I supervise doctoral research that builds theory from Philippine evidence rather than applying imported frameworks to it. Expectations are set in writing at the start; feedback moves through memos, revision plans and agreed timelines; and where a project leads to publication, co-authorship follows substantive contribution.

Doctoral supervision

Rae Francis C. Quilantang

Rae Francis C. Quilantang is completing the PhD in Communication at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, where I serve as his dissertation adviser. He is a faculty member in communication at the University of Santo Tomas, a Research Fellow of its Research Center for Social Sciences and Education, and Director for Research and Development of the Speech and Communication Organization of the Philippines. Before entering the academy he worked as a news anchor, producer and production head in Philippine television.

Dissertation. Human–AI Communication in Higher Education: Testing the HAI-IO Model in the Philippine Context (Polytechnic University of the Philippines, 2026) asks what happens to communication when generative AI becomes an interlocutor in academic work. Using a sequential explanatory mixed-method design across three Philippine higher education institutions, Rae surveyed students on their patterns of AI use, feedback behavior, trust and perceived benefit, then worked with faculty and administrators in focus groups on how they read that use.

The study puts feedback at the center of human–AI communication. Students do not simply receive AI output; they prompt, revise, correct and reject it, and this feedback behavior is the strongest predictor of how far they trust the output and find it useful. Faculty responses, from oral questioning and AI declarations to rubric changes and classroom-level rules, re-enter the same loop as institutional feedback, often ahead of formal policy. Student trust emerges as calibrated reliance rather than credulity, and trust itself is shown to be distributed across student–AI, faculty–student and institution–student relations. The dissertation supports the architecture of his HAI-IO model while specifying the refinements it needs: institutional feedback, differentiated trust, epistemic verification and the formation of future teachers.¹

Frameworks. Francis is the proponent of the Human–AI Interaction Outcomes (HAI-IO) model, published in Human-Machine Communication,² and of Psychoanalytic Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (P-MCDA), which joins multimodal critical discourse analysis with Lacanian and Žižekian psychoanalysis and Global South critique. His applications of the latter include readings of Attack on Titan,³ The 8 Show⁴ and the Philippine jeepney.⁵

Work together. Our collaboration grew out of a research methods seminar and has produced four co-authored articles on teaching, critique and research with generative AI,⁶ and a chapter, "Reimagining Critical Discourse Studies in the Global South," in the forthcoming edited volume Becoming Scholars.⁷

Public scholarship. Rae writes regularly on film, television and AI for Esquire Philippines. ORCID: 0009-0001-2008-178X.

Publishing with students

Some course projects continue past the final grade. Invitations to take a project toward publication come only after grades are in, are voluntary, and are open to every team through a published route; co-authorship follows substantive contribution. Two articles have come out of this so far.

Humor as resistance in the 2022 elections. With Paolo Alejandrino and Diana Marie Igual, then students at the University of Santo Tomas: a multimodal social semiotic reading of twenty-five political illustrations by Tarantadong Kalbo, Cartoonist Zach, Political Idiot and Isang Tasang Kape, showing how juxtaposition, irony, parody and historical allusion turned humor into dissent during the 2022 Philippine national elections. Published in Humanities Diliman.⁸

Male vulnerability in Philippine teleseryes. With Stephanie Nicole Asis, Aliyana Chenille V. Bunag, Mary Mae R. Cabaltera, Patrick James Fernandez, Roj Vincent E. Obligacion, John Patrick A. Oblino and Ferzt Wilgard B. Tavera, then students in my Qualitative Data Analysis course at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines: a critical discourse analysis of four teleseryes (Ang Probinsyano, Maria Clara at Ibarra, Destiny Rose, Batang Quiapo) with vignette interviews of young male viewers, showing how male pain is displaced through humor, ridicule or moralized endurance. The article names this pattern affective silencing and advances it as a Global South concept. Published in Communication, Culture & Critique.⁹

Notes

1. Rae Francis C. Quilantang, "Human–AI Communication in Higher Education: Testing the HAI-IO Model in the Philippine Context" (PhD diss., Polytechnic University of the Philippines, 2026).
2. Rae Francis Quilantang, "The HAI-IO Model: A Framework for Understanding the Human-AI Communication Process," Human-Machine Communication 10 (2025): 207–21, https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.10.9.
3. Rae Francis Quilantang, John Russle Guevarra, and Jude Vincent Valenzuela, "Breaking the Walls: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Attack on Titan," Journal for Cultural Research 29, no. 4 (2025): 767–78, https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2025.2572840.
4. Rae Francis Quilantang and Kimberly Nicole P. Quilantang, "Performing the Inferno: A Multimodal and Psychoanalytic Reading of The 8 Show as Contemporary Asian Spectacle," Asian Journal of Arts and Culture 26, no. 2 (2025): e62, https://doi.org/10.48048/ajac.2026.62.
5. Rae Francis Quilantang and Kimberly Nicole P. Quilantang, "'Para Po! (Stop, Please)': The Cultural Significance of Jeepney Decorations in the Philippines in the Context of Modernisation," Mobility Humanities 3, no. 1 (2024): 133–48, https://doi.org/10.23090/MH.2024.01.3.1.009.
6. Rae Francis Quilantang and Karl Patrick R. Mendoza, "Critiquing Power and Ethics: Teaching Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis and Ethical Literary Criticism through Amazon Prime's The Boys," Communication Teacher 39, no. 4 (2025): 311–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/17404622.2025.2467804; Quilantang and Mendoza, "Teaching in Entanglement: Co-thinking, Cognitive Justice, and Theory-Making in the Age of Generative AI," Communication Teacher 40, no. 2 (2026): 250–52, https://doi.org/10.1080/17404622.2025.2609611; Karl Patrick R. Mendoza and Rae Francis Quilantang, "In Relation, Not Replacement: A Reflexive Case for Generative AI in Qualitative Research," Qualitative Research Journal (2026), https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-11-2025-0428; Mendoza and Quilantang, "Critique without Guarantees: Justification and the Social Authorization of Criticism," Journal of Multicultural Discourses (2026), https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2026.2735970.
7. Rae Francis Quilantang and Karl Patrick R. Mendoza, "Reimagining Critical Discourse Studies in the Global South," in Reimagining Critical Discourse Studies in the Global South: Becoming Scholars, ed. Karl Patrick R. Mendoza, Rae Francis Quilantang, and Rodrigo C. Rivera (London: Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming).
8. Paolo Alejandrino, Diana Marie Igual, and Karl Patrick R. Mendoza, "Seriously (Un)funny: Humor in Selected Political Illustrations during the 2022 Philippine National Elections as Portrait of Resistance," Humanities Diliman 22, no. 2 (2025): 184–213, https://saliksik.upd.edu.ph/journal-issue/HD-12-25-001.
9. Stephanie Nicole Asis et al., "Affective Silencing and Moral Masculinity: Male Vulnerability in Philippine Teleseryes," Communication, Culture & Critique 19, no. 2 (2026): 170–78, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcag007.