Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo
Prof. Dr. Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo
SFG 4280
+49 (0)421-218-67610
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Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo is a sociocultural anthropologist, curator, and publicly engaged scholar. She is currently a substitute professor of public anthropology at the University of Bremen and formerly an interim professor and postdoc at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin's Institute for Asian and African Studies and curator at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Her interdisciplinary research and initiatives on social justice issues, resistance and solidarity, imagination and memory, and affect and healing are guided by critical, decolonial, indigenous, and feminist epistemologies and praxes. She also specializes on critical research ethics, alternative pedagogies, and community-engaged scholarship, as well as reaching broader publics through reflexive, multi-sensorial, multi-format, and research-based modes of learning.
She obtained her PhD in Anthropology with a summa cum laude distinction in 2017 from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies(BGSMCS), Freie Universität Berlin. Her dissertation “Being and Becoming: Imagination, Memory, and Violence in the Southern Philippines” provides ethnographic insights into the lives of Moros, specifically Maguindanaon adherents of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), who have lived through violence and the liminality of uncertain peace in the Cotabato region. She explores the workings of imagination in the formation of subjectivities and in the (un)making of the Bangsamoro imagined community, by giving attention to imagination’s links with memory, temporality, emotions, and action. Through this lens, she examines the dialectical relationship between the individual and the collective, Muslim-Christian relations, modes of belonging, aspirations, resistance, peace, and future-making, the co-implication of past, present, and future in people’s subjectivities and in an imagined community, as well as acts of exclusion and violence. Other threads that run through this project are processes of (mis)recognition, the emergence and traction of violent othering, ethical self-formation, the everyday work of living side-by-side in the aftermath of conflict, and the re-imagining of "the other" as an ethical being. Rosa has published and given public lectures on various aspects of this work, which she is currently transforming into a book.
Her doctoral research project was supervised by Prof. Dr. Hansjörg Dilger (Freie Universität Berlin), Prof. Dr. Vincent Houben (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin), and Dr. Richard Baxstrom (University of Edinburgh). She was awarded a German Research Foundation Excellence Initiative scholarship through the BGSMCS from 2011 to 2015.
Rosa is currently conducting research on arts of transnational solidarity and resistance amid Rodrigo Duterte's "war on drugs" as well as on diasporic solidarity during the pandemic. She is also continuing her work on the southern Philippines on the new political entity Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
She was born and raised in the Philippines where she finished her Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology (magna cum laude) and Masters in Anthropology (excellent GWA) at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She previously conducted research on the life world of compressor fishers, indigenous peoples’ rights, and gender-based barriers to access to healthcare and medicine in India and China, among others. She also does engaged research for NGOs and communities. Prior to moving to Berlin for her PhD studies, Rosa was a lecturer, instructor, and assistant professor in anthropology at the University of the Philippines Diliman and Manila campuses from 2005 to 2011.
She founded and curates the Philippine Studies Series Berlin, a platform for lectures, discussions, and art and film events regarding the Philippines, Filipina/o/x, and the diaspora. Rosa also conceptualises and manages the project Advancing Philippines Studies at HU Berlin. She furthermore co-established the Negotiating Research Ethics initiative at HU-IAAW with PD. Dr. Andrea Fleschenberg dos Ramos Pinéu and Dr. Sarah Holz, and is an associate investigator of the Berlin University Alliance-funded project Co2Libri - Conceptual Collaboration: Living Borderless Research Interaction. And together with Dr. Jonas Bens, Dr. Fabian Bernhardt, Dr. Débora Medeiros, and Dr. Verena Straub, she co-created and co-leads the "Affect and Colonialism Web Lab," winner of the Ideas Competition for International Research Marketing Prize of the German Research Foundation. It is based at and co-funded by the Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin.
Rosa is an inaugural editorial board member of Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies based at the University of California Davis, and a board member of the Philippine Studies Groupof the Association for Asian Studies.
