About
Communication scholar of trust, culture, institutions, and public life.
I am a Filipino communication scholar whose work brings political science and sociology into conversation to examine how trust, legitimacy, and participation are culturally organized across public and institutional life.
Academic leadership and service → · Research program · Academic CV
Current appointments
Surin Pitsuwan Visiting Fellow, Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University (June–December 2026).
Assistant Professorial Lecturer, Department of Sociology and Behavioral Sciences, De La Salle University (part-time affiliation, currently inactive).
Background and formation
Born and raised in Santa Maria, Bulacan, I grew up in a family shaped by education, overseas work, Catholic schooling, and the ordinary demands of sustaining relationships across distance. My mother, an elementary school teacher, was my earliest model of intellectual care, while my father’s work as a marine engineer made visible how family and livelihood are often organized through mobility and absence.
I initially trained in Consular and Diplomatic Affairs at De La Salle–College of Saint Benilde before completing an MA in Political Science at De La Salle University. These fields oriented me toward diplomacy, authority, institutions, and political judgment. Teaching and research eventually gave these concerns a more capacious disciplinary home in communication—the study of how social realities become meaningful, contestable, and publicly consequential.
I completed my PhD in Media and Communication at the University of Canterbury in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2023. My doctoral research examined the Dengvaxia vaccine controversy in the Philippines and was supported by the UC Doctoral Scholarship for Students with Disabilities. I also received the Judith Ensor Prize for Students with a Specific Learning Difficulty.
That experience consolidated my commitment to interpretive research while sharpening my awareness that scholarly achievement is enabled by relationships, institutional permissions, technologies, and unevenly available forms of support. My experience as a neurodivergent scholar drew my attention not only to what becomes known, but also to what the knower must encounter, assemble, and negotiate in order to participate in scholarly life.
Scholarship and academic service
From 2024 to August 2026, I served as Associate Professor III at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. I also held an Airlangga Postdoctoral Fellowship. I serve as Vice-Chair of IAMCR’s Emerging Scholars Network and convene the Trust, Culture & Publics Network. Across these roles, I treat teaching, supervision, editorial service, network-building, and institutional leadership as connected forms of scholarly work.
My three research streams examine trust cultures and relational legitimacy, scandal and institutional consequences, and academic life and conditions of inquiry. My work on relational legitimacy, ambivalent governance, and repair without correction asks how authority is sustained, contested, and reworked when accountability and resolution remain incomplete. Cognitive scaffolding describes supports through which scholarly participation becomes possible; my educational practice asks how such support can develop judgment.
Books and current work
I am the author of Navigating Trust, Journalism, and Health in the Age of Populism: The Dengvaxia Vaccine Scandal in the Philippines (Routledge, 2025). Trust Cultures and the Politics of Relational Legitimacy: Rethinking Trust from the Global South is in press with Routledge, with publication scheduled for December 1, 2026.
Scaffolding the Self: Neurodivergence and the Moral Life of Academic Work is a completed manuscript seeking a new publisher. My in-press monograph, Repair without correction: Institutional authority and enduring controversy in communication, will appear in Journalism & Communication Monographs. My research has also appeared in Media, Culture & Society, International Journal of Communication, Discourse & Communication, and Disability & Society.
Beyond formal academic work
I remain grounded in the practices that first made intellectual life meaningful to me: teaching, conversation, friendship, cooking, and the continuing effort to understand how people sustain trust in imperfect worlds. This grounding gives my scholarship its abiding orientation: to understand institutions critically while helping to build more trustworthy conditions in which people can know, participate, and flourish.