Research Agenda (2025-2030)
For Future Advisees/Mentees, Collaborators, and Partners
My research begins from a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to trust in contexts where trust itself is uncertain? This inquiry guides my work across the interwoven terrains of communication, sociology, political science, and anthropology—fields that together illuminate how publics in the Global South make sense of legitimacy, care, and belonging.
From communication studies, I draw attention to mediation and performance: how discourse and narrative shape public perception and political emotion. Sociology grounds my analyses in questions of structure and moral relationship—how trust is sustained, disrupted, and remade in everyday life. Political science sharpens my focus on legitimacy and governance, examining how authority is staged, contested, and rendered accountable. Anthropology provides a sensibility of lived experience, attending to the slow and affective processes through which people interpret moral life amid fragility. Together, these disciplines form the intellectual scaffolding of my work, each offering a vantage point on the cultural labor that makes authority believable or survivable.
From Trust Cultures to Constructivation
My early scholarship developed the concept of trust cultures to describe historically grounded and affectively charged frameworks through which publics evaluate credibility, sincerity, and moral authority. My book Navigating Trust, Journalism, and Health in the Age of Populism (Taylor & Francis, 2025) examined the Dengvaxia vaccine controversy not as a technical policy failure but as a cultural drama of legitimacy and recognition. Trust faltered less because citizens were misinformed than because institutions failed to meet the moral expectations of care embedded in Filipino social life. Through discourse analysis and interpretive inquiry, I showed how grief, suspicion, and outrage became forms of civic reasoning.
Building on this foundation, my article Scandal as Constructivation: Trust Cultures and the Politics of Legitimacy in Southeast Asia (International Journal of Communication, 2025) reconceptualizes political scandal as a performative process of “constructivation”—the construction and activation of truth and legitimacy through competing trust cultures. Using the Dengvaxia case as a generative example, the study advances a regional grammar of scandal characterized by affective resonance, moral legibility, and narrative fit. It challenges liberal-democratic assumptions that scandal is primarily a moment of exposure and reform, proposing instead that in postcolonial settings it is a culturally embedded struggle through which publics perform and negotiate trust under conditions of institutional fragility.
Emerging Research Directions
These inquiries have given rise to two ongoing research programs.
The first, Scandal as Ambivalent Governance in the Global South, extends my theorization of scandal beyond its conventional framing as exposure and reform. In many postcolonial democracies, scandals function less as instruments of accountability than as moral performances—sites where sincerity, shame, and legitimacy are publicly negotiated. Drawing on political communication, cultural sociology, and affect theory, this project treats scandal as a form of ambivalent governance that both challenges and stabilizes authority.
The second, Bringing Back Political Modernization, reopens a neglected strand of Philippine political thought by treating modernization not as a linear process of rationalization but as a moral and cultural negotiation. It seeks to recover vernacular grammars of trust, submission (pagsunod), and care (pag-aalaga) that sustain democratic life amid systemic fragility. Through discourse analysis, archival research, and interpretive political inquiry, I aim to rearticulate modernization as a process grounded in moral reasoning and relational ethics.
Alongside these, I continue to write on neurodivergent scholarship, relational sovereignty, and reflexive academic practice, advancing the view that knowledge production itself is a form of trustwork—an ethical relationship between researcher and world.
Methodological and Collaborative Commitments
Methodologically, my research is grounded in interpretive and qualitative traditions, including critical discourse analysis, reflexive thematic analysis, and multimodal interpretation. Beyond technique, I regard research as a relational encounter—a practice of listening and care through which theory emerges from lived experience. My positionality as a neurodivergent scholar reinforces this orientation, reminding me that nonlinearity can be rigorous and that intellectual slowness can be a form of depth.
To extend these ideas through collective practice, I founded the Trust, Cultures & Publics Network (TCPN), a trans-local initiative connecting scholars, practitioners, and educators working on trust, legitimacy, and care in the Global South. Through roundtables, workshops, and co-authored publications, TCPN seeks to cultivate a dialogic and morally attentive research ecosystem that holds others in trust.
Intellectual Vision
Trust is not only the subject of my research; it is also the principle guiding my scholarly practice. My work seeks to theorize the moral and emotional infrastructures of public life—to explain how trust is performed, felt, and contested in societies marked by uncertainty. From trust cultures to constructivation, from relational sovereignty to ambivalent governance, I aim to build a body of scholarship that redefines what it means to be trustworthy in an untrusting world: rigorous in method, reflexive in stance, and humane in imagination.
