Rooted Yet Resonant at the Speech Communication Conference 2025

Three weeks earlier I made a version of this argument in London. At the Speech Communication Conference 2025 I made it at home, in Los Baños, to a room of Filipino teachers and students.

The conference ran on 9 and 10 October 2025 at the NCAS Auditorium of the College of Arts and Sciences Annex 1, University of the Philippines Los Baños. Los Baños is a university town in Laguna, about two hours south of Manila. The theme was “On Speaking Terms: Enabling Encounters, Engaging Communities.” The UP Diliman Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts ran it with the UPLB Communication Division.

My paper was called “Rooted Yet Resonant: A Southeast Asian Framework for Culturally Intelligent Storytelling in Global Media.”

What rooted yet resonant means

Those two words usually get treated as a trade. Rooted means the story stays close to where it came from. Resonant means it reaches people far away. And the common belief is that you pick one, because the more local a story is, the smaller its audience gets.

But my paper argued against that trade. A story does not reach further by becoming less Filipino. It reaches further when a viewer somewhere else is given enough to enter it. Those are two different moves, and creators keep confusing them. That was the case I put to the Speech Communication Conference 2025.

So the framework builds from Southeast Asian practice rather than from Western media theory with local examples pasted on top. That distinction matters more than it sounds. When the model comes from outside, cultural specificity always ends up looking like the problem to solve. When it comes from inside, specificity is the material you work with.

Why the Speech Communication Conference 2025 was a different test

Three weeks before, I brought the same framework to a conference on heritage repatriation in London. That audience worked on museums, objects, and return.

This audience was different. Speech communication people study how Filipinos actually talk, teach, argue, and perform. They know the local ground better than any framework does. Presenting to them was less about explaining Filipino culture and more about defending whether the model held up.

It was also a month before the book came out in Santa Monica, California, in November 2025. So the Speech Communication Conference 2025 was one of the last rooms to hear the framework before it went into print.