the will-
ingness and the commitment of the students did not match up as seamlessly as we had hoped.
Although we remained open to the possibility of changing our plans according to what we found
in the community, we had to address our preconceptions that the residents’ struggles could be
reduced to their claims for land. Also, we perhaps overestimated the legibility of the issues by
assuming that empathy, action, and solidarity from our students would simply come naturally.
Reminded that there is nothing natural about the divisions and alliances between the middle
class and the urban poor in Metro Manila, I consider here how performance might help to create
“spaces of contact” between the middle class and the residents of San Roque (Lawson and
Elwood 2014) where social divisions are not simply reinscribed. How might solidarities be
negotiated? What role could our countermapping performance play in urban politics in Metro
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Manila?

CREATING REFRACTED STAGINGS: DISALLOWED EMPATHY

Entitled Lugar: Countermapping Mega Manila, the performance that we eventually created in
collaboration with the residents of San Roque sought to first and foremost challenge the prevailing
image of San Roque. Site plans and flat illustrations of mega construction, along with shiny
advertisements for the upcoming “developments” in the area, concealed the violent destruction of
the many homes that remain in San Roque and are vital to the lives of these residents. At the same
time, official maps enshroud San Roque as a terrain of poverty, illegality or irrational rebellions, and
urban degradation. Through a mix of documentary methods such as surveys, audio and video
recordings, photography, and one-on-one and group interviews, we gathered narratives that contest
these dominant depictions of the place and people of San Roque. Selected transcripts were then
transformed to short performances and installations presented for one night in March 2013 in an
exhibit in the small black box theater inside UP. That night, residents of San Roque arrived on our
campus to be part of the audience. With them were our students, their friends, and other members of
the UP community; most of the university community had not set foot inside San Roque.
What we presented that night was a collective exploration into what kind of performance
would help us “deconstruct” San Roque and its residents as complete, knowable wholes inside
the theater and out. This meant questioning the very strong foundations of the university
theatre department in Western modern dramatic techniques by doing away with the figure of
the playwright, who is often tasked with writing a dramatic text with a beginning, middle, and
end. We also did not want to privilege one resident’s story over another through action-driven
plots wherein characters get locked in a narrative and telos that ends up reproducing hege-
monic ideologies (Lehmann 2006). Instead of a stereotypical view of the residents’ narratives,
a major objective became dispelling the stable position of the Cartesian static viewing subject
and making the audience question their own lives. We asked how we might use performance
instead to bring out the cognitive but also more crucially the perceptual “practices” through
which the positionality of our students and other members of the audience emerge (Bleeker
2008).
We ensured that the first few moments spent inside the performance space engendered a
crucial disorientation and deterritorialization. Countering expectations that there will be a “play”
or stories to be told in this performance, audience members were asked to remain standing to
 338 BANTA

