[Music] uh uh president of uh pssp pambansan samahan filipino this year we are celebrating the 45th anniversary of pssp we are celebrating our organization's uh history um thinking about reflecting about the challenges that uh that we have um remembering our identity and thinking about our future and we are very happy at this moment to broadcast our first meeting with the division of philippines american of the asian american psychological association and today we have this meeting we are our panel are scattered all over the place um well we we brought gus here from the philippines we have our panel members from alaska california australia and australia and thailand so um without further ado i will introduce our panelists from the division of philippines american dofa beginning with the first uh chair of dofa one of the co-founders of dofa a professor from the department of psychology university of alaska anchorage author of theoretical and empirical works on racial or ethnic minority psychology such as brown skin white minds filipino american postcolonial psychology ladies and gentlemen let us welcome dr e.j.r david together with him in the panel the second chair of the dofa licensed counseling psychologist and tenured faculty member at the wright institute in berkeley california she serves uh as an editorial board of the asian american journal of psychology ladies and gentlemen gentleman dr alicia del prado welcome dr david dr alicia and uh finally for the dofa panel um another the third chair of dofa um licensed clinical psychologist who works as senior staff psychologist and licensed officer liaison to the lgbt research center for the university of california irvine counseling center dr christine katipon dr christine christine welcome to the panel so let's have the dovah panel hi everybody should i just go ahead and start yes yes please okay um uh good morning good afternoon wherever you might be joining us wherever part of the world you might be um my name is ej david i'm honored to be here with you all it has been a dream for a while now to have psychological filipino and filipino-american psychology come together um so this is really dope uh so maraming salamat pambansam samahan and sikhologyam filipino for inviting us to engage in this discussion by the way happy 45th year that's an amazing accomplishment congratulations so as you can see i am here to talk about the need for filipino-american psychology but before i do that as i always do before every presentation that i do i must first do some acknowledgments i want to acknowledge my ancestors i am kapampangan and i'm also a tagalog on my mother's side so that's who i i must acknowledge and you know that's who i come here with i also want to acknowledge my family i'm married to a ko yukon atabascan woman one of the indigenous groups here in alaska and together we have four children uh their names are malaccas and even though you don't see them here with me they are always with me i am a reflection of my family and i also want to acknowledge the lands that i am on now i am on the traditional lands of the dinaina people otherwise known as anchorage alaska it is here where i join you today and it is here where i currently live and work so i have about 10 minutes here with you and i just would like to to quickly share uh why we felt uh we needed a community really a family within american psychology actually it's it's uh you know even within uh asian american psychology um sheila can we go on to a slide two please uh here in the u.s when people think of asian americans people often think of east asians like chinese koreans or japanese even media outlets who claim you know whose mission is to focus on asian americans they reflect this east asian bias so for example as you can see in this slide i did a content analysis of you know like a major website that focuses on asian americans a magazine that focuses on asian americans a very influential paper in a very major city and then a large uh a media company that you know also focuses on asian americans and as you can see in this graph um the content uh for all four of these media outlets extend higher than the red line the red line is the the percentage of east of the asian american groups um you know the percentage that they compose of the asian american population so that's the red line is you can see the content for all of these four media outlets surpass that red line for chinese koreans and japanese you know suggesting that stories about east asians are disproportionately over represented given their population size however the opposite is true for uh you know what we call over here uh in the united states as brown asians uh indians or south asians filipinos um and vietnamese you know and as you can see right here uh you know brown asians are disproportionately underrepresented uh consistently across the board um and so you know this is an example of how you know there is an east asian bias whenever we talk about asian americans another example uh sheila can you go on to the next slide too another example is a recent documentary by pbs in the year 2020 so very recently it received a lot of funding and a lot of attention and there is also an intentional attempt from the producers you know from everybody involved in the in the documentary um to be more inclusive of you know asian american groups to try to address this east asian bias and so i also did a content analysis of this and despite these attempts right to get rid of the bias the product still ended up showing east asian bias as you can see in this graph um where you know like very little uh was very little time was devoted to filipinos and also south asians right and and this forgetting of filipino americans isn't new um sheila can we go on to the next slide please um you know fred cordova and dorothy cordova who founded the filipino american national historical society here in the united states notice this you know way back in 1980 in the 1980s right and when they published this this book in the title of the book is filipinos forgotten asian americans um i think we're on that slide now yeah um but again this forgetting of filipino americans go even further back you know than 1980 it goes back to 1970 you know when the whole asian american movement was beginning filipinos already noticed that they were being forgotten even within the asian-american umbrella so sheila um can we go to the next slide please so here you we see that filipinos back then and this is documented in joanne rendelia's book uh pacific diaspora they talked about how uh filipinos felt marginalized and forgotten even within the asian-american umbrella and so they felt like they had to create the brown asian caucus right this this whole concept of brown asian was started in 1970 um and then more recently uh our dear friend um also uh you know a prominent filipino american psychologist dr kevin nadal uh talked about the brown asian movement also because this issue is still happening today right so being understudied being underserved uh being invisibilized or forgotten um also extend to american psychology so it's not just you know america in general but american psychology in particular so if we go to the next slide sheila um here's a tally of psychological literature about some of the bigger asian ethnic groups in the u.s and again this is only up to the year 2010 um but as you can see uh you know the the orange bars there is our percentage of the asian american population and the blue bars represent um the percentage of asian-american psychology literature about those ethnic groups and as you can see oh can we go back can we go back to the to the graph to slide six sorry um and then uh yeah and as you can see right there um you know again filipino americans even though we represent about 20 of the asian american population only about two percent of asian american psychology literature is focused on filipino americans right and you know and that was my experience uh when when i started studying psychology here in the united states um there were very few filipinos specific literature that i could find filipino-american-specific literature that i could find you know there were some pioneers the works of pink seraphica assunchon you know maria root especially maria roots linda revelia lenny strobel of course judy pataxial patricia harris you know but many of them are working as clinicians and they were not necessarily producing you know a whole lot of literature i found whatever the the work that they were producing though very helpful uh for my own development and then i found the asian american psychological association but even within that organization there were very few uh filipinos in it you know there was alvin alvarez um and then kevin uh was kevin nadal was a graduate grad student just like i was back then right and so then eventually around 2010 um the few of us who were parts of the asian american psychological association we decided that it was time to to create our own division um so sheila can we go to the next slide now um so you know we were tired of being forgotten we were tired of of feeling lonely even within the asian american community even within asian american psychology we felt like there was so much about the filipino-american experience that can inform many of the important issues facing our country and really facing the world like immigration racism colonialism um indigeneity you know and the lack of attention on the filipino-american experience you know really was like a disservice to the world community because uh you know whatever solutions or answers we come up with for these issues is going to be incomplete and ineffective without the filipino perspective uh you know so filipinos must be part of the national or global conversations about these issues um given our experiences right and so then our you know the filipino perspectives need to be part of our solutions for these issues and so you know that really contributed to why we uh created the division on filipino americans dofa in 2010. you can see here an email kevin and i were looking through old emails and it really just started you know with an email for you know between a few group of uh a few people and yeah we just ran with it and we've come a long way since then uh you know there has been a steady growth uh in filipino-american psych literature dr kevin nadal published uh the first book on filipino american psychology and you know and then i published brown skin white minds um we've had conferences and and alicia is going to talk about those um we are now currently working on a special issue on filipino american psychology within the asian american journal of psychology so that's the first special issue on filipino american psychology ever so we've come a long way in our brief 10-year history however there's a lot more work uh to be done so um can you go to the next slide there sheila please um so as you can see as of today i just did this this analysis today um you know phil and psychology literature still compose a disproportionately low percentage of the total asian american psychological literature um you know and then you know so i did this today my friend dr nadal also did a quick comparison of articles on chinese versus filipinos and some of the more well-known journals publishing ethnic minority research so if you go to the next slide there you will see huge discrepancies between you know chinese focused research and filipino-focused research