10/09/2026
We're delighted to invite everyone to the Consuelo Joaquin-Paz Annual Memorial Lecture of the UP Center for International Studies (UPCIS), which will be delivered this year exclusively onsite by our colleague from the German section, Dr. Frankie Cruz. The lecture will be held on Friday, 18 September 2026, at 10:00 AM in UPCIS Classroom C, Benton Hall, UP Diliman at 10:00 AM.
The lecture is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is advised: https://forms.gle/t3VdjjuTkvz8sTHy8
Titled "J/Aula: Digital Discourse in the Age of Tech Giants," Dr. Cruz's lecture will highlight the many ways in which written language has transformed through the relatively new and dynamic text type of the social media comment.
The Consuelo Joaquin-Paz Annual Memorial Lecture honors the memory of Dr. Consuelo Paz, the Grand Dame of Philippine Linguistics and founding director of the UP Center for International Studies, who passed away in September 2022.
The UP Center for International Studies invites you to the 2026 Consuelo Joaquin-Paz Memorial Lecture on Friday, 18 September 2026. This will be held at the UPCIS Classroom C, Benton hall, UP Diliman at 10:00am.
The lecture is in commemoration of the fourth death anniversary of Prof. Consuelo Joaquin-Paz on 15 September. Prof. "Connie" Paz is the founding director of the UPCIS and an accomplished academician in Philippine linguistics and cultural studies.
For this year's lecture, Asst. Prof. Dr. Frances Antoinette Cruz will deliver a lecture entitled, "J/Aula: Digital Discourse in the Age of Tech Giants."
At a time when modes of teaching and learning are increasingly being driven to online spaces due to extreme weather events, an appraisal of the form of digital texts is in order, particularly from the perspective of Dr. Consuelo J. Pazโ legacy of democratizing the Filipino language and promoting the study of language use in social interactions. In this lecture, the speaker highlights the many ways in which written language has transformed through the relatively new and dynamic text type of the social media comment, from formal features to its discursive status in relation to Hanโs (2017) psychopolitical critique. Drawing from the latter, the speaker critically examines the productive power of the psyche driven by algorithmic modes of circulation through what some have called data or digital colonialism, driven by large tech companiesโ revenue models. The role of social media platforms (such as Facebook and YouTube) in the Philippines as occasional stand-ins for the functions that a public sphere would otherwise fulfill, is one in which algorithms simultaneously act as gatekeepers and amplifiers, raising important questions of democratic access to knowledge, encounters with human โothersโ and the flattening of forms of discourse. Using data on religion and gender gathered from Philippine social media pages, the speaker demonstrates the potentials of an archive-based epistemological excavation (Oyewรนmรญ 1997; McShane 2021) and frames the findings in terms of potentials and limitations for organizing in spaces where algorithmic mechanisms are evident.
Dr. Frances Antoinette "Frankie" Cruz is an Assistant Professor at the Department of European Languages, College of Arts and Letters, University of the Philippines Diliman. She is also the Deputy Director for Research, Publication and Resource Collection of the UP Center for Women's and Gender Studies. Dr. Frankie holds a joint PhD in Literature and Linguistics and Political Science from the Universities of Antwerp and Ghent in Belgium.
The UPCIS 2026 CJP Memorial lecture is on-site only. It is free and open to the public. Registration starts at 9:00am.
๐ You may pre-register here: https://forms.gle/t3VdjjuTkvz8sTHy8
