This thesis examines how Filipino mothers construct social media mediation strategies for their adolescent daughters as a means of informal sex education. With increasing cases of adolescent pregnancy and other sexual health concerns, sex education has become progressively important to discuss within the family, as parents are culturally positioned as gatekeepers of these socially taboo topics. Although Filipino culture remains conservative, mothers are faced with the need to protect their daughters from harm, especially online. Guided by the Extended Theoretical Framework of Parental Internet Mediation and Gender Schema Theory, this qualitative study utilized in-depth interviews with 12 Filipino mothers to gather insights on their ecologies and schemas, perceptions of their daughters’ social media environment, parental mediation strategies, and the cyclical processes of reflection and recalibration of these strategies over time. Findings show that these mothers’ sex education executions were shaped primarily by faith, lived experience, and strong protective instincts. Social media was a necessary contemporary component of their daughters’ adolescent life, but still inherently risky. Their parental mediation was multi-layered and heavily surveillance-oriented. In conclusion, their mediation strategies are dynamic, yet remain grounded in trust in their relationships with their daughters and authority-centered parenting structures.

Transgender people in the Philippines grapple with a range of issues online, including discrimination, prejudice rooted in religion, misgendering, and exclusion. However, despite these challenges, Filipino transgender content creators use their agency to actively create content on social media platforms so that they can disseminate information, create communities, and negotiate their identities. With this, we ask, how do Filipino transgender TikTok creators enact narrative control grounded on their situatedness? This study focuses on TikTok as a platform where trans content creators can engage in digital production through textual, audio, and visual features. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of platformization, narrative control, and situated knowledges, the study seeks to investigate how Filipino transgender TikTok creators enact narrative control grounded on their situatedness. Using a qualitative research design, we employed in-depth interviews (IDI) and textual analysis (TA) of their experiences and TikTok content. Through this, we were able to find that Filipino trans content creators enact digital practices that control trans narratives on TikTok, informed by their lived experiences. Overall, this study contributes to the body of knowledge that seeks to understand the narratives of trans individuals online and how they continuously navigate platform constraints in order to assert themselves.

Previous scholarship on climate change beliefs has surfaced how they relate to communication networks about climate change. However, research on how these beliefs affect network characteristics is limited. This thesis examines the relationships among Metro Manila residents’ climate change communication networks and their exposure to information sources, social media use, and climate change positions. An online survey was administered (N = 316) along with 11 online interviews. Bivariate and multivariate tests revealed that exposure to information sources was associated with climate change positions and some network characteristics. Lastly, modelling results revealed that a wicked problem orientation was significantly and positively related to the likelihood of discussing climate change with their network, and a holist solution orientation was significantly and negatively related to network heterophily. Overall, the findings suggest the importance of exploring information sources and climate change beliefs in contextualizing climate change communication networks.

This undergraduate thesis examined the research question: How is the Filipino body ideal discursively represented and interpreted as “normal” on TikTok? Using Machin and Mayr’s (2012) Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) as its primary framework, the study investigated how body ideals are constructed through multimodal content and normalized through audience engagement on TikTok. Drawing from scholarship on Filipino beauty standards, body politics, and discourse (Bordo, 1993;Gramsci, 1971; Machin & Mayr, 2012), the study conceptualized body ideals as hegemonic meanings that become normalized through repeated representation and active user co-production. Methodologically, the study triangulated textual analyses of TikTok videos and comment sections from four content creators—Shakirah Mae Corpus, Rio Maramba, Jam Blauta, and Enver Florendo—with semi-structured interviews involving eight TikTok users. The findings revealed that creators consistently represented the ideal Filipino body as lean, toned, disciplined, and healthy through recurring linguistic choices and visual strategies such as before-and-after comparisons, fitness routines, and food-tracking practices. Audience responses largely affirmed these representations by associating ideal bodies with discipline, self-control, responsibility, and personal success, although some negotiated and oppositional readings were also observed. The study posits that the normalization of this ideal stems from a dense alignment of culture, technology, and platform capitalism, where TikTok’s interface design and recommendation algorithms reward and amplify platform-optimized bodies (Bishop, 2021; Chen et al., 2025). At its core, the overall study demonstrates how user agency is captured to stabilize dominant ideologies, and advocates for critical media literacy, ethical creation standards, and systemic policy responses to body-based discrimination and false wellness information in Filipino digital contexts.

This dissertation examines how bodies and death become constitutive elements in governmentality and in the construction of the nation's body politic through a textual analysis of media texts and images. The study focuses on the shifts and contending discourses on the bodies and deaths of Ninoy Aquino and Cory Aquino, of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., and of ordinary people who died under state-initiated violence of past and present administrations. It asserts that bodies and deaths configure political narratives through time. The prevalence of necropolitics or the exercise of power over the population by managing “bare life,” death, terror, and notions of martyrdom, as mediated by media, pushes a kind of governmentality that enables the return and persistence of authoritarian regimes. This study examines varying forms of necropolitics as articulated in the terrain of media and culture, revealing that there are limits in its deployment to a population. Necropolitics can be overturned when the people encounter a potent symbol and acquire the language and agency to resist necropolitical governance. This media-mediated encounter facilitates the formation of political icons that could be a useful technology for empowerment, serving as an aperture that opens up possible futures.