right so we need more people to focus their work on the filipino-american community there are still so many unanswered questions and unaddressed issues facing our community so yeah we need you we need more people that's it that's my piece thank you all so much for listening thank you very much ej um i think uh we learned many things about dofa uh especially not about not only about especially the need for a special organization for filipino americans in the u.s um and maybe at this point we can move uh to our next panelists so we can have more time for our audience to communicate their questions we now have alicia alicia hello so excited to be here it's such an honor and i really would like to start off in a similar way as ej and acknowledge just a few of the people that have brought me to this moment first i want to just acknowledge my grandparents my dad's parents my lola and lolo mercedes and manuel del prado who both passed away the last couple years and i just kind of want to dedicate my my section tonight to them because really my identity as a multi-racial woman who was born and raised in the san francisco bay area the reason i connect so much with my filipina identity really has to do with the role that my grandparents played in raising me with my dad and my mom um so i want to kind of give a shout out to them um and you know i actually have only been to the philippines two times the first time when i was 16 years old and my grandmother took me and then in my late 20s when i went with my now husband to meet his parents in the philippines and that's another reason why filipino american psychology is so important to me because of my family my husband being a filipino man and also my two young boys that are multiracial filipino little kiddos and i really care personally and of course professionally about helping and advancing um the psychological health and needs of our community so so wonderful to be able to think about the philippines diaspora um today um in my first slide i just kind of put some highlights out there of what i'll be talking about um as ej gave a nice preview i'm going to talk about the dofa conferences um that email that ej showed was awesome amazing kind of seeing that there were about i think eight eight people on there and to kind of see how first there were the co-founders that said you know what we need our own division in the asian american psychology association to really represent filipino americans both for ourselves as filipino and filipino-american psychologists counselors therapists researchers um and then also for the public um and so that those are kind of our two primary goals well one of the things we thought that would help advance that was to have a conference and so i'm gonna share some pictures in a little bit on the conferences um here's the first one so it was i'm proud to say that the first dofa conference uh was in berkeley california at my home institution the wright institute and this was in 2016 and i i think that only in a philippine x filipino american uh filipino conference could you get everybody to actually cooperate to uh take a picture um so that was all of us and it was a sold out event we didn't know who would come if there'd be 10 people or or what but it was a sold out event and always a really positive memory of presenting um psychological topics and learning from each other and really honestly this kind of instant kind of family connection um the next photo is for the second dofa conference this is not everybody that attended but it is kind of a a favorite photo of mine because you can see in the background was from one of the presenters i believe um or keynotes where it said you can make a difference so when we come together every two years we are learning about the research and theory that's out there that's current um but we're also really advancing our communities through this empowerment and this connection that we all have together and so uh the next conference was in 2020 um pre uh pandemic it happened in in january which honestly feels like a whole another lifetime ago for me but it was this year and it happened in uh san diego and uh i had to put one of our members uh the picture this was the first time we had our own lachon at the conference and it was a major highlight and so you know again this kind of idea of community as well as a scholarship and clinical service so when we think to the future you know one of the goals of this shared panelist that's happening across different countries is how do we collaborate how do we learn from each other and keep this going um and so i'd like to to put out there that the next dopa conference will be in 2022 we don't know where yet um we've floated hawaii philippines alaska um but i think generally marked your calendars and you know who knows maybe we can have a joint uh conferences as well and i love this visual that i pulled um i think from dr nadal's um email or facebook where you you see the growth of in 2011 you see dr chronister with kevin and ej and then in 2014 the next image is when we decided to have our own conference that was at the aapa um convention um and then 2016 2018 2020 we will we will continue to grow um we want to but we have to it's fundamental we've really learned that while the field of psychology has so much to offer us it will not recognize us or do the work just to be nice we have to be the ones to step in and research our own communities okay so the next thing i'd like to focus on is accurate measurement in psychology um so for my dissertation i developed with dr tim church an enculturation scale for filipino americans so the constructs of acculturation racial and ethnic identity are my core areas in in terms of research and this concept um i think shows the importance of accurate measurement because yes we need more research just as ej's amazing graphs pointed out and we are being underrepresented then when we do the research to make that research accurate and valid and generalizable we need that accurate measurement and as we know that's a very common flaw in method methodology and so for the end culturation scale this came from seeing that the enculturation and acculturation scales that existed for asian americans really didn't represent um the uniqueness of the filipino-american experience and so uh with enculturation in this particular scale there's three sub skills connection with homeland interpersonal norms and conservatism and what i'd like to pose to the audience today is you know is this topic which we have found to be relevant for immigrants first generation folks 1.5 generation um as well as second generation third generation etc so i will use myself as a good example like i shared i didn't go to the philippines until i was a teenager yet this concept of how enculturated am i to my filipino ancestry is very relevant um and so we can measure that to see how it links to health outcomes attitudes towards help seeking which i think in you know i'm a little biased here but i think that's really interesting to think that um you know these cultural values transmit and and persist at varying levels across the generational level and depending on how you're learning about filipino culture okay um so this question of is this con so my question is is this construct relevant in the philippines does this matter um i think it does um because with globalization um with this kind of international communication we can do i think there i would conjecture that there are these varying degrees of inculturation even in the philippines um and then the question of the need for translated versions so you know if it is relevant uh i um have a scale that's only in english and so translating it accurately effectively not just linguistically but conceptually is something that is in need um and pos a possible collaboration and clearly there's many um filipino dialects and so you know thinking of thinking through those complexities is important too all right the other thing i want to focus on in the next slide um is hinting at the need for transformative research so for a long time at my uh university i taught research methods and a lot of the students that attend our program really are hungry for application and they're hungry for how does this relate clinically so of course there is a value of research and having that in form and at the same time the frustration that a lot of my students would have um would be okay but people are suffering now or how does this my health the client i'm seeing tomorrow um and so through that thinking through transformative research for example this idea of doing research that's helpful in and of itself so psychology has had a um at least western psychology in particular has had a really bad history of using participants in ways that don't help the participants and so with this new paradigm or newish paradigm and we can try to do good through the process of research and so the participants themselves might actually benefit from being part of the research study so i really love this approach to research um and in part probably because i'm also a practitioner and uh see clients in private practice um and the clinical concerns that i think are relevant for this approach include um attachment disruption so a lot of um filipino families are are familiar with the attachment between um caregivers and their children being disrupted having an interruption because of necessary economic reasons because of other reasons that family members are having to part geographically and while that might be in the best interest of the family unit or the larger unit there's also a cost um that is seen in the quality of the relationships uh if the relations if the families stay apart but also when they reunite um a lot of times it's not like these family members are just picking back up where they left off there's a lot of pain and grief and loss that comes from that and so i think this is a a concept that i'd love to see our joint organizations maybe put our kind of um heads together about how to to help our family members attune and keep that attachment to use to use the psychological language secure um so that we don't see the negative impacts that sometimes kind of hurt our families when disruption of the attachment bond happens especially early on um of course abuse all kinds physical sexual emotional um neglect um problematic gambling um so this is something seen sometimes in um our communities where it's going beyond recreation and it's more of an addiction uh toxic masculinity so the expectation of what a filipino man should be and how that might um hinder or hurt um this person's identity development and the kind of role model and father that they can be to their children and then the other issue i think is relevant um for researching is um colorism and so you know this idea that the lighter the skin the more beautiful the person and i've worked with clients that this has been very um painful for them to get that direct feedback from family members um and what that does to their self-esteem how they feel about their body um and how and their self-confidence as well so those are just uh some you know they're big constructs but i think there's a lot that we can look at and see how this impacts uh people in the philippines people in the united states as well as other countries um where yes we know um our filipino communities across the globe so i think i'll stop there my alarm went off during during my talk to remind me to to keep to