- Peace and conflict studies
- Social justice
- Subjectivity
- Memory
- Imagination
- Healing
- Anthropology of emotions
- Anthropology of morality
- Anthropology of ethics
- Resistance
- Solidarity
- Temporality
- Transnationalism
- Anthropology of Islam
- Decoloniality
- Indigenous studies
- Feminist approaches
- Engaged scholarship
- Critical research ethics
- Philippines
- Southeast Asia
- Germany
Scholarly
- 2023. "The Bangsamoro as imagined future." In Emerging Perspectives in Philippine Studies: A Reader. Stephen Acabado, Clement Camposano, and Dada Docot, editors. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press. (book chapter)
- 2023. Critical research ethics as decolonial praxis. Debating section. International Quarterly of Asian Studies 54(1) https://doi.org/10.11588/iqas.2023.1.21746
- 2023. Castillo, Rosa Cordillera and Raffy Lerma. “Regime-made disaster in Metro Manila: Beyond an aesthetics reading of photographs of Duterte’s 'drug war'.” In Beauty and Brutality: Manila and Its Global Discontents, Martin Manalansan IV, Robert G. Diaz, and Rolando B. Tolentino, editors. Pennsylvania: Temple University Press (book chapter)
- 2022. Fleschenberg, Andrea and Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo. "Negotiating Research Ethics in Volatile Contexts." International Quarterly of Asian Studies, 53(4): 495-503.
- 2022. Special Issue editor (with Andrea Fleschenberg, Abida Bano, and Sarah Holz), "Negotiating Research Ethics in Volatile Contexts." International Quarterly of Asian Studies, 53(4). (journal double special issue)
- 2022. Castillo, Rosa Cordillera and Hansjörg Dilger. Ethics as embodied practice: reflexivity, dialogue, and collaboration – Rosa Castillo in conversation with Hansjörg Dilger. International Quarterly of Asian Studies, 53(4): 505-518. (interview piece in journal)
- 2022. Castillo, Rosa Cordillera, Kay Abaño, Bui Kim Dinh, Henry Tan, Ferdiansyah Thajib, and Clod Yambao. "Southeast Asian Artists and Academics Unsettling Borders, Power, and Authority Through Collaborative Works." In Local Responses to Global Challenges in Southeast Asia - A Transregional Studies Reader, Claudia Derichs, Andrea Fleschenberg, Sumrin Kalia, and Lina Knorr, editors. World Scientific Press. (book chapter)
- 2022. Yambao, Clod Marlan Krister, Sarah, Wright, Noah Theriault, and Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo. “I am the land and I am their witness”: placemaking amid displacement among Lumads in the Philippines. Critical Asian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14672715.2022.2059771
- 2022. "The past, present, and future entangled: Memory-work as decolonial praxis." In The Decolonial Enactments of Community Psychology, Shose Kessi, Shahnaaz Suffla, and Mohammed Seedat, editors. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International. (book chapter)
- 2021. "When Facebook is the Internet: A halfie anthropologist grapples with evolving social media connectivity." Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology, 65(1): 143-150. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2020.650110 (article in journal)
- 2021. "A politics and ethics of viewing photographs of Duterte's 'drug war:' Towards reconceptualizing the political community," Akda: Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, and Performance, 1(2): 54-70. https://www.dlsu.edu.ph/research/publishing-house/journals/akda/articles/a-politics-and-ethics-of-viewing-photographs-of-dutertes-drug-war-towards-reconceptualizing-the-political-community/ (article in journal)
- November 2020. “Being young and Muslim in the Philippines: Changing the present, shaping the future.” In Rethinking Filipino Millennials: Alternative Perspectives on a Misunderstood Generation, Jayeel Cornelio, editor. Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House. (book chapter)
- 2018. “Unpacking 'youth' and 'religiosity' in J. Cornelio's Being Catholic.” Journal of World Christianity, Vol. 8, No. 2. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jworlchri.8.2.0165?seq=1 (article in journal)
- 2018. "Subverting 'formalised' ethics through mainstreaming critical research ethics and a responsive review process." Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 26:3. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1469-8676.12526 (article in journal)
- 2017. Being and Becoming: Imagination, Memory, and Violence in the Southern Philippines [dissertation on microfilm]. [Berlin]: Freie Universität Berlin. 377 p.
