Events

Join us at NIAS on 27 August at 5pm for a public guest lecture by Dr Nicole Curato, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra

Abstract
Whose suffering counts in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines? In this presentation, I enquire into the unequal distribution of compassion among ‘communities of misery’ in a nation that has been beset with a series of tragedies. I compare two case studies: disaster survivors from Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 and the families left behind by police and vigilante killings of Duterte’s controversial war on drugs.

While the nation has witnessed overwhelming gestures of solidarity in the aftermath of a mega-disaster, the drug war has not resulted to telethons to support the war’s orphans, Twitter hashtags to mourn the dead or mass graves that give visibility to victimhood. Why is suffering from the drug war treated any differently?

Drawing on four years of ethnographic research in Tacloban and Manila, I offer three logics that underpin this moral judgment: the logic of denialism, complicity, and deservingness. I argue that these judgments are embedded in a moral economy that renders some lives disposable and therefore ‘ungrieveable.’  By pursuing this line of enquiry, this presentation seeks to provide a sociological portrait of the society that emerges in the age of Dutertismo and critically examine its implications for democratic practice.

Bio
Nicole Curato is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She is the author of the forthcoming book Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedy to Deliberative Action (Oxford University Press) and the editor of the book Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on Rodrigo Duterte’s Early Presidency (Cornell University Press).

In 2015, she was the recipient of recipient of the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Research Fellowship for her work on democratic innovations in post-disaster contexts. She is a regular contributor in news outlets including CNN, Al Jazeera, ABC News Australia, and the New York Times, among others.

The guest lecture is organized in collaboration with Professor Steffen Jensen, Aalborg University, Copenhagen.