From communication studies, I draw attention to mediation and performance: how discourse and narrative shape public perception and political emotion. Sociology grounds my analyses in questions of structure and moral relationship—how trust is sustained, disrupted, and remade in everyday life. Political science sharpens my focus on legitimacy and governance, examining how authority is staged, contested, and rendered accountable. Anthropology provides a sensibility of lived experience, attending to the slow and affective processes through which people interpret moral life amid fragility. Together, these disciplines form the intellectual scaffolding of my work, each offering a vantage point on the cultural labor that makes authority believable or survivable.
From Trust Cultures to Constructivation
My early scholarship developed the concept of trust cultures to describe historically grounded and affectively charged frameworks through which publics evaluate credibility, sincerity, and moral authority. My book Navigating Trust, Journalism, and Health in the Age of Populism (Taylor & Francis, 2025) examined the Dengvaxia vaccine controversy not as a technical policy failure but as a cultural drama of legitimacy and recognition. Trust faltered less because citizens were misinformed than because institutions failed to meet the moral expectations of care embedded in Filipino social life. Through discourse analysis and interpretive inquiry, I showed how grief, suspicion, and outrage became forms of civic reasoning.
Building on this foundation, my article Scandal as Constructivation: Trust Cultures and the Politics of Legitimacy in Southeast Asia (International Journal of Communication, 2025) reconceptualizes political scandal as a performative process of “constructivation”—the construction and activation of truth and legitimacy through competing trust cultures. Using the Dengvaxia case as a generative example, the study advances a regional grammar of scandal characterized by affective resonance, moral legibility, and narrative fit. It challenges liberal-democratic assumptions that scandal is primarily a moment of exposure and reform, proposing instead that in postcolonial settings it is a culturally embedded struggle through which publics perform and negotiate trust under conditions of institutional fragility.
Emerging Research Directions
These inquiries have given rise to two ongoing research programs.
The first, Scandal as Ambivalent Governance in the Global South, extends my theorization of scandal beyond its conventional framing as exposure and reform. In many postcolonial democracies, scandals function less as instruments of accountability than as moral performances—sites where sincerity, shame, and legitimacy are publicly negotiated. Drawing on political communication, cultural sociology, and affect theory, this project treats scandal as a form of ambivalent governance that both challenges and stabilizes authority.
The second, Bringing Back Political Modernization, reopens a neglected strand of Philippine political thought by treating modernization not as a linear process of rationalization but as a moral and cultural negotiation. It seeks to recover vernacular grammars of trust, submission (pagsunod), and care (pag-aalaga) that sustain democratic life amid systemic fragility. Through discourse analysis, archival research, and interpretive political inquiry, I aim to rearticulate modernization as a process grounded in moral reasoning and relational ethics.
Alongside these, I continue to write on neurodivergent scholarship, relational sovereignty, and reflexive academic practice, advancing the view that knowledge production itself is a form of trustwork—an ethical relationship between researcher and world.
Methodological and Collaborative Commitments
Methodologically, my research is grounded in interpretive and qualitative traditions, including critical discourse analysis, reflexive thematic analysis, and multimodal interpretation. Beyond technique, I regard research as a relational encounter—a practice of listening and care through which theory emerges from lived experience. My positionality as a neurodivergent scholar reinforces this orientation, reminding me that nonlinearity can be rigorous and that intellectual slowness can be a form of depth.
To extend these ideas through collective practice, I founded the Trust, Cultures & Publics Network (TCPN), a trans-local initiative connecting scholars, practitioners, and educators working on trust, legitimacy, and care in the Global South. Through roundtables, workshops, and co-authored publications, TCPN seeks to cultivate a dialogic and morally attentive research ecosystem that holds others in trust.
Intellectual Vision
Trust is not only the subject of my research; it is also the principle guiding my scholarly practice. My work seeks to theorize the moral and emotional infrastructures of public life—to explain how trust is performed, felt, and contested in societies marked by uncertainty. From trust cultures to constructivation, from relational sovereignty to ambivalent governance, I aim to build a body of scholarship that redefines what it means to be trustworthy in an untrusting world: rigorous in method, reflexive in stance, and humane in imagination.