Through its Filipiniana collection development project, the Philippine Studies Group (PSG) at York University acquired 107 titles for donation to York University Libraries (YUL). This project was part of a grant from the Philippine government to enhance academic and research collaborations between York and Philippine universities.
A full list of titles acquired is available here.
“We focused on titles that fell outside YUL’s usual acquisition channels: titles older than five years, from presses without Canadian distribution channels,” said Kenneth Cardenas, a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Geography who coordinated the project.
Some highlights include 31 titles from the University of the Philippines Press, 11 from Ateneo de Manila University Press, and 5 from Anvil Publishing. We acquired a full set of the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Philippine Arts: its final print run before it shifted to an online-only model.
“We sought to reflect the strengths and interests of York’s Philippine Studies community: performing arts, gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, economic history and geography, and environmental studies and climate change. We also tried to fill some gaps in York’s current collection with titles on social movements, Mindanao, and conflict and reconciliation,” said Cardenas.
Top Twenty Themes
Publication Dates
Finally, there was an attempt to reflect in acquisitions the unique conditions of knowledge production in the Philippines after the 1986 Edsa Revolution, a series of popular demonstrations in the Philippines also known as the People Power Revolution.
NGOs | This was a period when some of the best critical, grounded, and responsive research was being produced and disseminated through NGOs. This was especially true for the crucial issues of the Edsa Republic, such as agrarian reform, environmental protection, indigenous peoples’ rights, and democratic participation. Many scholar-activists who came of political age under Martial Law devoted their energies into shaping “People Power” through this kind of critical, policy-oriented work. The collection includes 11 titles produced by Philippine and international NGOs.
Public affairs journalism and public scholarship | This period was also a golden age of Philippine journalism, with a newly-free press, energized by the Edsa Revolution, committed itself to deep reporting and investigative journalism. Meanwhile, Philippine academics cultivated a distinct form of public scholarship through columns on their op-ed pages. The collection includes seven titles from journalists, plus three of what might be termed “op-ed public scholarship.”
Social movements, biographies and memoirs | Much of the history of resistance to Martial Law, and efforts to shape the Edsa Republic, are in pamphlets produced by the social movements of the time, and in memoirs written by (and biographies written about) their luminaries. The collection includes eight political memoirs and biographies as well as eight ephemera from social movements, of which four were from diasporic social movements.
Defunct presses | Finally, this period saw the last (though hopefully not final) bloom of Philippine print publishing, coming after the restoration of free speech, but before the internet (and possibly trade and copyright policies under WTO membership?) weakened the industry. The collection includes 18 titles from presses that have since gone defunct.
These rough categories are meant to help sensitize future collections development efforts to this unique period of critical, public-facing scholarship from the Philippines, explained Cardenas.
Some of the best work from this period may not be immediately legible to an outside purchaser. They may have had limited print runs, no distribution outside the Philippines, sparse citations, and possibly no ISBNs/ISSNs. Their public scholarship might have come at the cost of ‘scholarly output,’ as measured in internationally-ranked peer-reviewed journal articles.
In other words, they are poorly visible to Northern academics. Yet they may figure prominently in discussions within social movements or in undergraduate syllabi, circulating mainly as photocopies. As such, collecting these works is crucial for maintaining dialogue between research communities within the Philippines and in its diasporas.
Despite these conditions our new acquisitions have been cited 6,446 times as of writing, going by Google Scholar data.
As coordinator, Cardenas expresses his gratitude to Alan Luangco, Alma Ragma, and Jhorie Arciga at University of the Philippines Press, who facilitated our order; Nel Coloma-Moya and Philip Kelly for donations from their personal collections, including rare items passed down from David Wurfel; Mel Cardenas for donating a copy of the 1969–1972 College Editors’ Guild of the Philippines memoir, Serve; Adriana Bugyiova at York University Libraries, for liaising with our efforts; Patrick Alcedo, Marissa Largo and Ethel Tungohan for project guidance; Arianna Alcaraz, for an ongoing conversation on the politics of “Filipiniana”; and Alicia Filipowich, for project administration and logistics.