ICA Presents. Kia ora koutou katoa. This is Professor Mohan Dutta. Welcome to the ICA podcast Interventions from the Global South. In this podcast, we converse with activists, artists, researchers across and working with the Global South on questions of transformation, engaging with ideas of social change. In this particular conversation, I'm delighted to have with me Professor Cheryll Soriano. Cheryll is currently Professor of Communication in De La Salle University in the Philippines. She is principal investigator of Fairwork Philippines, a part of the global Fairwork network, which seeks to advance fair labor conditions in the gig economy across the world. She has co-led a digital ethnography project on online freelancing and cloud work in the Philippines under the Newton Tech4Dev Network, a networking collaboration between DLSU and the University of Leicester and funded by the British Council. And another project on the viability of digital labor in the Philippines funded by De La Salle University. She is currently principal investigator for the project on how Filipino youth identify and act on social media bullying and harassment, supported by Facebook under their Content Policy Research team. So, it's a pleasure to have you with us, Cheryll, I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
It's my pleasure as well, Mohan. I look forward to it.
Thank you. So, Cheryll, perhaps let's begin by understanding what Global South means to you.
The Global South is a symbolic description of locations that are marked by historical experiences of injustice and coloniality. It's important to assert the experiences of the Global South in defining, understanding, capturing the experiences of the people in the Global South, in terms of capturing their communicative exchanges, expressions of agency, marginality, and also solidarity.
So, what does Global South look like when approaching it from the Philippines, your location?
Approaching the Global South in the context of the Philippines would imply understanding: our situated histories of coloniality, the inflections of class as have been shaped by these experiences of coloniality, but also co-shaped by multiple developments, socially, economically, and politically over time. The Philippines has experienced colonization from various colonial masters for several centuries. And that continues on even after the Spanish colonization until the American period. Any understanding of the Global South, or for example the Philippines at this point, would imply situating present experiences within those historical contexts and developments that are shaped by those historical contexts.
Now, one of the things that's quite striking within the struggles for justice in Philippines is the role of the US, and US Empire, in shaping the formation of development infrastructures, and within that context, in shaping the formation of communication as a discipline. Could you talk a little bit more about what does it mean to theorize communication, noting, acknowledging, and working through that history?
Unpacking this implies, looking at in what ways our linkages with the United States and those influences have shaped the various aspects of realities in the Philippines and how that continues on even until the present. We know that our educational infrastructures have been very much shaped by that colonial history. Our imperatives to speak in English in our everyday conversations have been shaped by that. Our political structures are continually shaped and influenced by these alliances with the United States. And at the same time, we tend to align our ideologies, our ideas about progress, agency, sometimes even solidarity, within those terms and definitions that have been defined by colonial masters for us. This is where decolonization becomes important in really interrogating how these power structures of the past and present have shaped our ontological and epistemological approaches to communication research and understanding our being - how we have come to arrive at accepting particular definitions of who we are, how we communicate, what it means to be expressing agency in communication, what it means to be resisting powers or communicative powers.
If you think about Philippines as the Global South engaging the empire in a particular kind of politics, that also essentially means that there is an elite class within Philippines that is complicit in this imperial politics. Calls for decolonization emerge from that same elite class. One might argue that it perpetuates the same imperial politics just in a new language.
The ways that we have understood communication theory, these are shaped by intellectual traditions of the North. And that has become more apparent to me quite later on - the importance of reflexivity and asking myself, "Which scholars am I citing? Am I eligible to even interrogate this scholarship and engage with this scholarship?" My position, my positionality, and my privilege as an academic who has had this privilege and speaking for and writing for the experiences of the people I interview, workers in the gig economy in different precarious conditions. So it requires constant interrogation and reflection. I totally agree with you.
Within Philippines there are indigenous peoples and struggles of indigenous communities with the right to life and livelihood. How does that play out in relationship to the registers for decolonization?
There are interventions from indigenous groups to assert and insert themselves in the conversation. Some scholars and activists are offering aid, offering support, so that they would have the bigger spaces to amplify their voices in asserting their expressions of self determination, expressions of autonomy. Decolonization work here implies understanding from their voices what struggle means, what risks they're experiencing, in order for interventions to be thought about and co-developed with them.
So often in struggles for decolonization emerging from indigenous struggles, the decolonization is really about land and ownership of natural resources. How does that work when you think through this question of solidarity and what it means?