view different installations as a prelude. These installations were meant to construct new viewing
arrangements that unhinged the stable positions of the observer, the middle-class spectator, and
the observed, San Roque, the informal settlement and the community living there. The installa-
tions were meant to present the different ways San Roque is made to “appear” or “disappear”
and then in turn, argue for a different apparatus for seeing and knowing San Roque as a way to
rework representational politics (Hawkins 2012). For example, a simple setup recalls the shiny
real estate development booths often located in malls and positions San Roque as an area that
hinders economic development. The spectators become the main target for the sales tactics of a
student-actor distributing pamphlets featuring prime sites included in Quezon City. From this
standpoint, San Roque becomes a stand in for other sites that will need to be removed for the
completion of this large-scale development. Disturbing the “market appeal” of this setup,
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however, is the short roughly edited video we prepared from downloaded images of San
Roque from Google Earth. From this perspective of the all-seeing eye of the satellite of the
Philippines, then to Metro Manila, the viewer then sees a zoomed image of a much bigger San
Roque when it still has not experienced the numerous demolitions. The incomplete accounting
of the visuals of San Roque’s transformation through the years is set against the vivid recording
of Nanay Rosa. In this recorded interview, Nanay Rosa uses the same downloaded image of San
Roque and points out the areas demolished and not reflected in the image. Through this
intentional overlap of the silenced histories of San Roque with images taken from Google
Earth, we hope to retrieve the multidimensionality of San Roque that these flattened illustrations
fail to capture.
Through another installation, we wished to direct the inward gaze of a spectator toward his or
her position in relation to the site of San Roque. On a hand-drawn map placed on the floor,
participants were asked to mark their points of activity within and around the area of San Roque
(Figure 4). For residents of San Roque, this meant identifying and seeing their activities and
movements in the area. San Roque was more than a place of residence, but also a place of social
and religious activities and a source of their livelihood. Opposition to the demolition and
promised relocation by the government to a remote area thus is not to resist only the destruction
of the homes they built, but the severance from the lives they built in the area. Based on our own
students’ reflections in class, we expected a crowd comprised of students who not only have
never been to San Roque but might also deliberately avoid it, and so we asked nonresidents to
mark their points of activity in or around the community on the hand-drawn visual rendition of
the community by the residents. Through the colorful markings of everyday paths and activities
by teachers, students, and residents, this countermap showed the many routes, flows, and paths
that connect the university to San Roque and illustrate a shared space between them.
After several minutes on entering the black box theater, further destabilization continued as a
voice summoned the scattered audience to cohere in the middle of the space after making their
way in and out of the installations. The coming together of bodies began the series of
performances that followed. Although we were certain that we could rely on performance’s
power to provoke a feeling or a thought that might not have otherwise arisen, some discussions
with my students centered around the relation between how we make bodies move in the theater
to make them move outside of it. If not protest now, how do we unleash another type of “social
kinesthetic” in the interim (Martin, 2006)? One theatrical experiment was to activate what
Bleeker (2008), called “perceptual systems” that involve “seeing” through a “process of bodily
response and investigation, measuring, exploring through sight and hearing, as well as through
 EMPATHIC PROJECTIONS 339
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FIGURE 4. Drawing the map of Sitio San Roque in the KADAMAY

office in San Roque. (Color figure available online.)

proprioception and kinesthetic” (175). One objective was to jolt the audience into seeing and
moving with others. With no spoken instructions of where to go, the audience were asked to
respond to a shift in lights, sound, and the movement of another body. Without a narrative guide
or set choreography, the audience members had to make their way to different spots of the space
to listen to an unnamed activist sing a song, watch projected video art pieces and monologues,
and stand witness to moving bodies in the theater space. Thus, although being confronted with
bits and pieces about San Roque, these theatrical prompts were intended to initiate kinesthetic
responses from the audience in their pursuit to understand “San Roque” better. I do not go as far
as to assert that this experiment produced empathy in its kinesthetic mode. Rather, I maintain
that it is precisely in between the interrupted and incomplete movement of this moment we must
strategize around how we must further build on the possible diverse kinesthetic empathies felt by
the viewers to collectively move for San Roque.
During the process of conceptualizing the short performance pieces, some undergraduate
students expressed their difficulties, especially in light of expected responses of friends, in
breaking away from representing San Roque through tropes of the poor’s “suffering.” A few
graduate students seconded this thought, also reflecting on their own viewing habits of not
wanting to watch the poor’s suffering on TV. One student asserted that the middle-class person
who is in “social denial” will be “turned off” by presentations of such suffering and displays of
poverty (Ong 2015). Encouraged to think about the body and its relation to the state and capital’s
enactments and performances of power instead (Thiong’o 1997), a few performances that night
attempted to show that the middle class is not in any way protected or exempted from such
enactments of state power. A choreographed piece by one theater student began with comical
music playing in the background (Figure 5). A figure who could have been a stand-in for a
politician, city planner, or urban developer enters the stage and begins to move around the
bodies first seen by the audience in calm repose. He throws around the unmarked, but live
bodies, contorting and then reconfiguring their positions. At first, putting them together, then
separating one from the other parodied the almost random and farcical movement and
 340 BANTA
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FIGURE 5. A movement piece choreographed by an undergraduate

theater major. (Color figure available online.)

