Post-PhD, my scholarship has increasingly coalesced around the question of how trust, legitimacy, and moral life are shaped through communication. I remain deeply indebted to the thinkers who first oriented me toward meaning, interpretation, and symbolic power—Mark Bevir, R.A.W. Rhodes, Clifford Geertz, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, James Carey, Murray Edelman, and Norman Fairclough. Their work opened up the interpretive terrain in which my research is grounded: the recognition that politics is lived, narrated, and negotiated through culture.

Today, I extend these insights toward what I call trust cultures—the moral and relational infrastructures that make institutions appear credible, doubtful, acceptable, or scandalous. My work examines how trust and legitimacy are produced, strained, and repaired in the everyday, especially in the Global South where institutional authority is both vital and fragile. I am particularly interested in ambivalent governance and the ways societies become habituated to repair without correction: crises are mediated, scandals erupt, symbolic gestures reassure—but the underlying moral and institutional injuries often remain. Scandal, in this sense, becomes not only rupture but also constructivation: a process through which meaning, blame, care, and responsibility are publicly reassembled.

Philosophically, I inhabit a critical-realist, interpretive middle ground. I accept that realities—material, institutional, ecological—exert force, yet our access to them is always mediated by culture, discourse, embodiment, and history. My work therefore follows a layered ontology: the material, the symbolic, and the relational interact to shape political life and public feeling.

Across books and articles, my research traces how trust cultures are scaffolded in journalism, health communication, governance, and everyday moral life in the Philippines and across Global South–North contexts. Communication here is not only transmission; it is ritual, relationship, and repair. It is how institutions narrate themselves, how publics practice moral judgment, and how societies negotiate damage, responsibility, and care.

For my students, collaborators, and mentees, this is the lineage and direction I stand within: interpretive, relational, empirically grounded, and normatively attuned to how public life ought to work—while never losing sight of how it actually does. Together, we can keep refining what “good” social science means: attentive to culture, serious about institutions, and responsible to the communities whose lives we study.

If you’d like to explore these ideas, the following works offer a strong entry point—classics alongside contemporary anchors:

I am always keen to connect with those exploring the intersections of communication, culture, power, and moral life—especially from Global South vantage points. Meaningful scholarship, after all, is rarely a solitary craft.