- 2015. "The emotional, political, and analytical labor of engaged anthropology amidst violent political conflict." Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, Vol. 34(1). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01459740.2014.960564 (article in journal)
- 2014. “Perspectives on truth, justice, reparation, and reconciliation in Central Mindanao.” In Dealing with the Past in Mindanao: Perspectives and Entry Points for Transitional Justice, Domes, M. and Jaeger, D., editors. Davao City: ForumZFD.
Online - https://www.forumzfd.de/en/publikation/moving-beyond-towards-transitional-justice-bangsamoro-peace-process (book chapter) - 2014. Alvarez-Castillo, Fatima and Rosa Cordillera Castillo. "Gender-based Barriers to Access to Health Care and Medicine: The Case of India and China." In The Living Tree: Traditional Medicine and Public Health in China and India, Chaturvedi, S., Ladikas, M. and Guo, L., editors. New Delhi: The Academic Foundation and Research and Information System for Developing Countries. http://academicfoundation.org/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=173 (book chapter)
- 2011. "When fishing is no longer viable: Environmental change, unfair market relations and livelihood in a small fishing community in the Philippines." COMCAD Arbeitspapiere – Working Paper, No. 105, 2011. Online - https://www.unibielefeld.de/tdrc/ag_comcad/downloads/workingpaper_105_castillo.pdf (working paper)
- 2009. Alvarez-Castillo, Fatima, Julie Marianne Lucas and Rosa Cordillera Castillo. “Gender and vulnerable populations in benefit sharing: an exploration of conceptual and contextual points.” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 18:130-137. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=4429852 (article in journal)
- 2009. Castillo, Rosa Cordillera and Fatima Alvarez-Castillo. “The law is not enough: free and prior informed consent issues raised by the mining of Philippine indigenous peoples’ lands; with insights from the San-hoodia case.” In Indigenous Peoples, Consent and Benefit Sharing: Lessons from the San-Hoodia Case, Wynberg R, Vermeylen S, Chennels R. eds. South Africa: Springer. Pp. 271-284. http://www.springer.com/de/book/9789048131228?wt_mc=ThirdParty.SpringerLink.3.EPR653.About_eBook (book chapter)
- 2008. “The Tasaday twenty four years after: Insights on ethnicity and the rights framework.” AghamTao Journal (journal of the Anthropological Association of the Philippines), Vol. 17:75-83. (article in journal)
- 2006. with Erika Rey, "Social capital, morality and the politics of urbanidad: The case of sidewalk clearing operations in an urban space." AghamTao Journal (journal of the Anthropological Association of the Philippines), Vol. 15. (article in journal)
Professional
- 2020. Stories and Voices from Southeast Asia: EuroSEAS 2019 Film Program. HU-IAAW Newsletter, Issue #6.
- 2019. Mediated Politics and the Populist Political Style: Introduction to the Focus Section (guest editor). IAAW Newsletter, Issue #5.
- 2018. “The Mamasapano clash, memories of violence, and the politics of Muslim belonging in the Philippines.” New Mandala, hosted by the Australian National University’s (ANU) Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs.
- Online: http://www.newmandala.org/mamasapano-memories-muslim-belonging-philippines/
- 2011. Gender-Based Inequities in Access to Medicines: The Case of India and China (with co-author Fatima Alvarez-Castillo), submitted to Innova-P2 Project, University of Central Lancashire. (research report)
- 2009. Automated Election System Policy Study(with co-author Center for People's Empowerment and Governance), submitted to the Dean’s Office, College of Law, University of the Philippines Diliman. (policy report)
- 2008. Protecting the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Research – Ati and Tagbanua Case Studies, submitted to the Commission on Higher Education of the Government of the Republic of the Philippines. (research report)
- 2006. Ethnography of Indigenous Molbog Communities in Bataraza and Balabac, Palawan, Philippines (with co-author Portia Villarante), submitted to SAMBILOG and Palawan NGO Network Inc. (research report)
News
- 2019. "Bangsamoro hopes." Rappler. https://www.rappler.com/views/imho/221291-bangsamoro-plebiscite-hopes
- 2015. "Who do we condemn? Whose lives matter?" Rappler. http://www.rappler.com/views/imho/83885-mamasapano-lives-matter