displacement of bodies in the city. The outdoor performance that followed was by Boyet, a
performance artist and cultural worker. After leading the audience members outside of the black
box theater, Boyet asked several members to paint his face, which according to the artist,
familiarizes himself to the audience as opposed to alienating him (Figure 6). He then asks the
volunteers to be his coperformers and stand inside his rope-lined demarcated square just outside
the black box theater. At first this produced laughter and amusement for the audience members,
but it was not long after that Boyet’s intentions were made clearer. Masked as another unnamed
power figure, the performance artist repeatedly made lines and demarcations, thus limiting the
space that could be occupied and inhabited. As volunteers are displaced one by one or in groups,
we see that the piece was an interrogation of any sense of security in land and tenure for both
residents and nonresidents of San Roque in their shared space of Metro Manila.
In sum, the mix of installations and performance pieces during our performance event was
intended to operationalize what theater scholar Roxworthy (2014) called “critical empathy” in
the context of San Roque and UP. Roxworthy carefully considered the critique of empathy in her
review and analysis of performance projects that depict the experiences of Japanese American
internees in the United States. According to her, some works that claim to be immersive and
interactive end up erasing racial violence and colonialist histories when empathy is “peddled” so
that spectators identify with the “assimiliationist” racialized other in the United States.
Roxworthy, however, did not foreclose the possibility of mobilizing critical empathy in perfor-
mance and argued that by destabilizing the mise en scene, for example, we can “disallow easy
empathy.” Although Roxworthy centered this argument on the “thing-power” of objects on stage
and their role in critical empathy, I take her challenge to initiate performative experiments that
disallow easy empathy. Playing around with the usual “affective structures” of performance, for
example, creates “jarring” and “ponderous” effects. In our own work, the compendium of short
performance pieces and installations sought to surround the spectator with fragmented life
 EMPATHIC PROJECTIONS 341
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FIGURE 6. Nanay Rosa participates in Boyet’s performance piece.

(Color figure available online.)

narratives, unseat them from their stable positions as observer, and generate feelings of disloca-
tion and displacement (although partial and fleeting) in the theater.

FEELING OUR WAY THROUGH

Empathy has been part of wider discussions about a “crucial tethering” of emotions to social
justice movements (Wright 2010). At the same time, we take note of the serious critique of how
empathy reifies the privileged position of the one who empathizes by endowing him or her with
the capacity of cofeeling (Pedwell 2012). The statements of UP administration, for example,
demonstrate how empathy could easily become an “affective capacity” susceptible to appropria-
tion by market-oriented logics to validate more palatable tactics of displacement and disposses-
sion. Responding to these critiques, I would like to exercise a different emotional reflexivity
(Brown and Pickerill 2009; Evans 2012) and suspend reflecting on our capacities as researchers
to empathize with our “subjects of research” or the success of the project in producing
empathetic subjects. I keep my focus on the address of a few allies during the tense and
uncertain space of the after-show talk back as they make crucial interventions in the usual
circuit of empathy examined by other critical scholars. For one, their presence within this space
makes more evident the multidirectionality of performance where empathy should not be
conceived as a sole and isolated exchange from spectator to performer or aesthetic object.
Cummings (2016) argued that it is only through considering this dynamism and multidirection-
ality that we could begin cultivating “dialogic empathy,” which she defined as the ongoing and
constant dialogue wherein we could perhaps begin to ask “how to do empathy well.” Also, a
focus on these “moment-to moment engagements” (Cummings 2016) opens up ways to work
toward to decolonizing empathy in critical scholarship wherein we look at alternate spaces, the
 342 BANTA

