Reclaiming Story, Restoring Care at the Philippine Sociological Society Conference

The Philippine Sociological Society approved my abstract and then told me to explain myself better. They were right.

The society held its 2025 conference from 1 to 3 October at Ateneo de Davao University in Davao City. Davao is a city in southern Mindanao. The theme was “The Sociology of Crisis and Care: Navigating Tensions, Charting Alternatives.”

My paper ran in Panel 7, under serial PNL-PSS-2025-074. It was called “Reclaiming Story, Restoring Care: Filipino Storytellers and the Comparative Crisis of Cultural Representation in Southeast Asia.”

Two other papers shared that Philippine Sociological Society panel. First, Maria Anjelica C. Wong wrote on climate migration and environmental care in Iloilo City. Then Paola Louise Rico wrote on comedic portrayals of Filipina migrant nurses on TikTok.

The note that made the paper better

The scientific committee approved the abstract in July 2025. But it attached a comment. The abstract needed a short, plain definition of the Culturally Intelligent Storytelling Framework, for readers who did not already know it.

That kind of note is easy to resent. It is also easy to act on. But the second option is the better one.

When you have lived inside an idea for a few years, you forget something. Because its name means nothing to a stranger. A framework is not a password.

So I rewrote the abstract for the Philippine Sociological Society with a plain definition inside it. Also, the title grew a clause. It now says Filipino storytellers out loud instead of leaving them implied. The version in the programme is that revised one.

Sociologists were the right people to catch it. Their whole discipline runs on not assuming the reader already lives in your world.

Why a storytelling paper belonged at the Philippine Sociological Society

The theme was crisis and care. So the fit was not obvious at first. After all, storytelling sounds like a creative concern, not a social one.

But my argument was that cultural representation is its own kind of crisis. A community that keeps seeing itself told badly loses something real. And telling a story back to the people it came from is a form of care, not decoration.

The Philippine Sociological Society conference also came a week before Los Baños. Two Philippine conferences in ten days, one sociological and one on speech communication. So the framework had to answer to both.