The clamor of indigenous communities in the Philippines for their right to self-determination is really that call for respect of their ownership and autonomy over the land, and the resources and the rituals that are connected to the land. This has been a historical struggle and all the expressions of resistance are connected to that yearning to have the autonomy to determine how they want to make use of the land. There has been a violent conflict related to their expressions of indigeneity and self-determination. That is not an issue that's understood by many Filipinos. I am ashamed to admit that I understood the struggle about the land and why they're clamoring for self-determination, our Muslim minorities, only when I was doing my Masters. It was not framed in a way that you would understand struggles are connected to questions about the land and self-determination. It was always discussed in vague terms that will not allow other Filipinos to be able to be in solidarity with these groups.
Would you say that that's part of the propaganda emerges from the hegemonic structures that prevent that understanding?
In some ways. The framing of it as a conflict, where the aggressors are the Muslims, for example, is the part that I feel is deliberate. Also, at the same time, half of it has become a product of multiple intersecting forces. For example, who is given the chance to study? They have been recorded in terms of the lowest economic status as well. It cycles, the possibilities of expressing themselves, the ways by which they have been understood by the larger sectors of society, the ways by which people will think, "Do they have the right to be heard? Do we need to listen to them?" How can we even listen to them in the ways in which they are actually able to express these things? Part of it is deliberate, but the other half of it is a product of unequal structures, economic, political, cultural, social, that has been a product of this history of undermining the conditions of our indigenous communities.
So, when you locate this conversation in relationship to the question of democracy, voice, and participation, and particularly think about the contemporary moment - an authoritarian consolidation of power - and US involvement in supporting authoritarian forces in the Philippines that actually have undermined democracy and targeted activists. How do you make sense of broader geopolitics, in terms of the question of democracy and participation in the Philippines?
The very question of how activism has been demonized or stifled over the past several years needs to be connected to questions of, "What were the central node points of activism?" Very vibrant in this activist circle are expressions of resistance towards imperial control. I remember one scholar that asked, "Why does it seem like the sentiment is to be critical of activist forces now, when they have stood for long periods of time for the condition of ordinary people, for the condition of marginalized people? Where does that hostility towards activism actually root from?" We need to go back to how that hostility has been established, to begin with, and what are the roles of these global power structures in questioning the legitimacy of activism in the country. The notion of activists as destabilizing forces is very much connected to the idea of what is being destabilized. It connects to the idea of preserving the normalization of the economy, and sidelining democracy. The people expressing their views, expressing their struggles, is less important. That thinking is decades of poverty, decades of social injustice that many Filipinos have experienced. But in the context of increased mobility, communication facilities, people are seeing or exposed to various visions of economic progress that is also underscored by neoliberalism. That vision of, "Oh, we can be progressive if only these activists don't disrupt us, if only we allow [Rodrigo] Duterte to continually run. It doesn't matter if drug addicts, or people he labels as addicts, are killed. It doesn't matter." And even now, with Bongbong Marcos, it doesn't matter if we reinstate the son of the former dictator, who has been known to have ill-gotten wealth and torture Filipino activists. It doesn't matter because he promises. The YouTube videos I've examined say, "Make the Philippines Great Again", which is very much echoing the "Make America Great Again" of Trump. The visions of wanting to become economically progressive as a nation is very much anchored on legitimizing these narratives of Duterte and Marcos going back, which is a very real threat. It strikes a lot of anger because it hits on a history of activists and well-documented killings, tortures, abuses. Some scholars would argue, it's not that people are stupid, and they don't know about this. They know about this, they just don't care. They simply see certain values underpinned by neoliberalism as more important than voice, expression, democracy, respect for human rights.
One has to connect these ideological expressions to the Imperial politics and the ways in which the US has systematically disseminated neoliberal values, as part of its propaganda work in terms of, "The free market will emancipate us all," and any labor organizing getting in the way is actually a detriment to the progress to be delivered by the free market. So, it is very much tied to that kind of propaganda work targeting countries like the Philippines and Chile.
I saw this quite more closely in the current study, research, that we have been doing in relation to platform work. In our conversations with the workers, we see how workers themselves have begun to embrace the notions of flexibility that, "It's okay to work 12 hours because I'm gonna get future gains anyway. It's okay because eventually this will lead to the fruits of my labor, anyway." This current work entails conversing with platforms and how they think about what is good for the workers and what is rightful claim for labor. It appears to me to be very much defined by these neoliberal visions of "Well, they're gig workers, so they have control over their time. They can meet the minimum living wage, but they have to work for 16 hours. And so?" In small everyday conversations, experiences, and exchanges, these ideologies have permeated and they are expressed in many different forms in platform work, in how we express ourselves on social media, in terms of how we treat marginal communities, etc.
So, what are the insights of resistance to this overarching ideology of flexibility and entrepreneurialism?
