[Presentation] 41st UGAT Conference - Deciphering a non-meal

At the 41st UGAT Conference in the Visayas State University,  Baybay, Leyte, I presented a paper reflecting on the notion of 'pantawid-gutom', drawing from fieldwork among young people who use drugs and low-income urban communities. The abstract is as follows:

Pantawid-gutom’ literally means ‘to bridge hunger’ and refers to a range of food and non-food products and practices that allow people to survive in between what the cultural historian Doreen Fernandez calls “serious meals”. What makes a good ‘pantawid-gutom’, and what does its existence as a liminal category between ‘food' / ‘non-food’ or ‘serious' / ‘unserious meal' signify, particularly for the over 2 million Filipino families who experience hunger on a regular basis?

Drawing on my fieldwork in low-income urban communities in Luzon and from a review of the scholarly and popular literature, I use local conceptions of ‘pantawid-gutom’ - hitherto overlooked in the scholarship - as a starting point for exploring the lived reality of food insecurity in the country. The efficacy of ‘pantawid-gutom’, I argue, is both material and symbolic, providing temporary relief from the feeling of hunger - and allowing people to suspend their ideas of what is good to eat while maintaining the hope that their predicament itself is something that they can bridge. 

[Presentation] HSR2018, Liverpool - Lessons from qualitative research on NCDs

As part of the RESPOND project - a collaboration between UP Manila, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), as well as partner universities from Malaysia, I presented some of our initial fieldwork reflections at the HSR2018 - Fifth Global Symposium on Health Systems Research - in Liverpool on October 8-12, 2018.

One of the methodological insights I discussed had to do with the fact that for many of our informants, hypertension is viewed not as a chronic condition - but an acute one; it is not taken as seriously as other illnesses. This leads to problems of recall - people struggle to remember the illness course because they don't perceive HPN as an illness in the first place.

This is an ongoing study and we hope to publish our findings as soon as we're done with data gathering and analysis later this year.