Everyday university politics in the Philippines: a tale of two universities

Abstract

The experience of the two universities presented in this article provides evidence to the proliferation of contestations for power in modern universities, including those in the Philippines. This can be analyzed in the context of ordinary resistance and everyday politics where architectures of power deployed by university administrators tend to both constrain and enable political action. This occurs even as human agents offer their transgressions by deploying forms of localized resistance that may appear petty and mundane but has the power to reinforce the self-identification of its bearers. Indeed, this is enabled by the fact that the university is now normalized into simply another place of work, and where knowledge is no longer produced for knowledge's sake only, but as a collateral benefit in a political economy of symbols, narratives, images, and commodities. Thus, this article shows that in late capitalism the university has become just another place for performativity and simulacra.