This study investigates the intersecting identities of Muslim women community journalists in Marawi City. Using an intersectionality framework, it examines how gender, religion, ethnicity, and the geopolitical landscape shape the lived experiences of journalists in a high-stakes environment. Data was gathered through photovoice with four practitioners and interviews with experts across gender, human rights, and Meranaw culture. The findings indicate that journalism in Marawi is a continuous negotiation of identities where gender, religion, profession, ethnicity, and geographical and political landscape and history are performed as a strategic means of survival. The study concludes that the realities of women journalists cannot be understood through gender alone; rather, they are shaped by overlapping layers of identities. By highlighting these complexities, the research advocates for more nuanced, intersectional approaches to media studies in marginalized or conflict-affected regions.

This study explores how men's skincare advertisements on TikTok construct meanings of masculinity and self-care through textual and visual design elements. Drawing from Roland Barthes' semiotic framework and Stuart Hall's encoding perspective, the research analyzed ten men's skincare advertisements targeted at Filipino audiences to examine how recurring signs generate connotative meanings and broader cultural myths. The findings revealed that the advertisements consistently associate skincare with self-improvement, discipline, confidence, expertise, and responsibility, positioning grooming as a legitimate masculine practice rather than a cosmetic activity. These representations produced dominant myths of the modern Filipino man as someone who continuously optimizes himself, maintains his appearance without compromising his masculinity, and attains confidence through successful self-management. The study demonstrates how TikTok advertising functions not only as a promotional tool but also as a cultural mechanism that shapes and normalizes contemporary understandings of Filipino masculinity.

This case study explores the mediation of a teacher's professional identity through videoconferencing class sessions. Although mandatory remote learning brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic has ended, some educational institutions still have programs using videoconferencing as a method of instruction. Thus, the study seeks to shed light on how teaching through videoconferencing platforms has shaped teacher identity post- pandemic. By interviewing University of the Philippines College of Media and Communication professors currently handling classes primarily via Zoom, the study sought to (1) describe teachers’ professional self-perception; (2) describe the formation of teachers’ professional identity during videoconferencing class sessions; and, (3) teachers’ professional identity aspects emphasized or constrained by videoconferencing affordances during class sessions. Findings show that years after the pandemic, professors continuing to teach via videoconferencing had aspects of teaching identity disrupted by the medium, namely the sense of the classroom and the need for nonverbal feedback. However, some professors have found ways to compensate for these disruptions, such as the use of Zoom chat, reactions, and breakout rooms to foster class interconnectedness and the use of clothing to evoke professionalism and propriety, thus partially adapting their professional identities to the videoconferencing medium.

This thesis examines the emergence of stand-alone movie houses in the “pilgrim city” of Naga by analyzing cinemagoing as a spatial and social practice shaped by movement, mediation, and inequality. Framed through the concept of dalan—bikol word meaning to watch and a road—it situates early cinemagoing within the city’s colonial spatial formation, intermediary economies, and classed patterns of mobility. Drawing on archival sources and oral interviews, the study traces how cinema developed in a city historically structured by riverine trade, Hispanic urban planning, Catholic institutions, and unequal access to land, capital, and circulation. At the turn of the twentieth century, Bikol’s incorporation into global trade enabled immigrant intermediaries to introduce cinema technologies to the region. Film exhibition thus emerged not as a cultural novelty but as part of commercial networks shaped by colonial and capitalist systems. Focusing on the Bichara family, the thesis shows how immigrant entrepreneurship, land ownership, and kinship organization consolidated exhibition power while remaining dependent on Manila-based distributors. By the postwar period, cinema theaters became sites where class distinction and mobility were lived and imagined, reproducing older hierarchies while enabling limited aspirations beyond the city. By approaching cinemagoing as a spatial and social practice, this study aims to contribute to ongoing efforts to recover the “lost” histories of regional cinema in the Philippines.

This study examines how Filipina professional Valorant esports players construct and negotiate their participation and performance in professional esports tournaments. Drawing on feminist institutionalism (Mackay, Kenny & Chappell, 2010) and hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1987; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005), the study reads the competitive Valorant ecosystem as a gendered institution in which formal structures and informal norms reproduce a masculine logic of appropriateness. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five Filipina players who competed in all-female and mixed-gender settings, including FSL Game Changers, and analyzed using Braun and Clarke's (2006) six-phase thematic analysis. Six themes emerged: the masculine norm as baseline, the inclusion paradox of formal female circuits, team dynamics across the gender divide, identity and coping under the masculine gaze, love of the game as a sustaining force, and the structural cost of staying. Filipina Valorant esports players construct and negotiate their participation primarily through persistence, adaptation, and self-recognition of the barriers they face, rather than through direct contestation of those barriers. All five participants were inactive FSL competitors. While the motivation and the talent exist, the institution is not yet designed to convert either into sustained, equitable professional careers.