democracy discourse fellow
Katrina Stuart Santiago
Katrina Stuart Santiago is an essayist, cultural critic, opinion writer, and book author from Manila, with a decade of work in print and online. Her role as critic has fueled her activism, which cuts across issues of cultural labor, systemic dysfunctions, and institutional crises.
She is co-founder of the small press Everything’s Fine, and teacher of writing and criticism at the College of St. Benilde-School of Design and the Arts. In 2017, she published two books of cultural criticism with the Atene de Naga University Press entitled Romances: Variations on Love and Rebellions: Notes on Independence. A new edition of her book of creative non-fiction, Of Love and Other Lemons, was reprinted in 2020.
Country
Philippines
Categories
Community Engagement
Political Literacy
Her criticism fuels her activism, seeking practices that delve into systemic dysfunctions and institutional crises, and championing a lived feminism interested in questions of sisterhood given inequality and privilege. She founded People for Accountable Governance and Sustainable Action-PAGASAph in 2020 that seeks to provide the space for political action from younger civil society actors, and is the sole Filipina in the first 15-person cohort of the Feminist Journalist Project of the Association of Women’s Rights in Development. The core of all her work is built upon telling silenced stories and seeing through willful blindness.
She has been writing at katrinasantiago.com since 2008, and is @radikalchick online.
Sining Siyasat
Sining Siyasat seeks to gather artists and communities around a continuing conversation about nation, as a way to address political polarization in contemporary Philippines. Coming from a highly-divisive governance and an electoral campaign that lived off negativity and hate; and now living in a present of disinformation across all sides and massive polarization, this project seeks to work with a series of solidarity exercises that are bound to discussion and dialogue.
The task is two-fold. First is engagement in the form of productive and sustainable conversations that gathers actual data on the diverse notions about governance and leadership, democracy and freedom in the present, an opportunity for the disenfranchised sectors to speak beyond their perceived “voice” as represented by electoral outcomes. The second task is to use these conversations as the core of creative responses from artists of diverse persuasions, who might engage in two ways: as part of the team that goes to the communities for these conversations, and/or as individuals that will create from the data that these conversations surface.
The goal is simple: to reboot our ability to have conversations about nation that is not embroiled in polarized and divisive discourse, and is instead bound to points of solidarity based on our unities in the present. The form in which this dialogue might be had—creatively and artistically—is crucial to this exercise. A social anthropologist will be part of the team across all these conversations, facilitating open spaces for deeper discussions across these different echo chambers, and formulating strategies for continued and sustained engagements across these communities.
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