margins, or even occasions during which empathy fails to examine how it might be put to work
differently (Gunew 2009; Pedwell 2013, 2016). I see this an effort to extend discussions about
the radical potential of the “zones of encounter” between the middle class and the poor
(Valentine in Lawson and Elwood 2014) by reflecting on the role of researchers and teachers
in both creating the spaces of contact and ensuring empathy is sustained and channeled to
concrete actions that forge paths of resistance, in this case for both UP and San Roque.
As soon as the low lights came up in the black box theater after the last outdoor performance
of the night, the crowd gathered, not knowing what would happen next. At that moment, right
after the performance, empathy was hardly the glue that congealed into a truly shared space.
Breaking the silence was Karla, a young organizer and resident of Sitio San Roque who
addressed the crowd gathered to talk about the economic development that will displace many
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residents and remove them from good sources of livelihood (Figure 7). Karla, although trained
by numerous experiences to speak in rallies and mobilizations, showed signs of worry and
frustration in speaking to the very quiet crowd of students and young professionals, and almost
in a desperate attempt to appeal to the emotions of the audience asserted:
We (Karla, students, and other nonresidents) are lucky that we are able to get an education; there are
professionals like you. You are lucky that you are able to study without worrying about anything. I
wish that despite that, when you pass by “squatter areas,” I wish you could also think about the
conditions of the residents inside it every day. The employed are very lucky.3
Karla’s address to the crowd revealed not only the complex negotiations of class difference
between the educated and the unemployed poor in the room, but it also reminded us that
engaged contact should never be taken for granted and must be continuously generated.
Especially for those who make their way outside of campus to go home or to go to the
commercial centers, they would definitely pass by San Roque to get to the main lines of transit.

FIGURE 7. Nanay Rosa, Karla, and another resident address our stu-
dents during the Q & A after the performance. (Color figure available
online.)
 EMPATHIC PROJECTIONS 343

Yet San Roque has remained invisible and inaccessible to them because of the many ways Ayala
has tried to conceal San Roque from public view. Karla, definitely not trying to evoke pity, was
in her own way trying to evoke empathy. Karla was asking the crowd to look at San Roque quite
differently from what they are used to doing when they pass by the “informal settlement” areas.
Most residents and community members of KADAMAY attest to difficulties in addressing the
dwindling numbers of residents who attend protests and participate in barricades they have set
up through the years. Some reasons for this within San Roque include disappointment over
personal conflicts within the group or “activist fatigue,” wherein some residents have started to
doubt the group’s plan of resistance. Eman, another community activist, drew this comparison. If
the urban poor experiences this, we can assume that there is an even bigger hurdle for the middle
class. For Eman, spatial distance between the two groups grows, as does the social distance, and
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media images about San Roque’s dissidence or Ayala’s glitzy plans for urban development
become ingrained. Moreover, if we recall the statements of the human rights commissioner in the
beginning of this article and the spectacles of Quezon City government and the UP administra-
tion, their empathetic performances of “understanding” the poor are only extended until what are
perceived as violent, rebellious acts on the part of the residents occur. Some hesitate to extend
their support when invitations are issued to join putting barricades around the area, fight the
police or demolition teams, or march toward the mayor’s office. For Eman, the middle class
must be pulled in and steered into the direction of San Roque.
The particularity of countermapping through performance is that the space of performance
brought different communities into the same space for a moment in time. Aside from the use of
the performance space itself as a place to meet, we saw the project and the practice of performance
making as a way to find—and even create—more strategic places in which everyone could
encounter each other. Eman remembered that in the past he was able to enter the university and
classrooms to talk to students and ask for their support. “We would just go in because that’s UP
before.” Now, in addition to the expense of commuting from San Roque to UP, he said security
guards do not allow them to enter. After the performance, Eman thanked us. “You could just speak
for us sometimes,” he asserted and challenged us to take their issue to the “middle forces” in the
ways we could. Thus, after the performance, conversations continued as to how we could help with
bringing San Roque into the university. This might happen through inclusion of the project or other
urban issues in our syllabi or by supporting San Roque residents gaining access to university spaces,
offices, and venues for meetings, events, and film screenings. Karla and Eman made clear at the
performance talkback that establishing proximity and contact do matter to them, but asking us to
speak for them does not signify that the empathic process even for us, scholars and researchers, is
already complete and therefore makes us the perfect spokesperson for San Roque. The task is two
pronged in this case: We still need to be thinking of ways to materially contribute to the struggles of
San Roque by making use of our privileges in the university. At the same time, though, creating
spaces of encounter from within and around the university are to view our own institution as a
“dense site” wherein we could examine what Elwood, Lawson, and Nowak (2015) called “relational
place making.” For these scholars, how the middle class enact poverty politics has serious implica-
tions for us to understand how class boundaries are reproduced. Within these sites, though, we could
“disrupt dominant narratives of poverty that can lead to more reflexive interactions, sowing seeds for
cross-class alliance” (Lawson 2012; Elwood, Lawson, and Nowak 2015, 140). Hence, part of the
task of countermapping is to open critical discussions about middle-class-ness and poverty within
our classrooms and imploring other academics to do the same.
 344 BANTA

