Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2024-09: Elijah Jesse Pine on remote field instruction in the virocene

Now that nearly all college instruction in the Philippines resumed the onsite modality in response to the COVID-19 educational disruption that now seems like a lifetime ago. A few reflective pieces start to trickle in to inform us of the advantages as well as fallouts of remote learning. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, major transformations in the practice of field instruction in higher education institutions were instituted. For field-based academic disciplines, remote field instruction, in the form of virtually corresponding with community and organizational partners through calls and emails, became an immediate alternative to fieldwork. While this has expanded the role of technology in facilitating learning, this also posed a challenge for field-based courses that source pedagogical strength from close engagements with their intended stakeholders in physical spaces. 

Assistant Professor Elijah Jesse Pine is giving a talk for the Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2024 that is happening at 5:30PM on 27 September 2024 via Zoom, and sponsored by the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) and the UPD Department of Geography. In the talk entitled A Depth Deficit: Rapport Building and Remote Field Instruction in University Classes during the COVID-19 Pandemic, EJ Pine traces the assemblages of human and non-human actants that gave rise to remote field instruction as a social phenomenon. 

Guided by Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory, Asst Prof Pine observed that the nature and scope of remote field instruction positively interrogated traditionally-held assumptions about the field as a learning space. However, it also highlighted the limited capacity of virtual spaces to create lasting interactions between students, educators, and stakeholders, in turn creating a depth deficit that may impede effective field instruction. This research provides recommendations in locating a happy medium between remote and actual fieldwork in an increasingly hybrid post-pandemic society.

Elijah Jesse M. Pine is Assistant Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Communication (DEC), College of Development Communication (CDC), UP Los Baños. He obtained his BS degree in Development Communication in UPLB in 2015 and his MA degree in Anthropology in 2023. He has previously done research on educational communication, field education, and learning during the pandemic. In December 2023, he co- published a monograph titled Development Communication in Emergency Remote Teaching during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges, Adaptation, and Reimagination along with his colleagues at DEC. His current research and public service involvements focus on developing educational media to achieve reading literacy outcomes. 

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is part of the ongoing 40th anniversary celebration of the UP Department of Geography (1983-2023) which simultaneously serves and provides a space where practical, discursive and embodied discussions and performativities from academic geographers, practitioners and civil society can come together and thrive. This talk is co-sponsored by the combined research groups of the UP Department of Geography: Human Geography (HuG) and Media, Literary Geographies, and Geohumanities (MELANGE) and in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goal #4 (Quality Education). 

To participate for this lecture, click this link: https://tinyurl.com/y4fttm7t

Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2023-16: Edward Nadurata on care and vulnerabilities during COVID-19

For the 16th and last talk of the Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2023, the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) present the ongoing research of Edward Nadurata on the various geographies of care and caring landscapes that emerge during the COVID-19 period that exposes greater vulnerability on the bodies of Filipino care workers who work as frontliners and their labor precarities.

The presentation is entitled Racial Capitalism, Care, and the Global Filipino Condition: Interrogating Risk and Contagion in the Philippines and its Diaspora During COVID-19. It is happening on Wednesday, the 6th of December 2023 at 5:30PM via Zoom.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the indispensability of the Philippines and its people as careworkers for the world. However, the pandemic also magnified the global inequalities around health and labor that were only exacerbated by the position of the Philippines as a key player in global health infrastructure as a source of cheap and flexible labor. This presentation juxtaposes how the Philippines as a labor exporting nation dealt with the uncertainty during the pandemic and the global organizing efforts of Filipino nurses and organizations amidst the rise in Anti-Asian violence during the pandemic. 

Edward Nadurata argues that examining the conditions that Filipinos faced globally highlights new ways of thinking about care that magnify a sense of citizenship rooted in the lived experiences of Filipinos as careworkers during COVID-19 who were proximal to contagion and as always at risk because of their racialized positions in the global economy. In doing so, this presentation considers different ideas around care and governance that have emerged and have been informed by COVID-19 that do not align with state-led visions of crisis management but rather with community-oriented approaches. 

This presentation furthermore interrogates how the centering of risk and contagion in our understanding of labor allows us to think of the global condition for Filipinos as a racialized group, the relevance of racial capitalism as an analytic in terms of the Philippines and its diaspora, and the different possibilities for the world for other pandemics to come.

Edward Nadurata is a PhD Student in Global and International Studies with Designated Emphases in Medical Humanities and Asian American Studies at the University of California at Irvine. He is currently an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation fellow and a Visiting Fellow in the Third World Studies Center at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. His research lies on the intersections of aging, retirement, carework, globalization, Disability Studies, and Filipino Studies. He received his MA in Asian American Studies from UCLA and serves as editorial assistant for Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies, the online open access journal of the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies at UC Davis and the Journal of Asian American Studies.

This lecture is in conjunction with the UP Department of Geography's 40th anniversary as an academic unit in the Philippines, as well as an homage to the 100 years when geography was first taught at the University of the Philippines (1923-2023). 

The lecture is sponsored by the Human Geography (HuG) research cluster of the UPD Department of Geography. It likewise touches on the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #3 (Good Health and Well-Being) and #10 (Reduced Inequalities). 

To participate in the lecture, please click this link to register. Likewise you can paste this URL to your browser: https://tinyurl.com/yc4wckxd