This is what I was working with for a while with my colleague, Jason Cabañes. We wrote a piece where we try to capture the interesting emergence of solidaristic formations amongst gig workers in the Philippine platform economy, where resistance is problematized because particularly for people doing gig work, and specifically cloud work, where Filipinos would cater to providing tasks or services to a foreign client, those workers are physically dispersed. So, how can solidarity form? And what we saw is that there are emerging forms of solidarity, where workers help each other navigate the complexities and the ambiguity of the platform labor environment, given the absence of real government support towards the workers, while constantly promoting gig work as a solution to unemployment. Although in the Philippines, or in the Global South analysis of platform labor, workers are often cast as digital sweatshops, always in a very critical sense about the precarious conditions of workers, we cannot sideline or simplify the workers' experiences as just a sweatshop. There are many ways by which workers are able to insert themselves. They do and are recognizing the inequalities facilitated by the platform. But they know that this is much better than any alternative that is available to them. At the same time, they see this as a level up, particularly because of that colonial influence of working for a global client, speaking in English, being technologically savvy - they differentiate themselves from other workers. That's what we try to encapsulate in that notion of entrepreneurial solidarities; these solidarities manage to help workers to survive within this bigger context of colonial history, inefficiencies of public state and public state infrastructures to support workers, and also the abuses of labor platforms.
I wonder if that then serves as an organizing basis at all for international worker solidarity that can perhaps offer an alternative infrastructure to transnational tech capital?
Similar to migrant workers who are located in different parts of the world, Filipino migrant workers, they tend to converge with co-nationals. What we're seeing is that they seem to be converging and using the co-Filipino, or the "kababayan" in local terms, as an ideology for coming together and making more relatable, their experiences as gig workers. These expressions of entrepreneurial solidarity, they are assertions of agency amongst these workers as a collective. "I have started to earn millions from my gig work, this is how I did it. This is also how you can survive." "Oh, you're finding your platform unfair? You can look for another platform that's better." It's not exactly dismantling the power structures that are embedded in platform labor and that's why we say that it is an ambivalent kind of an assistance because it is important to the workers. On the other hand, their power is continually reinforced by these solidarities as well.
Do you see strategies such as stop work or collectively walking out of work?
Not for cloud work. But there has been important assertions in the context of on-demand service work. Unfortunately, the platforms have expressed threat of deactivating them and expressed that they wanted to individually deal with workers and not work with them as a collective. It allows them to influence and control more easily. That is part of the work that we're doing in Fairwork, trying to see whether local platforms would offer more dignified conditions for their workers. Given that they are locally rooted, hopefully, they understand the struggles of workers.
I wanted to see if you could compare the call center platform work with the conditions of precarity that you witness for foreign domestic workers and migrant workers. Are there threads that flow through?
Several studies have shown the mental and psychological impact towards call center workers and that is precisely what triggered us to study gig work. Because what we found was that people who are moving into cloud work were unhappy about migrant work. They imagine gig work as a solution to all those conditions. But gig work also presents a lot of precarity. There is labor seasonality; sometimes you have a lot of jobs, but sometimes you have no jobs at all. Sometimes you can be abused by the client. Sometimes the platforms charge too much fees. That relationship between the foreign client, often located in the Global North, and a Filipino worker, needs to be further unpacked because that can be an important lens for seeing a re-articulation of these colonial histories re-manifesting themselves.
In terms of decentering the whiteness of the literature on gig work and platform economy, one of the things that you're suggesting is that the sense of precarity that literature on platform economy articulates is nothing new in the Global South. It is a part of ongoing experiences of workers in the Global South, as a product of the extractive economies imposed by the Global North.
We drew from the work of Ronaldo Munck, an Argentinian sociologist who has argued that precisely. Although there is a tendency to confer an idea of newness, in the South this has been an "always" "already" condition. And we need to understand expressions of resistance and solidarity in the context of precarity as an "always" "already" condition. And where workers are seeing gig work as perhaps even a step up to these precarious conditions, even as it reinstates and reinforces layers of power that are already entrenched by neoliberalism.
So the ideas of democracy at this particular moment seem to be about the ability to challenge these totalitarian, authoritarian tendencies that we are seeing in the South. Perhaps, there are lessons to be learned from the South in terms of Southern democracy that could translate into the North, as the North too is struggling with these questions, isn't it?
The rich experiences of the South, our colonial history, and how that continues on with our present-day experiences, are so crucial in understanding the diverse possibilities of agency, resistance, solidarity and the capacity of communication to play a role in those articulations. Not just in ways that matter to us, but also in ways that perhaps can inform understandings in the North and the rest of the world as well.
What a lovely conversation.
Thank you for this opportunity to be in conversation.
Interventions from the Global South is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This series is sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University Qatar. Our producer is Sharlene Burgos. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Sleeping Ghost. For more information about this episode's host and guest, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check out the episode description. Thanks for listening!