GIVING WAYS

A tense impasse was felt inside the performance space after Karla, Manang Rosa, and Richard,
another young resident of San Roque who inspired one of the monologues of the night, delivered
impassioned accounts of injustice. Another urban planning student questioned the residents
about the basis of their claims and their refusal of the government’s plans for relocation. For
this student, despite her own visits to San Roque and discussions in the classroom, with “no
clear demands” to government, resistance is not only futile; it is simply groundless and illogical.
A response from a resident brought an insufficient and, perhaps worse, only temporary clarifica-
tion. The demand is clear yet alternatives are uncertain, or unknown even. Paolo and Boyet, both
cultural workers, activists, and two of the performers that night, had this to say in response to
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this student. Paolo, a nonresident of San Roque who at the time was working for a different
activist organization, stated:
The poor are defenseless against the chorus of the government and big businesses. Yet, there will be
an opportunity for us to shake the foundations laid out by the strong partnership between the
government and the big corporations, especially when professors, urban planners, scientists, and
students speak and share their analyses as to why our laws, policies, and programs by the govern-
ment do not serve the poor. It’s a big thing, if this will come from our architects and engineers. It’s a
totally different thing if they will not only help expose the truth, but also help the poor with their
knowledge.
Paolo, in his response, contended that what is clear is the power of partnerships between the
state and big, private corporations and the resistance needed to wage war against it. For Paolo,
what needs exposing and illumination are the state laws, policies, and programs that continue to
keep residents in poverty. Boyet addressed the impression of “groundless” resistance by
suggesting a more active alternative response:
If there is a question about alternatives, if not a relocation, suing the government or a return to the
countryside, then we need to study it then. How much do we need to pay rent if the minimum [wage]
is not even more than 400 pesos a day? We, who are in the middle class, a big part of that are the
educated. You can make a big contribution.
Paolo and Boyet, for example, help us reflect more on how Pedwell (2016, 20) defined empathy
as the “giving up of the empathic desire for cultural mastery or psychic transparency.” Rather, for
Pedwell, empathy is a “giving in” to what is “foreign” and not as easily comprehensible. Paolo and
Boyet’s response to the audience was not an appeal for a deeper identification with the subject
position of the poor as prerequisite for more empathy. However, they were strong provocations to
“give up” their unfounded assumptions by appealing to the student, architect, and urban planner in
them, helping with their knowledge, studying the issue, and proffering solutions.
Indeed, the failure to attain a concluding emotional “dramatic” climax to the performance and
the uncertain outcomes of Boyet and Paolo’s address impel us to consider how much more work
is required for empathy to move beyond its “perspective taking potential.” Although Cummings
(2016) encouraged us to cultivate dialogic empathy in all stages of performance (including after-
show talks), our experience with our Q&A after the show pushes us to think further on how we
could help create different itineraries for our students based on careful attunement to our own
interactions with them. This is how we hope to create empathic routes into San Roque from our
 EMPATHIC PROJECTIONS 345

