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Towards Urban Alter-Politics: Scholar-Activists Situated Solidarities in Philippine Housing Struggles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2025

Chester Antonino Cunan Arcilla Open the ORCID record for Chester Antonino Cunan Arcilla [Opens in a new window]
Chester Antonino Cunan Arcilla*
Affiliation:
Department of Social Sciences, University of the Philippines Manila, Manila, Philippines Department of Sociology and Centre for Asian Studies in Africa, University of Pretoria, South Africa
*
Email: ccarcilla2@up.edu.ph
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Abstract

In this paper, I marked the critical alter-political works of urban scholar-activists in the Philippines. Slums are at the heart of capitalist dispossessions. Slumdwellers live, survive, negotiate, and resist on an everyday basis. In the Philippines, the struggles of slum community organisations are strongly influenced, formed, and pulled in divergent ideological trajectories by contending larger political formations.

I draw on my own experience and that of 20 Filipino urban scholar-activists with varied political commitments, reflecting on decades of community work, to highlight the alter-works and challenges of navigating the web of political heterogeneity within urban poor organisations and movements. By scholar-activists, I do not refer solely to those who are based in universities, but to the many who struggle every day to unearth subaltern political knowledges and collectively fight for the right to adequate housing, as well as, for some, the right to the city. I enumerate the multiple functions and necessary labours of being 'embedded' in these complex politics. We engage in political advising, framing, networking, organizing, translating, and capacity-building. Caught in a complex web that may necessitate strategic essentialisation, silencing, and foreclosures, scholar-activists play a crucial role of strategic facilitation that connects collective forms of living among urban surplus lives and corrodes neoliberal urban dispossessions. These alter-works are continuous efforts towards situated solidarities, where urban scholar activists critically draw from and reshape ‘inherited’ social movement frames and strategies grounded on actually existing subaltern realities, capacities, and political opportunities.

Keywords

alter-workPhilippinesstrategic facilitationurban scholar-activismurban social movements

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Type
Original Article
Information
TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia , First View , pp. 1 - 19
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Institute for East Asian Studies.

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