my um minutes and so uh you know i think that while i have this slide i'm still comfortable pausing um because it's just further talking about this importance of not just research but advocacy and so how do we verbalize these constructs and and have constructive conversations um about all of them thank you so much thank you alicia um for sharing your conferences also the research questions that we can um work together and um yeah i i hope to hear hear more about it as our relationship progress okay um so at this point i will i will call christine now um yeah yeah hello yeah so it's your turn okay great thank you and thank you so much for having me it's a real honor to be able to speak to um my community both here in the us and as well as in the philippines and in australia in all of these wonderful places so as a clinical psychologist uh i have my own different takes so we've heard about the research we've heard about the research and direction that we want to go and i'm going to share a little bit about my own personal experiences with um with psychology of being a filipino american woman and share a little bit about some of the experiences in terms of identity development that i experience or hear from our young adults our college students um as well as talking about what dofa has meant to me personally so i'm gonna you know we've talked about having conversations about past present and future and i forgot to start my timer there um and uh so i thought i'd share a little bit about my past a little bit about the present um where i see filipino psychology um going as well as where i hope we can go with a shared future with our um with our cup of iron from the philippines so who am i to talk about this experience so just a little bit of background um i'm the eldest child of filipino immigrants my parents came from the philippines a few months came to the u.s a few months before martial law was instigated so i but for the grace of god could have been born in the philippines but um they wanted a better life for um for their family so we we came they came here and i was born here in los angeles in well the year is not important a long time ago and so i think there were a lot of pressures being the eldest child of an immigrant family and i started reading when i was three years old and so i think he got in everybody's head that oh i was gonna be a doctor and as i'm sharing my story i'm sure that a lot of this will resonate with people from the philippines as well as people who identify as filipino-american lots of pressure to be a doctor from both my nuclear and extended family all of whom are also in the los angeles area so um my childhood was filled with weekly birthday parties because our family was so huge that we were naturally celebrating something almost every week but some of the challenges i had in growing up you know were somewhat unique i think i was raised in carson california which is one of the cities in los angeles that's very heavily populated by filipinos but i was not taught the language i don't speak any tagalog my family speaks chappacano and tagalog but i didn't speak any of it because they really wanted us to be acculturated um into the u.s and not have any reason to not have the same opportunities as everyone else so the most of what i knew about my culture was from food and from my family but i think there was a lot of pressure to be successful um at a very young age to be smart and um but you know i'm naturally chubby and you know alicia was talking about the body shaming and the colorism and fortunately i experienced a lot of those things at a very young age and it led to a lot of low self-esteem problems because i felt my worth was based on a lot of things that i didn't think were important because i was i was singing and was playing piano and i was getting good grades and all of those things but for some reason my appearance um was focused on so it caused a lot of mental health concerns but i didn't know what it was i just thought something was wrong with me because there wasn't vocabulary or language around psychology or mental health at that time in the 70s so um so i carry a lot of this um with me through my life and it showed up a lot in college when i started experiencing different uh my friends you know there was a lot of filipinos in uc irvine as well and i started getting different experiences positive experiences of the philippines and all my grooming to be a doctor changed when i went to the philippines uh my last year of college because i got to go there as a medical surgical mission practitioner went all over the philippines were assisting in surgeries and yet that taught me i did not want to be a doctor and it also gave me great appreciation for you know filipinos and the values but it really did shift my perspective and make me you know question my life and what i was going to do so you know fast forward to a lot of different things this is actually my second career i was in pharmaceutical research for um the first 10 years out of college and then i decided to go to graduate school because i had this epiphany one night of wow i'm so unhappy with my life and i wish i could just help one little filipino girl not have to go through what i went through or feel about themselves as i felt about myself at that time and so that just became my motivation for wanting to be a psychologist so next slide sheila so the journey to being a filipino-american psychologist was also challenging because as a first-generation college student i didn't know much of what was out there when i decided to go to graduate school i was 10 years out of college and so i didn't know who to turn to i certainly couldn't talk too many people who had graduate degrees in psychology so during my program and you know i think this was echoed with ej and alicia too like there weren't a lot of filipinos and i didn't have any mentors i didn't have any role models um to look to i didn't know how to choose graduate schools i didn't know what was important to study and i felt very othered i felt very you know separate i had a few i had like two or three mixed heritage filipinos in my cohort but none of them embraced their filipino um heritage and most of them identified more on their caucasian side so that was hard to have somebody who understood my worldview and even when i was doing practicums and training with people i i just felt like am i doing something wrong because it like my world view was so different from most of my cohort who identified as part of the majority culture so it wasn't until 2014 when i heard about this thing called dofa that ej and kevin were starting and the only reason i joined dofa is because i'd heard of kevin who had written this book about filipino american psychology and i had purchased it maybe like a few months before and i was like oh i'm going to meet one i just want to meet one filipino psychologist and as the organization has grown there are as you can see from the pictures much more than um just the one so when i joined joffa in 2014 i started out as the mentorship coordinator because again there was this feeling of i just want to help people i i don't want people to you know go through the loneliness that i did and then i became dopa co-chair for the last four years until um until i stepped down a month ago because i was two years over my tenure but what i love about dofa is not only the research and the education and the workshops um you know just for this last uh this last conference we had so many we had like 40 to 50 submissions for workshops and we just weren't able to accommodate them all but it kept it kept growing because there was co-chair for the last two conferences it's like we started out with 30 for the first one and now we had 60 for this last one and i can't imagine um where the workshops and interest will go as we keep holding these spaces but more than anything i'm hearing from our participants and our members like how good it feels to have a community because for many of them they're like the only one like i i don't know where my the family is i don't know where you know my cup of tea are so if anything it just kind of gives us that validation that we're doing this work and it's important work and we can support one another too so i think that's one of the main takeaways that i get from jofa and it's presented a lot of opportunities for me to speak to the community speak at conferences and really a lot of it is coming from this inspiration of i know other people have this story and i want them to feel hurt and i want them to feel validated and speaking of validation we made the move at this last conference to change our name from the division on filipino americans to the division on philippine x americans and believe me this was not an easy choice i you know really the intention of it was coming from wanting to be more inclusive of you know our community those who may not identify with the gender binary um but it's really interesting and i'd love to you know process this more with um in our q a um because i'm understanding that there is a lot of feeling around the identification of philippine x um and so it's just how do we how do we navigate that and understanding it um for us we felt that the majority of the members um supported uh the inclusionary term filipinex and so that's what we've stuck with but i'm open to having more conversation about it in the q a in a little bit next slide sheila so one of the things that i wanted to share um is it feels very full circle to be working now at the counseling center um at my alma mater okay i put my how many years ago so now you all know how old i am probably but um i didn't go to the counseling center when i was at uc irvine i didn't know it existed i didn't know therapy existed and so i think representation really makes a difference and i would say half of my caseload is philip you know is filipinex identified because they know that they won't have to explain their worldview and why they're aunties cheesmies and why you know their relatives call them fat and all this kind of stuff it's kind of like an understood thing and what's really fascinating is that many of the issues that me and my friends experienced 25 years ago are still in a way happening now and i'd like to just highlight a few of those themes so one of them that i hear quite a bit in the counseling center is respecting your elders but not getting any respect back um colonial standards of beauty so alicia mentioned this like colorism a lot of body shaming and you know body shaming again was kind of like my impetus for wanting support and wanting to be understood um social conformity and peer pressure we hear this one a lot in terms of my students being compared to their cousins compared to other people didn't help that all my cousins were super skinny you know so there was like you know it was very easy to just go right there um the crab mentality it's so interesting i didn't know about crab mentality until uh kevin nadal's book but it's this idea that if you do if you're crabbing you don't have to put the lid on because once a crab tries to escape all the others down below will pull them down and i see this a lot with family members who are jealous of the student being more successful than them and so trying to denigrate them or pull them down you know as they're trying to work hard is something that i've seen a lot suicidal ideation due to fears of causing shame or letting parents down this idea of pursuing a