campus. Boyet offered one critique of this last performance. For Boyet, we missed the simple yet
important task of putting a signup sheet with name, affiliation, and contact number for our small
audience: our students, colleagues, artists, performers, geographers, urban planners, architects,
the educated, and the middle class. He told us that we cannot expect our students to know what
is next, nor should we take for granted whatever was felt or seen that night. If not San Roque,
Boyet said, there are other communities that will need the help of the students. “How are we to
know where and how we could lead these students?” he asked. The first step, for Boyet, is to not
treat the audience as a faceless and already empathetic crowd. Paying attention to the affective
dimension of counter mapping would require a steady process of leading our students to specific
points of inquiry and walking together with them as the needs of the group of activists and
residents in San Roque also change.
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Nevertheless, we are wary of and vigilant against merely being comfortable conduits of
“immersion trips” to San Roque, which, according to one ally we interviewed, “only adds to the
burden of residents and activists to host students and teachers” with no concrete gains for the
residents or the movement they are building. Thus, although these trips or visits might indeed
increase the number of students who come to San Roque, we realize that the time and effort
spent doing so could instead be used to establish stronger relations with the students and
colleagues who have expressed some interest or “sign” of empathy for the people of San
Roque, the urban housing issue and others, or the project itself. The middle-class allies, the
architects or urban planners that Boyet and Paulo referred to in their statements, for example,
will be able to help with their knowledge and expertise directly in the group’s ongoing political
campaigns. Academics and other researchers could contribute in helping organizations like
KADAMAY distinguish their claims and methods of practice from other nongovernmental
organizations and other community-based organizations that offer short-term solutions that
further entrench the poor in systems that oppress them (Shatkin, 2002; Hutchinson, 2007;
Kares 2014). It is also through our relationships with them that we could lead them somewhere
else. Although some students or colleagues might not be able to help San Roque directly,
potential formed relationships through performance might activate them in other spaces. How do
we encourage urban planners, for example, to take up issues from their workplace that resist
growing privatization of urban planning and development in Manila (Shatkin 2008) that also
affect not only land tenure and housing for the poor, but also state provision of basic services for
all urban residents? Akin to the colorful dots on the map discussed earlier, we need to encourage
and challenge others to take up critical positions in relation to San Roque, UP, Quezon City, and
greater Manila. This way, empathy is not just an outcome of one performance. In the ever
shifting grounds of state policy, development programs, and urban change, countermapping
projects might also consider how strong empathic currents among participants are necessary as
the affective scaffolding that buttress and sustain future countermapping projects.

FOCALIZED REORIENTATIONS

As a way to conclude, I would like to provide an update on what is going on with San Roque at
the moment of writing. In the early months of 2017, KADAMAY successfully “occupied” empty
housing units originally meant for police officers and members of the Philippine army in Pandi,
Bulacan. Some say that the occupation would not have happened if it were not for the organizing
 346 BANTA

