Southeast Asia Hub Plenary Panels

Panel 1: On gender and development: trajectories, challenges, and prospects

What is the state of advancing women’s rights in in the global south? How does conflict affect the gender and development programs in the region? With examples from the Philippines, these are the questions that the opening plenary of the IFJP Conference’s Southeast Asian hub will explore. The panel will also discuss the challenges practitioners experience in advancing gender-related programs. Finally, the panel offers the audience a space to reflect on the prospects of gender-related programs from the global south.

Panellists

Jinky B Bornales (WHWise: iBLEnDNICE 4 WomEn and Mindanao State University-Iligan)
Jinky is the Project Leader of the WHWise: iBLEnDNICE 4 WomEn. She leads the Gender and Development Center of MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology in Iligan City, Philippines, where she also served as the Vice-Chancellor for Research and Extension. She has produced a number of papers in international journals. She has actively pursued memberships in international consortiums with researchers in Germany, Japan and Portugal, resulting in student and faculty exchanges in universities abroad. She is instrumental in establishing two innovation facilities in the university, the Technology Business Incubator and FabLab.

Nery Ronatay (UN Women's Women Peace and Security)
Nery is the head of the UN Women's Women Peace and Security team in the Philippines. For two decades now, Nery has worked as a capacity builder, facilitator and program specialist in the Philippines, Malawi, Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar with grassroots communities, CSOs, and the United Nations thematically focusing on conflict transformation, HIV and AIDS, gender, and rights. Recently, he was the Peace and Development Officer of the UN Human Settlement Programme (UN Habitat) in Marawi City, Philippines as part of a team that helps rebuild the city after a devastating five-month siege by a radicalized ISIS-aligned group.

Hilton Joyo Aguja, PhD (Mindanao State University-Iligan)
Hilton is a Political Science professor at MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology in the Philippines. He chairs the University’s Technical Working Group for the Gender and Development (GAD) Focal Point System. He is a member of the Philippines’ National GAD Resource Pool, a group of experts that has significantly assisted the Philippine Commission on Women in providing GAD-related technical assistance to national government agencies and local government units. He has extensively lectured, researched and published on the GAD matters. He goes through life with a gender lens and infuses gender sensitivity in all facets of human interaction.

Panel 2: Transformative methodologies: the academe beyond knowledge production

What role does the academe play in helping address social issues? How does pure knowledge production evolve? This panel explores the experiences of scholars-practitioners on how their scholarships are geared towards addressing social issues. It highlights how transformative approaches in research pull us the way we create knowledge: that beyond knowledge production and theory testing, the academe has the role of proactively engaging with the community they study. The panel offers the audience a space to reflect on the research methodologies we employ and the research's utility in the society we work in. Panellists bring their experiences as scholars-practitioners working on youth and women inclusion, community engagement, and post-conflict reconstruction.

Catherine Roween Chico-Almaden
Catherine is currently the College President of the Northern Bukidnon State College. She earned an undergraduate degree in Bachelor of Science in Economics major in Development Economics, Master of Arts in Economics and PhD in Development Studies major in Economics and Public Policy. She has completed over 20 research projects funded by national and international organizations, implemented locally and internationally, in multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral groups. She has also produced several monographs and books and over 15 research articles published in international referred journals indexed in the ISI-World of Science and Scopus.

Lynrose Jane D Genon
Lynrose is currently a Faculty Member at the Department of English of Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology (MSU-IIT). She is also a member of the Executive Council of Young Women + Leaders for Peace-Philippines. Her work focuses on Youth Leadership, Education, and Peace.

Dr Nassef Manabilang Adiong
Nassef is the founder of Co-IRIS (International Relations and Islamic Studies Research Cohort), PHISO (Philippine International Studies Organization), and DSRN (Decolonial Studies Research Network). He works on interdisciplinary research between Islam and International Relations and explores research studies on various policy, legal and legislative topics about the Bangsamoro communities while he heads the Policy Research and Legal Services (PRLS) of the Bangsamoro Parliament in the Bangsamoro autonomous region in the Philippines.

Primitivo III Cabanes Ragandang
Prime is currently doing a PhD at the Australian National University, exploring the intergenerational intersect of memory and resilience in an ayóm-ayóm political order. Since 2017, he has served as an Assistant Professor at the Political Science Department of Mindanao State University-Iligan. In 2020, he co-founded Seeds for Mindanao’s Advocacy and Youth Leadership, a youth-led organisation supported by the UN Mission to ASEAN. In 2021, he published his article entitled, “What are they writing for? Peace research as an impermeable metropole,” highlighting his experiences as a practitioner-turned-scholar from the Philippines.