degree that they're paying for but the student has no interest or is really struggling i can't tell you how many bio majors and nursing majors have come to me for therapy because they are despondent the fact that they're failing their classes but they can't change because this is what their parents want them to and i get that everybody is doing the best that they can but what's happening is we're not having these conversations that are really important to to address the mental health that comes with a lot of these concerns and then finally people exploring their identities around religion sexuality political beliefs gender identity and fears of not being accepted by the family so the family piece is such an important component in mental health and this is why we need to involve the families in in healing intergenerational trauma so sheila next slide so what i'm envisioning our shared future of looking like and turn off my timer here um so i i would like us um to start having conversations around acculturation and filipino values and how these impact identity development for phil ems in the us because they're not always applicable we have western values shoved in our faces and we're trying to balance um you know the old school values that our families are bringing in but also our own unique experience of being brown in this white dominant country talking about mental health and decreasing the stigma around mental health increasing communication and validation of feelings i think if more people said i'm sorry and i love you it would be such a game changer in terms of philippines mental health more research of course about how filipinos and philippines americans experience mental health in similar and different ways you know so maybe some of this resonates with my colleagues in the philippines and maybe it doesn't but how how is it so different then if that's the case then finally healing intergenerational trauma and stopping patterns of abuse and unhealthy behaviors i think a lot of what i experienced was part of this intergenerational trauma that had existed way before i was born and it is you know again with my intention to not let one little filipina girl feel like i did i feel like i've accomplished that with this um profession as well as having the support of my doe family and i don't think i would be here today in this space speaking to all of you if it wasn't for dofa so i'm really grateful to be here and thank you all for listening to my story thanks thank you very much christine um thank you for yeah sharing your story and for bringing up many um tensions uh experienced by filipino americans and perhaps many filipinos in the philippines could relate to some of these issues um and also for bringing up the tension in the philippine philippine next thing which we expect many questions later okay so at this point we will move to the next panel the pssp panel and um i am i am happy to say that um we have two organizations today that celebrate the filipino identity and experience we learned about the dofa and the filipino-american experience in the u.s now we move to the organization that started 45 years ago aiming to decolonize philippine psychology and based it on filipino experience friends we will begin with the president of the pssp um an associate professor from the department of psychology university of the philippines dilemma dr jose antonio r clemente our co-panelists from our co-panelists from mahidon university program manager of the forum for ethical review committees in the asian and western pacific region and a former secretary of pssp professor atoy navarro a founding member former president of pssp former associate professor and head of school of the school of social sciences at the university of new south wales australia an editor of handbook of sicologian filipino doctor rogelia papua and lastly our former pr another former president of pssp director of ognayanang pahinug the university volunteer service program of the university of the philippine system and professor from the department of psychology of university of the philippines dilemma dr grace aguilin okay um i'm just so excited to be here and to see all of you and uh thank you so much also to all who are watching us um on facebook uh thank you so um so let's just see are the slides ready i think we'll just have to wait through the slides a bit she looking to share okay um i guess while we're waiting for the slides i can i can begin the the intro okay um in preparing for this brief presentation i gravitated toward the idea of pssp celebrating its 45th birthday okay um so uh the title of this presentation actually is turning 45. um birthdays usually trigger a live review so that's something i tried to do on pssp's behalf as with my as with any review of our past present and future there's usually a lot of questioning and reflection so i might be offering more questions than answers today questions like the one that hopefully you're now seeing uh in the title is 45 still young for an organization any discipline or should pssp and sp start worrying about its legacy next slide please okay okay so while we're waiting for this slide let me start with sicologian pilipinas appeal i have been enamored with the field since my undergraduate days after taking a course on esp i am still hopeful and excited about this field which is why i'm still here the appeal of this psychology of for and by filipinos is that it was and still is a relatively novel solution to insert crisis here that has the potential to improve the quality of life of all filipinos it is a solution imperfect and incomplete but a solution nonetheless to crisis such as next slide please the indigenization crisis next slide please uh imposition of western or euro-american-centric psychology or the lack of representation in the literature as discussed earlier by ej next slide please and issues such as oppression and perpetuation of our colonial status next slide please however i often wonder if sp is all that if it's that cool if it's vision and mission are that sexy why does it seem like sp is still in the periphery why is it still not the mainstream way of doing psychology in the philippines why does it seem like s peace appeal a second why does it seem like sp's appeal is localized or centered on a few and third as pssp turns 45 has it matured is it experiencing generativity productivity like no other in a sense that it can now look after the younger generation of scholars and advocates or is it experiencing a stagnation crisis with time just simply passing it by next slide please some cases in point if we look at the commission in higher education's required courses for undergraduate programs in psychology cycling filipino is listed so yay but it is also an alternative to culture and psychology why does sv have to be an alternative and not the only and best option for undergraduate psychology students next slide please if we look at the breakdown by geographic location of pssp professional members this year note that the unprofessional members are excluded the number is small and mostly concentrated in the national capital region in luzon aren't we reaching our visayas and mindanao psychology siblings does the accusation that sp is really just sicologia and tagalog have merit next slide please and when we talk about sp is it just cap psychology uh usually in conversations about politics relationships current events with some of my friends from the academe who come from other disciplines so we'd usually do a round robin and then share their thoughts on the matter informed by their own expertise uh they would turn to me and sometimes joke oh musa so what what can you say what can say about the issue as a catch-all explanation for everything for anything next slide please perhaps one reason why i raised the earlier questions is because i'm projecting my own insecurities frustration anxieties and impatience with the field but then again if we're going to talk about legacy is it important for pssp and sp to be popular how many are needed to form a critical mass for us to say that we've made it are theory building and indigenous contributions the point of it all next slide please sp has always been described as not just a discipline being a movement is part of its dna sb scholars are somewhat expected to be social change agents as well similar to what alicia discussed earlier about transformative research sps appeal to me has always been that it aims to be relevant responsive to the times and hell-bent on improving the quality of life of all filipinos next slide please so perhaps the more legacy driven question should be has pssp and sb contributed to filipinos attainment of amazon buhari translated as the good life i offer a vision of what that good life looks like a life that is free from constraints so people are capable to pursue what they value or deem important next slide please focusing on this goal would perhaps provide pssp and sp some focus instead of worrying about being the mainstream the emphasis could be on the question mainstream for whom perhaps the metrics for success of an indigenous psychology is not solely about numbers but on impact and planning for and assessing pssp and sv's legacy could be based on their contributions in the four areas of activities by filipino psychologists namely research outreach advocacy practice and education the ideal scenario is for these four activities to contribute to a magandang buhay for filipinos next slide please so a quick look at pssp's website will give visitors a preview of the activities that pssp usually holds so look at activities that merit that their own tabs or links so i encircled them we have our core activity similar to dofa a yearly national conference which satisfies the research and education goals as with any other conference we offer linan an education focused activity which is a capacity building workshop for teachers teaching an undergraduate sb course we're trying to be an outlet for research written in filipino through the diwa e journal in the round table discussion of you and women in partnership with pssp is one example of our outreach or advocacy activity finally what i think is one of our strongest programs and partnerships would have to be the alliance of student organizations advocating for sv i think some of the member organizations are are here or watching so hello to the tatsu family um in 2019 around 40 student organizations were part of this alliance and we tried to strengthen our partnership with students through activities such as an introduction to sikhology and filipino in a student-led conference next slide please that quick glance of the website somehow reflects pssp's nature as an academic and professional organization perhaps our contribution has mainly been on developing sp as a discipline and when able developing a more ideological movement to professional available um what else do we need to do so pssp and sp are remembered as an organization in a discipline that have contributed to the attainment of a magenta i'm going to wrap this up now so next slide please okay so lastly a part of this reflection involves looking ahead and here i present short-term medium-term and long-term goals in the short-term plan the most urgent goal would be to survive the pandemic has upended all our plans and has made it extra difficult to keep afloat unfortunately the organization has to generate income at some point to allow us to keep doing what we're doing another