LINGUIST List 36.2473

Fri Aug 22 2025

FYI: Call for Book Chapter Proposals: Philippinescapes and Beyond

Editor for this issue: Daniel Swanson <daniellinguistlist.org>



Date: 22-Aug-2025
From: Nicko Enrique Manalastas <nlmanalastasup.edu.ph>
Subject: Call for Book Chapter Proposals: Philippinescapes and Beyond
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CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS
Philippinescapes and Beyond
Nicko Enrique Manalastas, Christian Go, & Nelson Buso Jr. (Editors)
Under consideration with Palgrave Macmillan

About the Volume:
Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies have emerged as a dynamic and increasingly visible area of inquiry in Philippine scholarship. Filipino and foreign scholars across disciplines—from sociolinguistics and discourse studies to education, sociology, and cultural geography—have begun to explore the ways in which local and foreign languages are rendered (in)visible in public spaces across the archipelago. From multilingual street signs and billboards to institutional signage (Eclipse & Tenedero, 2018; Villareal et al., 2021), street and train station signs (De Los Reyes, 2014; Peckson, 2014), Church signs (Esteron, 2021); protest slogans (Monje, 2017), and school signs (Astillero, 2017; Balog & Gonzales, 2021; Brown, 2012; Bernardo, 2021; Magno, 2017), the Philippine linguistic landscape is complex, layered, and deeply imbricated in issues of gender and sexuality (Topacio, 2022; Go, 2022, 2024), language politics (Tupas, 2024; Guinto, 2019; Bernardo-Hinesley & Gubitosi, 2022), legal history (Manalastas & Auxtero, 2024), social movement (Buso, 2025), and language teaching (Floralde & Valdez, 2017).

Despite the growing body of localized LL research, however, there remains a notable gap in the scholarship: the lack of a sustained interrogation of what, precisely, constitutes the "Philippine" in Philippine linguistic landscapes. That is, the ways in which “Philippine” functions as a signifier that influences which languages, identities, and meanings are made visible, celebrated or erased in public spaces remain unexplored. While many notable studies are grounded geographically—focusing on specific cities, regions, or islands—the broader cultural, historical, political, and colonial entanglements that shape these spaces remain undertheorized. As such, instead of a geographic orientation, which emphasizes linguistic landscapes in the Philippines, this volume proposes the term “Philippinescapes," which, in turn, highlights not only the plural realities of Filipinos but also concomitantly the illusion of an assemblage that appears coherent and unified, yet is shaped by fragmented identities, contested histories, and, oftentimes, irreconcilable significations and resignifications.

Going beyond the descriptive mapping of signs, Philippinescapes probes the broader historical conditions, power relations, and semiotic practices that produce and transform the linguistic landscapes we encounter. It also invites a reading of linguistic landscapes as material traces that index and negotiate Filipino subjectivities—including those that are marginalized, silenced, or in resistance. Furthermore, it also examines how Philippine linguistic landscapes become sites and focal points of negotiation where dominant ideologies, local knowledges, legacies of colonialism and nationalism, the ongoing struggle for linguistic rights and recognition, the interplay of local and global forces, and resistant voices converge and contend (see Lanza & Woldemariam, 2009; Shohamy & Waksman, 2009; Spolsky, 2009; Gorter & Van Mensel, 2012). It brings together novel interdisciplinary and interregional perspectives on the theory, method, and politics of conducting LL studies within the Philippine context or what counts as the imagined assemblage of Philippine concepts, ideas, and values. In doing so, this volume seeks to create a space for critiquing the limits of methodologies that fail to engage with the dissonant, the invisible, or the epistemologically subaltern.

By foregrounding the Philippine context as not merely a site but, most importantly, as a lens, this book aims to reframe LL studies from the margins of the Global South, particularly within the broader historical, political, cultural, and colonial context of the Philippines and its regions. It therefore builds on and complicates existing paradigms in the field by bringing attention to place-specific histories, cultural practices, and socio-political and linguistic dynamics. Contributors will be invited to reflect on but also move beyond the spatially fixed notion of Philippine public spaces by examining how language is displayed, erased, contested, or commodified across sites shaped by urbanization, internal migration, tourism, (neo)colonization, militarization, Indigeneity, education, globalization, and neoliberal development. In doing so, the volume encourages analyses that consider how meanings associated with “Philippine” are produced, circulated, and transformed both within and beyond geographic, temporal, and semiotic borders. The volume will also welcome chapters that critically engage with methodological challenges in doing LL research in diverse Philippine contexts, including those outside of Metro Manila and other dominant urban centers as well as in digital, diasporic, and other emergent spaces of sign-making and meaning-making.

Ultimately, Philippinescapes invites readers to see linguistic landscapes not just as objects of analysis, but as arenas of struggle, history, and meaning, i.e., as domains through which the Philippines, in all its complexity and fragmentation, continues to be imagined, contested, and lived.

The edited volume aims to include, but is not limited to, the following topics:
Regional and national identities in the Philippine LL
Local, translocal, and global subcultures in the Philippine LL
Gender, sex, and sexuality in the Philippine LL
Politics and social movement in the Philippine LL
Health and medical communication in the Philippine LL
Climate justice, natural disasters, and the Philippine LL
Language education, teaching, and the Philippine LL
Unequal Englishes in the Philippine LL
Inequalities of multilingualism in the Philippine LL
Language policies, planning, and legal history in the Philippine LL
Tourism, heritage conservation, and the Philippine LL
History and memory/memorialization in the Philippine LL
Philippine popular culture and media in the LL
Technology and artificial intelligence in the Philippine LL
Decolonizing the Philippine LL and its methodologies

Provisional Timetable
15 September 2025 – Deadline for chapter abstracts and working titles
30 September 2025 – Notification of acceptance
31 January 2026 – Submission of first drafts (7,000 words including notes and references)
31 August 2026 – Submission to publisher

Submission Guidelines
Submit your chapter proposals through this Google Form on or before 15 September 2025:

https://forms.gle/TfK7ue9DnyyvqGxY9

For questions and concerns, please contact the Editors at [email protected].

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
Applied Linguistics
General Linguistics
Sociolinguistics
Writing Systems




Page Updated: 22-Aug-2025


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