work of community activists of KADAMAY, including its members from San Roque; the rallies,
the barricades, and fending off the violent police from demolishing their homes were crucial
precedents for the taking over at Pandi, Bulacan. Yet despite this undeniable buildup of force
that enabled the residents and their supporters to take over this space, some things sounded
oddly similar to those we have seen or heard before. The residents were heavily lambasted for
demanding the free water and electricity in the occupied area. Aside from being “freeloaders,”
they are accused of being a “headache” to the local government of Bulacan, which is also
demanding support from the national government for road construction and local employment
(Reyes-Estrope and Andrade 2017) A few months have passed and as residents settle in, they
must also begin the process of thinking about how to collectively plan, implement, and build
Pandi, Bulacan.
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In this article, I have argued for the need to consider the role of empathy specifically in
projects that attempt to explore the productive synergy between performance and countermap-
ping. By situating our project within the spatial context of San Roque and UP and critically
examining the challenges that we faced as a group of students and teachers who aimed to
connect with a community such as San Roque, I discussed how empathy hardly emerges as
something that could be possessed by the middle-class spectator. I direct our attention to the
interventions of community activists instead to underscore the need to strategize around creating
concrete channels into specific activities that work toward ensuring continuous involvement and
participation.
Yet, you might ask why we frame the project and this analysis within the “cultivation” of
empathy among the middle class (Pedwell 2016). These are some questions we tried to answer
after the performance: By arguing that empathy has a place in performance countermapping
projects, does this not direct attention away from the “rightful” subjects of analyses: the poor and
the working class in the collective performances of struggle? What is the purpose of such
performances for the middle class when others are already doing it, when activists are already
performing in San Roque, with a much clearer objective of eliciting anger from the residents for
the purpose of enlisting them in political struggle? Does theorizing the non-working-class body
in performance, even if we withhold an easy reading of it as resistance, simply romanticize their
“affective capacities”? At the root of this kind of questioning is, I think, the discomfort and
disappointment that comes with organizing the middle class. I suggest, though, that performance
could still provide openings through which the middle class could begin to enact a different way
of relating to San Roque and its residents. From this place of cognitive and perceptual
reorientation, educators, for example, could encourage students and their colleagues to “shake
the foundations” from where they are at. How can we direct their attention to move in alliance
with the informal communities set to be relocated within campus? First rooted in place and its
struggles, these empathic projections might then eventually lead them to build stronger connec-
tions with communities like San Roque.
Importantly, we do not see this as a one-off event. This is the first of what we hope will be a
continuous series of performance countermapping projects, which attempts what Dawkins and
Loftus (2013) termed “relational urban interventions.” For Dawkins and Loftus, drawing on
Marxist aesthetics theory, relational urban interventions are powerful in a sense that they proffer
a world that is “sensibly understood” and the necessary “sensory relationship” to grasp it. They
provided and analyzed examples that focus on “transience, process and performance” wherein
new sensory encounters could be framed as not mere events that already have done or not done
 EMPATHIC PROJECTIONS 347

something, but rather as processes that “encourage conditions of possibility.” We open up our
project here as a way to rework and build on a type of praxis that holds on to a vision of
performance similar to that outlined by Houston and Pulido (2002): performance as a “dialectical
operative” that puts into motion practices that simultaneously enact a type of “imaginative work”
and change everyday material life. By paying close attention to the empathic projections forged
through performance and then mapping their coordinates, I suggest that we might be able to
move toward imagining and creating a dialectical space in between distant and disconnected
spaces such as UP and San Roque.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers, the editors of this journal, and Geraldine Pratt for their
helpful feedback and editorial guidance. Thank you to KADAMAY–San Roque, our geography
and theater students, colleagues from UP, and other cultural workers who helped us with this
project.

NOTES

1. Sitio is a defined territory, part of the barangay, the smallest administrative unit of the Philippines. Sitio therefore
does not have independent administration.
2. Hindi po batayan ang pera para makaahon kami sa kahirapan. Sabi nila, mahirap ka ayaw mo pa tanggapin ang
pera? Sabi ko hindi porke’t mahirap ako, pera ang tinitignan ko. Ang tinitignan ko pangkaramihan. . . . May pera ka
nga, wala ka naman bahay? Kaya paninindigan lang ang tapat para sa amin. Paano po kami mabibigyan ng
gobyerno ng programang pabahay?
3. Maswerte po tayo na may nakakapag aral, mga professional na kagaya niyo. Maswerte kayo na kayo ay
nakakapagaral, wala kayong inaalala. Sana po sa kabila noon, pagnapapadaan kayo sa mga iskwater area, sana
maisip niyo rin kung ano ba yung kalagayan ng mga mamamayan diyan sa loob ng araw ng araw, maswerte po yung
mga may trabaho.

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VANESSA BANTA is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
BC V6T 1Z2, Canada. E-mail: v.banta@alumni.ubc.ca. Her research interests include labor migration and development,
the return of overseas Filipino workers, and the state programs designed for their reintegration in the Philippines.
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