way to survive possibly as a discipline is to remember perhaps through the production of an undergraduate sp textbook that can be adopted so teaching sv will be an easier decision for schools the medium-term goal is to cultivate partnerships with dofa for instance that's why this is so exciting and i do hope that the joint conference will be possible in the very near future so hello to 2022 that will be our election time by then the plan is also to take care of our current community we're not a big organization but that should allow us to focus on the needs of our of our members and ultimately i hope that sp and pssp continue to thrive in the in the near future as a long-term goal through culturally relevant and culturally sensitive research outreach practice and education toward a magandang buhay for all okay i hope i kept the time thank you very much and i look forward to the discussion of our co-panelists um atoy mamrodji and man grace now so before i turn you over to the panelists let me just quickly um set up what's going to happen so i will come in first and he will comment uh so i i asked all the panelists to talk a little bit about something though so i asked adam to talk about why is it important for us to care about the philippines americans in america and why do the philippines americans why should they care about filipinos here in the philippines now what is the importance of partnership and caring for each other despite our distance uh otto will be followed by mom and i asked mama raji to comment a bit about sp as a peripheral discipline if that is an accurate assessment and what she sees about the development of psychology and filipino in the academic community in the future and finally i asked members to talk a little bit about her suggestions on how we can strengthen the public advocacy public service component of pssp okay so that's it for me and i'll turn it over to andre okay so first i would like to make a minor correction although i lecture at mahedon university i'm currently based at thomas at university and apologies i will not i did not prepare any powerpoint presentation but i did prepare a written reaction for this forum so i was asked by dr ton clemente to give a reaction focusing on the importance of having filipinos in the philippines and philippines americans in the us care about each other's uh issues so as filipinos in the philippines why is it important for us to care about the issues facing philippines americans in the u.s and vice versa but before i share my views on this assigned reaction topic please allow me to contextualize first what i mean by filipino and how it relates to philippines american americans because as ton knows my background is history so i would like to contextualize it first based on our historical development as a nation as a people so while present-day filipinos uh come from various australian ethnolinguistic groups the name filipino as we all know was derived from isla's philippines in honor of king philip ii of spain during the spanish colonial period the term filipino was used for spaniards born in the archipelago it was the propagandist reformist lycocerrizal who appropriated the word filipino to refer to all inhabitants or all quote unquote natives of the archipelago archipelago so-called indios moros infield so the christians the morals or the muslims and the non-christian non-muslims or spaniards call them pagans the term filipino wasn't immediately accepted and used by most filipinos so maybe uh philippines can learn something from that experience up until the 1930s tagalog or tagalog people of the river because most filipino communities were founded and prospered in rivers and other water systems like pampanga cebu etc was preferred by the indigenous population after the establishment of the commonwealth of the philippines in 1935 filipinos gradually accepted and used the term filipino to refer to themselves so needless to say when we refer to the filipino term for filipino which is filipino uh with letter p we recognize filipinos from different different classes ethnicities religions gender sexualities generations so it's been said that the name filipino is treated as gender neutral filipino women and members of the lgbtqia plus community refer to themselves as filipino filipino women also refer to themselves as filipina or pilipina but they have no issues or qualms in referring uh to themselves as filipino so just recently the term philippine x was introduced initially applied only to those of filipino heritage in the diaspora used specifically or especially by the younger generations of the philippines american community but now it's also being applied to all filipinos within the philippines and in the diaspora but in reality philippines isn't used by most filipinos in the philippines it doesn't resonate with the filipinos in the philippines we'll probably if we use dr enriquez category we'll probably need to apply indigenization from without on philippine x but even then we don't know if it will be accepted or rejected by filipinos in the philippines it needs to be appropriated first by the filipinos from the grassroots from the ground and i don't see that happening anytime soon this brings me a related question how do filipinos view philippines americans and how do philippines americans view filipinos we obviously have not only a shared future but also a shared presence in the shared past but we also are very very different our histories might have converged at some points in space and time but they also diverge in countless ways while there are similar for example while there are similar authoritarian and extreme rightist challenges that we face in rodrigo duterte's philippines and donald trump's america there are also a lot of differences especially in terms of the everyday experiences everyday struggles of our peoples from the perspective of the filipinos in the philippines regarding our idea of shared future with philippines americans we may ask are philippines americans part of the filipinos intra indigenous dialogues or are they part of our inter-indigenous discourses when we say intra-indigenous we treat the philippines americans as part of us but when we say inter-indigenous you you look at philippines americas as uh someone outside of us so to to the filipino cerrille or self are philippines america's capua fellow or shell self or are they other or iba or both i've always believed that philippines americans are both kapwa and iba to the filipinos in the philippines and it's from being kapwa and iba that we derive our answers to the main question i earlier uh mentioned as posed by dr clemente why is it important to have filipinos in the philippines care about issues facing philippines americans in the u.s and vice versa because philippines americans are kapwa we share some aspects of our histories our cultures our languages our psychologists with philippines americans a lot of filipinos as shared by the final from dopa have philippines americans as family members relatives and friends and aside from that we have comparative as i mentioned we have comparative challenges in the face of authoritarian and extreme righteous governments of duterte and trump we are all exploited and gutted by global capitalist system that perpetuates anti-environment classes racist sexist and aegis uh structures in our societies so while there are differences and filipino-americans or philippines americans are also iba or other they're also our kappa our fellow human being when caring we don't limit ourselves to people we have direct or comparative connections to because we are makatao or humane or pro people all those who are different with us uh all those who are different from us all those who are iba in the end are all our cap we need to care about each other's issues because as filipinos and philippines philippines americans that aspire to live up to being makatao we practice or humane relations with fellow human beings by recognizing both our shared identities and our diverse identities and more importantly fighting for karanalan or dignity katarungan justice intellia and freedom for all as espoused by dr enriquez and maybe as elaborated by dr clemente fighting for amagandang buhay so thank you sir for reminding us the history of our identity where filipino came from and all that and also moving forward uh caring for the philippines philippines america and for philippines caring for filipinos here in the philippines [Music] mom good afternoon or good morning wherever you are and in australia we say g'day i was given the task of first i want to acknowledge the traditional owner of the land where i am now past and present the aboriginal people and second i would like to congratulate pssb and dolfa for organizing this napa aganda it is so wonderful to hear our three panelists from dofa and tonton and atoy and to be able to uh be here and join this important uh occasion can i can i just say that i have bragging rights because pssp is celebrating 45 years since its uh foundation or establishment and may i say that i was part of the first national conference on sicologian filipino so 45 years ago casa manago so that establishes me perhaps as the oldest in the panel of of this uh webinar and i'm happy to say that and being able to see how uh sikhology and filipino progress and being able to participate as well in promoting it internationally now um i'm meant to talk about the academic and scholarly uh development and link it to international development as well and i would like to take off from what the why are we still in the margin or periphery after 45 years but actually i beg to disagree we are not in the periphery we are not in the margin and i guess that it has something to do with how you define the margin and what you define as mainstream i had this experience about i think it was six or seven years ago when i went to new zealand to be a visiting researcher and everyone was so excited about having me there was this university where i went and they were so excited it's like you know they are welcoming a movie star or something i said what what have i done and it turned out that filipino psychology was very popular and still is like the idol of indigenous psychologists in new zealand and uh when we when we look at the other developments uh what what the dr david said earlier about an east asia bias in terms of international indigenous psychology there's also uh i mean in asian american psychology there is also such a bias internationally so mostly it's uh uh when they talk about indigenous psychology they acknowledge chinese and indian psychology even if the advance in filipino psychology is way way uh ahead it is not as recognized and but i can say that in recent years because of publication because our participation in international dialogue it is already gaining some stature so i bet to disagree that it is marginal or peripheral it has done a lot of advances thanks to in fact the present generation of indigenous psychologists in the philippines and a lot of the work that is being done by pssp uh you talk about the don mentioned curriculum which is very much important in terms of the academic development of indigenous psychology but i think that with its continuous training of teachers who can teach psychology and filipino or give an indigenous perspective in their teaching of psychology it is seeing a lot of prospects for the future and the reason why i want to also ask what is mainstream why do we worry so