Panel Session 5
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Beyond Survival: Negotiating Agency, Reciprocity, and Narrative Repair in the Contemporary Philippines
Moderator
Dr. Melissa Q. Navarra
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology
April 23, 2026 (Thursday)
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
LH 404 Dean's Conference Room
This panel interrogates the dialectic between structural "shocks" and the mobilization of Filipino agency across diverse, often precarious, social landscapes. By centering the lived experiences of healthcare workers, freelance media professionals, resettled micro-entrepreneurs, and survivors of institutional abuse, the session explores how individuals move beyond mere "survival" to actively negotiate dignity, reciprocity, and repair.
The panel features four inquiries from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology (DSA) that bridge theoretical rigor with ethical inquiry:
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Institutional Navigation: An investigation into how post-pandemic healthcare workers utilize "strong structuration" to navigate systemic resource shortages and policy complexities in state-run hospitals.
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The Politics of Livelihood: An ethnographic look at freelance work through the lens of hanapbuhay, where workers traverse the boundary between zoē (bare survival) and bios (meaningful life).
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Social Capital & Reciprocity: An analysis of how microfinance borrowers in Southville 7 resettlement site leverage networks of awa (empathy) and informal reciprocity to sustain livelihoods against capital shocks.
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Narrative Repair: A sociological reflection on "narrative repair" among women survivors of childhood sexual abuse in schools, examining how storytelling reclaims moral agency after profound institutional betrayal.
Collectively, these papers contribute to "Charting the Future of Inquiry" by demonstrating how micro-level acts of meaning-making and resistance inform broader Philippine social science trends and ethical frontiers.
Buhay-Sangkalusugan: Triaging Social Structuration of Post-Pandemic Lived-Experiences of Healthcare Workers in a State-Run Sub-Metropolis Hospital
Arthur Tangara, Jr.
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Tagpuan Ateneo
This dissertation critically investigates the lived experiences of post COVID-19 healthcare workers (HCWs) in the Philippines, employing Strong Structuration Theory to foreground the interplay of human agency, power relations, and social structuration within hierarchical and complex health systems. Utilising hospital ethnography alongside descriptive phenomenology, the research centres on HCWs in a State-Run Sub-Metropolis Hospital. The study will critically examine how healthcare workers (HCWs) navigate institutional constraints, resource shortages, and systemic policy complexities, foregrounding both adaptive strategies and transformative responses to evolving socio-cultural expectations. These findings are expected to yield nuanced insights into the structural complications of healthcare work during and after the pandemic, providing empirically grounded recommendations for future pandemic preparedness and health-system reform within the Philippine socio-cultural context.
Hanapbuhay: Life-seeking and Self-Presentation in Philippine Freelance Work
Theresa Anne Nadine L. Rellamas, MA
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Hanapbuhay, a compound of the Filipino words hanap (to search) and buhay (life), names what the English translation “livelihood” cannot; that for freelance workers, the search for work is life itself. This paper argues that hanapbuhay functions as an ongoing negotiation between bare survival (zoē) and meaningful life (bios) and that this negotiation is made visible through how freelancers present themselves and their labor on social media. Drawing on Agamben’s (1998) distinction between zoē and bios Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical theory of self-presentation, the paper examines 170 publicly accessible posts across Facebook, Twitter/X, and TikTok through four dimensions: Configuration, Relations, Experiences, and Operative Logic, all developed inductively from the data.
The resulting analysis reveals that within one freelance field, two distinct market structures operate, and these produce different orientations: (a) freelance as trabaho (employment), where the freelancer’s posts are optimized for visibility and employability, and (b) freelance as hanapbuhay (livelihood), where posts are more affective, relational, and grounded in tiwala (trust). These orientations are not fixed identities but fluid tendencies that the same worker may inhabit across different posts, platforms, and periods of their working life. Further, the analysis reveals that this spectrum is structurally grounded in an occupational differentiation that divides freelance work in the Philippines between two different categories: platform-mediated workers who tend to present their work more towards the trabaho (employment) orientation, and field-based embodied workers whose posts cluster more towards the hanapbuhay (livelihood) orientation. This differentiation made visible by the word buhay (life) added to the hashtag,#buhayfreelance, suggesting that the Filipino freelance field is not homogenous but internally divided by two distinct market structures: platform-mediated and locally-networked, producing different operative logics, different relationships to trust, and different relationships with work.
Sustaining Livelihoods through Microfinance and Careful Navigation of Social Ties in a Community-Led Cooperative in Southville 7
Miguel Galvez
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
This research investigates the concept of social capital under the context of a cooperative and microfinance program launched to aid in sustaining the livelihoods of poor residents in Southville 7, an off-city resettlement site, in the Philippines. In addition, this paper explores the idea that microfinance programs are associated with an expansion in social capital and social networks among borrowers. The study design is a qualitative, cross-sectional inquiry among the primarily women borrowers in Southville 7 operating microenterprises in the locality. Findings reveal that the increase in social ties happens at the individual level through new cooperative ties and new business ties; the density of ties varies depending on membership tenure, community role and social mobility. Further, in order to ensure continuity and the sustaining of livelihoods, the cooperative and individual borrowers navigate their social network to ensure smooth relationships and informal exchanges of reciprocity within the community. The notion of awa or empathy permeate amongst the majority of the respondents at the cooperative and individual level of debt collecting. Finally, the microfinance program helps address shocks in capital flow and asset disruptions/loss, while kinship bonds remain to be primarily leveraged in the event of sickness or health-related shocks.
Narrating After Rupture: Embodied Violence and Narrative Repair among Women Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse in Schools
Karen Garcia
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Ateneo School of Government
Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) in schools constitutes a profound social rupture that destabilizes institutional care, embodied well-being, and survivors’ sense of belonging within the social world. Schools are institutionally imagined as sites of protection and mentorship, yet cases of abuse perpetrated by teachers expose how gendered power and hierarchical authority can transform these spaces into sites of harm. In the Philippine context, where patriarchal norms, institutional protectionism, and cultural expectations of silence intersect, such violations often remain obscured, leaving survivors to navigate the aftermath of abuse within social environments that may deny or minimize their experiences.
The discussion presents an exploratory sociological inquiry into how childhood sexual abuse by teachers can be understood as a rupture that reverberates across institutional, relational, and embodied dimensions of life. Drawing on feminist sociology, ethics of care, and narrative theory, the study conceptualizes abuse not only as a traumatic event but as an embodied disruption that reshapes survivors’ experiences of power, existence, and social embeddedness. In response to this rupture, survivor storytelling is examined as a potential form of narrative repair, through which individuals may reinterpret past experiences, reclaim moral agency, and renegotiate belonging within families, communities, and institutions.
Positioned at an early stage of research development, this paper outlines the conceptual framework and proposed narrative methodology for examining survivor accounts in the Philippine context. By situating healing within everyday practices of recognition, care, and storytelling, the study invites sociological reflection on how survivors work to reweave livable futures after institutional betrayal.