This critical conversation, which took place in summer 2023, brings together three brilliant Filipina Canadian scholars, discussing the field of Filipina/x/o Canadian Studies!

Song featured in this podcast episode: K!MMORTAL stop business as usual

Conely de Leon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her current work focuses on the need to hold space for collective grief, collective care, and collective healing in migrant justice work. This work has led her to pursue further training and certification in trauma-informed care, and grief education. Recently, she co-founded the Pahinga Collective with Filipinx-identified graduate students, community organizers, and service providers representing migrant, queer, and feminist grassroots organizations in Tkaronto. The Pahinga Collective's hope is to contribute to more embodied understandings of rest as a form of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist resistance, and healing justice. 

Dani Magsumbol is currently completing her doctoral degree at the Department of Politics at York University. She was awarded a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS-D award for her research, which examines affective relationships of citizen/ships & nation/alisms and the political economy of emotions, with a focus on the Filipino labour diaspora in Canada.

Jann Tracee C. Ko Din (she/siya) is a graduate of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Master of Arts program in Immigration and Settlement Studies. Her research focuses on collecting and collectivizing critical Filipinx resources and making them more accessible to those in andoutside of academia. Alongside Dr. Conely de Leon, Jhona Binos, Jessica Loyola, Joelle Navarro, Mycah Panjaitan, and Mauriene Tolentino, Jann co-founded the Pahinga Collective. Their work builds upon emergent collective care praxes and contributes to radical, anti-oppressive, and embodied understandings of rest as a form of resistance, refusal, and healing justice. Jann is rooted in her responsibilities as the kin to peoples from the Philippine Islands; as an immigrant and racialized settler on Turtle Island; as the bunso of her family; and as a descendant of her ancestors.

CFSC celebrates a new publication from Dr. Rose Ann Gutierrez, Hazel Piñon and Trisha Valmocena.

Gutierrez, R. A. E., Piñon, H., & Valmocena, M. T. (2023).

Rose Ann Rico Eborda Gutierrez is an assistant professor at

This episode brings together Filipina/o/x trained in history talking through the importance of history, historians and the archive for a Critical Filipinx Studies.

Dr. Stef Lira received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Irvine in Latin American History where she completed her dissertation “Mercurial Masculinities: Indigenous and Chinese Laborers in the Early Modern Philippines.” Dr. Lira’s research focused on the impact of Spanish colonization on the Philippines, particularly the formation of racial and gendered ideologies within colonial labor sites. Her work traced the relationship between racial and gendered ideas and racist labor exploitation via local laws and punitive expulsion orders. She is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Long Beach City College. Outside of the college, Dr. Lira works with non-profits and grassroots Filipino organizations that work to protect the rights of working class Filipino communities in Southern California. She is the Education Officer for Gabriela South Bay, a Filipino women's organization that fights for the rights and welfare of Filipino women and families. Through her community work, she further grounds her pedagogical principles in her teachings: History is not made by great men, but by the efforts and struggles of everyday people.

Dr. Bernard James Remollino is a 1.5-generation undocumented Filipinx American from Manila. He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. History from UCLA in 2022 for his research on histories of Filipinx American popular culture, labor, and migration in the early 20th century. Dr. Remollino is an Associate Professor of Asian and Pacific American History at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, CA, where he mentors AAPI students as part of the college’s Empowering Positive Initiatives for Change (EPIC) program. He is also currently engaged in a book project examining transpacific interwar Filipinx popular cultures and their influence on U.S. politics, society, and empire from the 1910s to the 1950s. He is a Managing Editor and Senior Staff Writer for Mahalaya newspaper, a free monthly print news publication based in San Francisco sharing Filipinx American stories through solidarity journalism. Dr. Remollino lives in San Francisco and enjoys teaching Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, getting tattooed, and riding motorcycles in his spare time. 

Abby Gayle Reynoso Principe is a first-generation Filipina American born and raised in Vallejo, California. Abby received her AA-T in History from Napa Valley College and her BA in History from UC Davis with minors in Education and Asian American Studies. She is now an incoming PhD student in History at UC Riverside, with the desire to center her research around preserving kwentuhans (the art of storytelling), especially within the Filipino farm labor movement in the 1960s. Abby is a former lead intern for the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies from 2019 to early 2020. Her undergraduate research can be found under the Bulosan Center Working Paper series titled, “The World is Watching: the Meeting that Ended a Movement and Sparked a Revolution.”

 Since graduating from UC Davis, Principe is implementing kwentuhans, community, and her love for coffee to run Masaya Kapé, a coffee pop-up that celebrates these pillars instilled in her through the work of the Bulosan Center and Filipina/o/x Studies.

Today, you’ll hear a conversation between Dr. Amanda Solomon Amorao, Associate Professor at UC San Diego, Dr. Joy Sales at CSU Los Angeles and a founding member, Dr. Robyn Magalit Rodriguez. They reflect on a CFSC praxis and the impact their involvement has made on their personal, political and academic careers.

The audio is from a hybrid event we held with the UC Davis Bulosan Center in May of 2023 facilitated by Dr. Mike Viola, and myself, with the support of doctoral candidate Wayne Jopanda.

This moving and frank conversation between three amazing scholars dives into how life informs research and dissertating while Filipina/x.

Veronica B. Salcedo (she/siya) is a 5th year PhD

Jackie Colting-Stol

Katherine Nasol is a earned her doctorate degree at UC Davis in

Dr. Tracy Lachica Buenavista a Professor of Asian American Studies at Cal State Northridge and a core faculty member in the Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership. She also serves as the co-principal investigator for the CSUN DREAM Center, Asian American Studies Pathways Project, and Ethnic Studies Education Pathways Project; and is a member of the Project Rebound Community Advisory Committee. Professor Buenavista teaches courses on race and racism, immigration, and research methods, and in her research uses critical race theory to examine how education, immigration and carcerality shape the contemporary experiences of Filipino/a/x and other People of Color in the U.S. She is originally from the Bay Area, and loves to read, run, and jump rope.

Dr. Michael Castañeda is Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies in Fairhaven College at Western Washington University (WWU). He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently completing his book manuscript, No Separate Peace: Multiracial Struggles Against Racial Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest. This study examines the parallel and overlapping activist traditions and grassroots organizing practices of Filipino cannery workers in Alaska and Black construction workers in Seattle between the 1970s and the early 2000s. His teaching interests include critical/comparative ethnic studies, anti-racist social movements, histories of racial capitalism, Asian American/Native Pacific Studies, and the Black Radical Tradition.

Dr. Gina Velasco is an Assistant Professor in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Gettysburg College. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Dr. Velasco's research and teaching explores how gender and queer sexuality inform notions of nation, diaspora, and transnational belonging in a contemporary context of globalization. She is the author of Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalisms in the Filipina/o Diaspora (University of Illinois Press 2020).

On this episode, Drs. Mike Viola and Valerie Francisco-Menchavez talk with Dr. Iyko Day an Associate Professor of English and Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College and Faculty Member in the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. Her research focuses on Asian North American literature and visual culture; settler colonialism and racial capitalism; Marxist theory and queer of color critique. She is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke, 2016).

You can find her book here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/alien-capital

Dr. Steven Osuna is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach. As a professor, activist-intellectual, and mentor, Dr. Osuna teaches courses on immigration, critical criminology, social theory and his research are centered in a preferential option for the poor, social justice, and critical thinking. He is also a member of grassroots organizations that seek to make social change in the world to improve the conditions that many face such as the Human Rights Alliance for Child Refugees and Families (HRA), International Migrants Alliance (IMA) and the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP).

Music for this podcast was provided by Alan Dizon.