much about not taking our place not being in that position where we are considered mainstream let's face it it's a very diverse area and it also can hinge on some of the information or knowledge or expertise that people would have to give up and why would they give up it is something they they value that just as we value indigenous psychology or psychologist so i think that um in terms of getting ahead i i don't think we should try to always uh worry too much about getting the blessing of the of the majority as long as we continue here uh as long as we do the right thing and we know this is the relevant thing it is very important for us to just focus on our work i have a few points that in my experience i have seen to be very uh uh important in terms of moving this forward now we have uh mentioned conferences pssp has not missed the conference i think this would be the only year that it means a conference but it is being replaced by webinars like this one is the conferences that is very very important and second is the publication uh i have uh retired and uh but when i was uh after i retired an article came up but written by a very famous cross-cultural psychologist um spelling gloom and doom again about indigenous psychology i refuse to read that article because i don't want to be rattled because at that time i was editing a two-volume book the handbook of filipino psychology may i promote it two volumes and this is consisting of 100 articles of the important and relevant developments of in psychology and it's not just kapwa psychology it has shown developments in different areas even in the areas of health and clinical psychology in uh um among others so i would like to say that publication is very important so anytime someone would would try to downgrade the indigenous psychology or philippine x uh scholarship you can always show the the publication another thing is uh inclusivity uh hinted at this when he asked how inclusive has sp been in terms of regional development and so on the only question the only answer to that is let's keep doing it that's it let's keep doing it another thing also is mentoring which was mentioned by someone that we are able to mentor others uh in order to take up the challenge of developing indigenous psychology it's the only way and one other one other um uh idea i would like to share is the idea of cross-indigenization this has been promoted by enriquez and some of us in terms of the idea that eventually indigenous psychology's goal is to become known outside the philippines and i think that the inroads to to uh it being becoming uh being promoted in america is seeing its fruits in the inclusion of dofa here and the developments that they talk about and uh we may not be aware not only in new zealand but in indonesia malaysia and other places they look up to philippine indigenous psychology why do i say that sometimes we feel that it is not important to be known internationally we should focus just on the philippines but the reality is they go hand in hand some recognition from outside the philippines adds to our own recognition within the philippines so cross-indigenization is basically the concept of uh working together to find out whether the indigenous concepts we are we are working on have parallel or similarity with other indigenous psychology and even if they have differences the idea is that the cross the indigenous psychologists would come together and share and probably work collaboratively do some research together in order to come up with a more universal psychology than is what is done what is being offered or recognized at present which we all know is not universal at all so cross-indigenization will work academically in terms of that collaboration with other indigenous psychologists in other areas within the country itself cross-indigenization will come in the form of different regional psychologies working together in america it would simply mean different dolphin members working together as well um i think that because of time limit that's all i could share but one thing i want to say is that we need to be active also in debating or putting forward what we have known sometimes we are too modest in terms of what we have achieved it's time to be forward and claim our uh name in terms of our achievement in the area not not only nationally but internationally that's it 10 minutes there's my timer thank you for reminding reminding our accomplishment and putting back in our inner working memory uh the importance of acknowledging our own achievements at this point we will move to our next panelist dr grace yes uh i would like to thank pssp and ton specifically for the invitation to join the panel this morning and to congratulate him and pssp and dolfa for coming together for bringing these two panels together uh it's been said that in any crisis there is opportunity and i think one of the things that has positive things that has come out of the situation is um the opportunity to interact and meet one another online such as the first okay session that we're having uh this morning i've been asked to focus more on advocacy uh primarily because of my work okay in the volunteer uh service program of the university of the philippines and in the volunteering sector but allow me to comment first on some of the things that don mentioned a very comprehensive presentation inviting food for thought of course okay i'm picturing that but again what this brings us together in trying to look into topics that have been raised several years before okay so i'm my sharing is coming from my experience with sicoleen filipino i was fortunate to be a student of virgilio enriquez okay uh i came in a bit later than uh rogie so uh who's the founding daughter founding a member of pssp but it really was very um informative not only to have dr enriquez as teacher but as mentor and to see him as a person who really lived what he talked about uh when he discussed sicole young filipino in terms of advocacy i'm also coming from a work that i've done with uh the late la divina carino on volunteering and this has helped me shape okay volunteering in the philippines i'd like to thank my colleagues both at the voice network and of course the department of psychology of the college of social sciences and philosophy in demand for the opportunities to engage in conversations and activities one second so it's our 45th birthday as a developmental psychologist one would say what happens when one is 45 so that's usually seen as the start of middle adulthood or with life and what happens in midlife there's uh stress there are possibly doubts but it's also seen as a stage of life transitions many things can change so we talk about the transformative aspect of circulating filipino at 45 one looks back at what has happened and looks forward uh to seeing new things to come uh i'm 45 where the middle age which is 45 to 60. usually one is expected to be more actively involved in the civic life of one's community to be more socially responsible and i think that's uh pretty much where we are in the bambansan uh you know i think that the ssp has made inroads i will not repeat what uh raji has mentioned earlier and other panelists but we are i think in the stage where we have a lot of things to look back on and to be proud of these things that we have accomplished in the last 45 years uh also taking note of the comments the critiques that people have made against sp which is all part of growth and development one of the things that has been mentioned uh about the ssp about sp and which john mentioned is in his presentation is what is again sp 45 years later but we do ask ourselves at 45 who am i and what have i been and what do i want to be in the next so many years forward when you ask ourselves these questions or we ask about sp i think one of the things that has been mentioned is language so when people say hiriba and sp tagalog i remember always telling my classes in sp no matter where these classes are held okay but that's precisely the reason that we have these classes so that people are able to contribute their own perspectives coming from their their culture coming from the regions know where they grew up and the limitation as to language will persist only if people do not engage in conversations about this so i guess even to this date that is a topic that we should engage in there were bitter arguments in the past about what will happen if one publishes or speaks or writes in english what does that mean does that make one more or less of something and it's good to go back to that uh discussion not just so there is um argument but to see how we have managed also to address that uh situation another thing that has been um said of sp and i think we will uh remember now the first textbooks on cigarette filipino that published no sp we always think well i always think of it as that yellow book on filipino theory theory research method and practice or applications so let me talk about espn saying well there are developments in the area of teaching and we see the curriculum in higher education identifying sp as one of the two courses that one can look into i think that is already a fruit of uh the work that sp has done we also talked about research methodology and earlier dosa panel there was mention of the research methodologies that would be appropriate to use in the kinds of things that we are interrogating or wanting to explain and and understand and then separately there is the practice or into one slide that i saw practice uh and outreach uh as well um i understand and i support developments in this area but i'd also like to think that um if we talk about engaged scholarship all of these come together so that it can be difficult or even unnecessary to dichotomize to partial things out to compartmentalize and say that sp in this area is teaching in this area its focus is research and in this area its practice one example would be in teaching where we use service learning for instance where there is a lot of you might say um outreach as part of of learning and i think that secular filipino lends itself very much into teaching our students at the same time doing so by providing opportunities for service and learning about themselves and the communities that they engage with okay so let me um maybe into what i've been asked to do primarily and uh please just signal me if i'm bored i forgot to turn on my timer uh so the area that i'm uh i've been active with in the last so many years or decades has been in the volunteering sector and volunteering as some of you might know formal volunteering in in particular is celebrated in the philippines uh every december we have in the philippines what is called the national volunteer month okay by presidential proclamation number 55 series of 1998 so since 1998 the philippines has been celebrating national volunteer month in december and the work that we do in in volunteering not only in the university of the philippines uh through its online and final program but in the philippines through various volunteer organizations it shows the kind of contribution that we have to the international volunteering arena i recall decades back when the voluntary services overseas was just looking at international volunteering at that time so there was a lot of debate on you know whether uh filipino should volunteer abroad or uh should stay in the philippines and in those discussions i think what became very clear was that no filipinos serve anywhere and