“Here Lies Love in Critical Contexts: A Public Syllabus” is modeled after public syllabi such as #FergusonSyllabus, initiated by Dr. Marcia Chatelain; #CharlestonSyllabus, initiated by Dr. Chad Williams; #StandingRockSyllabus by the NYC Stands with Standing Rock Collective; Trump Syllabus 2.0 by Dr. N. D. B. Connolly and Dr. Keisha N. Blain; #AtlantaSyllabus by Dr. Lori Lopez, Dr. Lisa Ho, and Dr. Erica Kanesaka; and Anti-Martial Law Syllabus by the Critical Filipina/o/x Studies Collective and the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies. We are deeply indebted to the BlPOC scholars who conceptualized, curated, and contributed to these syllabi. Their powerful and necessary projects illustrate the critical intersections between scholarship, pedagogy, and community engagement, and inspired us to design a public syllabus that contextualizes and complicates Here Lies Love and help strengthen our collective capacities to refuse authoritarianism, disinformation, and denialism.
We also created this public syllabus as an open love letter to Filipino artists, journalists, activists, students, and scholars in the homeland and the diaspora. Featuring a chorus of Filipino voices, this public syllabus hopes to generate conversations about our shared goal of meaningful democratic social change in the Philippines.
This project is supported by SULO: the Philippine Studies Initiative @NYU and NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Teaching and Learning. We also wish to thank the King Juan Carlos Center, the NYU Center for Multicultural Education and Programs (CMEP), NYU Steinhardt’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Belonging, and the New York Southeast Asia Network for supporting the two-day program for our syllabus launch.
Special thanks to Marconi Calindas for his fabulous art and for Jojo Karlin and Anastasia Chiu of NYU Libraries for their guidance on web publishing.
Background image cropped from Trikosko, Marion S., “Marcos visit Johnson 1966.” Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.