everywhere they're at okay there was also an appreciation for what was then called international volunteering and national volunteering and that bringing together people who had served in different parts of the world would contribute a better understanding of volunteering so what am i saying that it is important to recognize the work that is done in the philippines in the volunteering sector and by saying so i would like to think that this is really young filipino in action because this reminds us of what enriquez himself had said about ciculum filipino that sikulem filipino is a liberation and a liberating psychology and it is through volunteering understood as surveying that is uh inaudib i know that my two co-authors are here one is on the panel uh toy navarro and i just saw a comment from jayakat okay and so given that i think even articulating volunteering to be that is sickolean filipino in action and the many activities that uh we've done so if you look at the cycle and filipino as being liberating okay and a liberation psychology we look towards the empowerment of people the transformative uh nature of volunteering so that people are able to address their own issues to address concerns and for themselves to work in partnership with others to making a better life for everyone when you talk about volunteering i think one thing that has been very clear now in the last years is we no longer use the term beneficiary okay we talk about community partners because really development is something that is done in partnership it is not a unilateral activity okay and to me this resonates very much with the enriquez view of research where we do not talk about a research partners as subjects they are not subjects they are participants we work with them towards a common goal so again in this area i see that sickening filipino yes alive it is something that is really you know very clearly articulated in the way that we do our advocacy and from my particular perspective that i am speaking about today that would be uh volunteering so i think i've used up my time but i think that again cyclone filipino when we talk about teaching we talk about direct and indirect strategies and i think that cycle and filipino is taught in many different ways directly using direct and indirect uh strategies but one of the ways by which ciculum filipino is discovered is disseminate disseminated and appreciated by people is through the different formal in informal indirect ways that we share our knowledge and experience of securing filipino and in this particular instance it is alive and well in the volunteering sector so thank you very much especially for reminding everyone which is to bring about a positive change to engage especially in volunteering at this point see dr danny ochoa of university of the philippines diliman our secretary kalihim namkambasang samahan says filipino to read the questions of our audience and then we'll have our panelists to answer them thank you so much to our panelists for these wonderful perspectives and um telling us about the work of the both organizations so we have a couple of questions from our facebook feed i think we've been getting a lot mostly uh greetings and some uh positive comments but we do have uh these questions and one uh one um sorry i forgot to copy the name um how do you feel the words representation of filipinos in the media especially in international screens and you know so anyone from the panel please feel free to jump in and respond this is good for dopa and the pssp i volunteer for the question of philippine representation in the philippines how are filipinos represented i think and we have made some strides in uh representing different filipino identities but as we all know still like in history like in psychology there are still dominant i identities that are represented so basically tagalogs christians especially heterosexual those who identify as a heterosexual so so while we've made strides in being able to represent the different the diverse filipino identities there are still some dominant uh representations that we need to challenge we need to continuously challenge whether i think it's whether it's in the philippines or house are represented internationally you can see that thank you sir would anyone else like to uh jump in i i think i just want to echo uh what i've shared first of all i learned so much just listening to everybody by the way thank you um and my mom watches it all the time and you know one of the one of the things that i noticed a lot is that many of our so-called you know movie stars or celebrities and our beautiful people uh they tend to be you know as some of you already alluded to earlier you know light-skinned folks or mestizos um and then you know and then they're the ones who are often you know playing the the the top characters or the major roles right the beta and then the controversy or the dark-skinned people right and so to me like psychologically you know how does that affect um the filipino society in the filipino mattress um so yeah so i think we need we need to make dark skin cool um in international media thank you um yeah i also have something oh christine go ahead no well i was just gonna hop on not just the colorism but also all shapes and sizes and heights and and everything and um one of the things that i brought up with a lot of my students at the lgbt resource center at uc irvine is my my understanding like whenever i see tfc on at a filipino restaurant that i'm eating at you know if i'm watching a variety show those who are identified as lgbt are very flamboyant and very like um exhibiting the stereotype and yet um the the homophobia in the philippines is is quite rampant and so it's almost as if the representation is that of being laughed at her or being a joke and i'm also curious about that because i haven't seen a whole lot of positive representation for the lgbt community in filipino media i don't watch a whole lot of it but what i have seen um you know that that's been my observation of it as well go ahead alicia thank you alicia can i comment first on i think we we need to point out that it's not because they're flamboyant or effeminate that's the issue that's not the issue because we have a lot of plum boy and feminine gays in the philippines the issue is that when they are represented as one-dimensional so i think and they're limited to being comic relief so because we also have to recognize that you know flamboyant fm permanent gays exist in the philippines they have a lot of we have a lot of a lot of these types of gays in the philippines so the issue is not because they're feminine or flamboyant but because they're you said that much better than i did but that's exactly what i meant um i was thinking about the point of just under representation and and i could notice that because when we are watching television that is um us tv uh when there is a filipino identified person on the screen we get very excited in my house and we look up them up and we we google them and i think the fact that it is feels more like a rarity although there are more and more of us being represented on screen shows that it is not a common occurrence um and as we know it's so important for role models um for our youth and as well as our adults um the other thing i think we need to be really vigilant of is that representation that is one-dimensional um and a while ago i believe ej you know we collaborated on a piece that you initiated about a this group a show that was going to come out um that was about mail-order brides um and it was intended to be a comedy um and it was going to feature a filipina in in that um and you know ej i want to give you so much credit for for raising this issue i think i i think it was nbc i'm not not sure but a mainstream us network um and you know ej was really wonderful in pointing out the problems that with such minimal representation to have that be the representation for the filipino community um was was problematic on on multiple levels um so wanted to raise those points as well about where we need to grow okay thank you so much suddenly we have a flood of questions uh on facebook so i think we'll move on to those others um i will just choose among them i think uh so simon bries one of our co-faculty at ub asked how can psychology and filipino and philippines american psychology find renewed applications in our current social political contexts especially considering increasingly salient forms of oppression like racism social immobility soji based discrimination and democratic backsliding which sp aimed to be a protest against tough question i think we have a very quick answer uh for this one and maybe um greece can also chime in i i've always been interested in the role of values and beliefs in shaping people's behaviors and i think that's what that's one of the strengths of um filipino the way that we started talking about about values um what is interesting for me is that these things are often very difficult to change and very difficult to target so although we know that particular values and belief systems um do predict particular discriminatory behaviors uh i i think i'd like to explore more how we can utilize for instance their own families and parenting and friendships and communities and kind of you know changing values if that's even possible um especially in such a short span aspect i don't i hope that made sense but maybe um the other guy on this would like to chime in maybe just to say that the question seems to be very large but i don't think that there is just one answer i think we contribute to this in uh the different types of work that we do and for teachers in the different classes uh that they teach but i think it's important uh for us also to highlight diversity and inclusivity in the work that uh we do knowing that there are dif it is still a challenge i think in the philippines to be able to partner and to incorporate learning from our different ethnic communities in in the country i think that is one of the things that we can uh look into um i think in the daily conversations that we have and i imagine i'm not around advantages but i don't know now we also have digital online lunches i think people do that these days but i think in conversations just sharing the view that we have about filipinos and the work that we do not laughing at jokes that are insulting to filipinos i think that's one very practical way of addressing the concern that simon very interestingly has put up so very simple a little simple ways well as maybe the big researchers know that have been mentioned and looking at maybe coming up with programs intervention programs let's say from studies done on values that i found has mentioned can i add something uh i agree it's a very very big question and you can actually um all of us can participate from from different angles like in australia i find that the law is very important the law is very important so that you don't see that much radicalism or discrimination that is not being lambasted by media so as soon as someone says something that is uh you know slightly racist then that really comes up and you get the uh the society really condemns that so what that's one angle for us to be active in in uh in promoting or advocating for such law second is in terms of the group mentality of makikibaka i remember dr enrique said that one thing that he found in the portrayal of filipino values is that what is emphasized is that niceness and so on we forget that is as important and fighting for justice fighting the world for our freedom they are as important but they were not highlighted in the western portrayal of the filipino values i i remember that with the with what was happening in the philippines i asked my friends i said what is happening to the filipino people when we revolted against marcos several times ago several years ago we went to edsa not being afraid for our life i remember my mother-in-law saying why are you going don't you worry about your children and i remember saying that it is for our children that we are going there and and the reply i got from my friend is that uh she said that even the left are split they are divided in terms of their uh you know opinion of of the the political situation i don't want to name names but but i think that that is something that seems to be evolving and apparently there is something very different in the environment now that people are not able to call on that in that sense of justice and freedom but what i'm saying is we can attack it from different angles and uh that's one thing that seems to be a white elephant in the country in the philippines right now sorry if i uh passion issues with that be the best person to say that but i'm in uh coming from uh roger's comment and the rest uh again from my volunteering background and talk about the sustainability development goals and sdg 17 in particular is partnership for development and what it's saying is that we'll only achieve this 16 goals if we are active in partnership towards achieving those goals and i think that's true no for for us and so simon asks about uh addressing our social political context there are very intangible reasons i think you know that's for fear and anxiety and i guess one of the ways of addressing this is to have stronger partnerships within the philippines uh the ciculum filipino with the tatsulok with the philippine association the pep with uh maybe the mental health associations and you know everyone coming together and now knows this wonderful opportunity of partnering with dofa i think we have to come together so we have a stronger stand not just to you know to make us more um confident you know in bringing forward what might be tagged a certain color but again understanding why these things need to be said and after that how action needs to be taken so that transformation can occur so it's to me partnership is important it's imperative and i think we have a very good start today thank you thank you ma'am grace and i'm raji um does anyone from dofa want to respond to the question i'll just say briefly that our current you know political events um require us to be as supportive of um our community as possible and we do have the challenges that many families are being torn by political beliefs and so as psychologists trying to have be able to provide that space for people of all beliefs um has been a challenge you know when we want to you know when we're saying we're experiencing the same struggles as well so i think um it's a real honor and privilege to be able to hold space and and recognize that we are also working our own processes of how do we become activists and how do we promote uh mental health in the midst of um a situation right now where racism and um political activism like negative political activism is so rampant right now in our country as we're awaiting the results of our u.s election so and i i'll add to that too that i think that psychology research has so much to offer for understanding how people are making their political decisions um four years ago i i was surprised to learn that filipino americans were the highest asian-american vote for trump um and and so you know this concept of how and why and you know in terms of enculturation the construct of conservatism is something that came up and this kind of belief in hierarchical values and also the importance of of religion particularly christianity and catholicism and how that is kind of possibly you know a research question is how is that playing into this decision making versus for some other filipino americans where maybe racial identity and ethnic identity is more central to their self-concept and is that influencing maybe another um the more more the democratic party that focuses more on racism so i think we can try to understand that more um in my opinion because i'd like to to for advocacy um and and fighting oppression um but but of course there's there's a role of um the objective science of looking at the the correlations hey thank you so much for that there there's so much work to do really for all of us um and so we'll have one last question uh and this is actually a combination of questions from deborah gale and that's a lock um so what advice would you give for early career psychologists and students who wish to be involved in furthering um clinical and also secondary and filipino work and research i would say find a mentor i wish i had one i wish i'd known about all of the organizations but you know if you didn't have a mentor be a mentor if you don't have one look around i mean there's some wonderful people on this panel and we can you know work together in creating connections so that's my biggest piece of advice to know that you're not alone in doing this work maybe uh first psychology students it's very important to study with and work with the distant franchise the marginalized uh the oppressed peoples in the philippines and if you're doing inter-indigenous studies also those in other countries so at least we are able to generate uh understanding from these types of strategies that will further our movement for social justice so not only in the philippines but in different countries of the world okay so if i may just okay roger go ahead now you go ahead i was just going to say that it's probably a shameless plug but i think uh joining pssp is a wonderful way of working with graduate students and psychologists and furthering work in whatever area of psychology we would like to specialize in uh to actively participate and there's a lot to be learned in organizing a conference because it helps us see what people think about uh things that probably we assume as understood the same by everyone else it gives us the opportunity to present our research papers our good practice papers and uh while that may sound time cheap i really do think that being a member of an organization uh even as an undergraduate student provides us wonderful opportunities of learning about psychology and also sharing what we do know at whatever stage we are in our lives in psychology that's it i just want to share that um i was an undergraduate student be when i started being involved in sicology and filipino and when i became a lecturer i started involving my own students in developing the first book the yellow book that grace mentioned it was with the help of the students so both for the teachers and students i would like to suggest that this continue following on also from what grace just mentioned the working together in terms of uh producing something tangible because the this then becomes a legacy this one becomes a model an example for other mentoring projects in the future so being close to your teachers and the teachers be having the students close to you in terms of uh getting their hands dirty redeveloping materials that we need just one more thing i i want to add when i was secretary of pssp we used to a decade ago so when i was going through the documents of our organization so i came across our first uh what international conference so in 1994 that was around the time when uh dr enriquez passed away so maybe it's important to rekindle that that connection that we had in 1994 that's more than two decades ago of course we have the annual uh kapwa conference uh international conference when we see philippines americans and filipinos uh exchange ideas share ideas but maybe looking forward so we we hope to have more of this and hopefully we are able to uh develop more theories methodologies and applications that are relevant for both philippines americans and philippines so maybe we can have the second or second international sp conference conference anyone else maybe from dofa just plugging dofa you can join dofa if you're in the u.s about that [Music] oh it's good you mentioned it so i was thinking is cross membership possible like dofa members also being members of dssp and vice versa is there something that we can work on around that because international organizations usually have like affiliate members international members i don't know if we'd like to see one another as affiliates or as full-fledged members but i thought it might be something that we can think about i think that's really i look i personally really like that idea because i think it sets up nice infrastructure and so it's a way to kind of establish and of course i think it would warrant you know town hall discussion and you know make it be ground up if that's what our membership wants but it sounds like such a nice idea to make this a lasting um relationship in a concrete way and i'm totally for the international um conference um and i also just want to add the inclusivity piece and i think that if there are students out there that don't feel connected yet to our organizations um don't let that stop you i think that you know that one way you can feel connected is by throwing out how to be more connected i mean the way dopa came out was because we weren't feeling as connected to aapa so we created our own division so i think that there can be subgroups as well um in that and i'll do a shout out to um one of my former students watching as well and they they created their own kapwa collective group of filipino-american graduate students and found their own group and it's not in competition with dofa it's just another way that they have developed their own group so yeah and i think that we can really maximize the the the use of technology the benefit of technology like this is the first webinar i have uh i have uh attended and last week i was just asked to be into a class in new zealand who is a which is about indigenous psychology i think that there's a lot of potential here and um i know i'm now in australia i'm i cannot be uh elsewhere but with the webinar i'm still able to contribute so i think that this is a very very good start and kudos to pssp and dofa yes so jay is also plugging the university of the philippines with a man have a graduate program with concentration in circulation filipinos for m a and phd so applications are ongoing okay it seems darren can't back get back in so i uh oh there he is okay there you go okay so thank you very much to our dear natalie and uh we are uh very happy to remember ex uh and uh think about our shared past shared present and shared future and we wish that our relationship dofa and the pssp continues to warm up as we move forward and maybe we can have um more projects in the nearest possible time so uh we can continue in embracing our common identity and the provide solution to our papua filipinos wherever they are um we also want to remind everyone to our dear audience who wish to get certificate you you can go to the pssp link where you can get the evaluation form for this webinar you fill them out and uh you'll get a certificate afterwards thank you very much everyone uh we had a very fantastic day thank you thank you oh say cheese cheese okay one two three okay okay thank you thank you thank you