 So good morning everyone. I'm a PhD candidate at the Department of Political and Social Change. I'm working on the conflict in the south of the Philippines, but today my contribution is more an activist pitch really. So I am trying to look at another kind of intersection here, not just race, gender, in class, but the activist as an academic and as, sorry, the academic as an artist and as an activist. So I start by really commenting on how we live in a world that is brimming with talent and intellect, but suffering in creativity and critical thinking. Academics as a collective are complicit to this poverty in our shortcomings in our research, teaching and public engagements. What did we do when gender was hijacked as a technical fix in development agendas? What did we do with the knowledge that the big winners of the US led wars elsewhere in the world were US companies that sold 19 to 36 billion dollars in arms sales? Why we were busy revising that journal article for that ranking journal drowning in papers to mark for the courses we teach, computing points for an elusive tenure. Neoliberal academia has kept us occupied, distracted and competing with each other. While we have not dismantled neoliberal education yet, we gain in revisiting the technology of ourselves in our academic institutions and in the wider communities that we engage in. So amidst this dystopic climate in neoliberal academia, scholars in various parts of the world have resisted through artistic and activist engagements. It did not matter if it required more intellectual and emotional labor and no points, no grant and not even an achievement award. But exciting work by scholars for instance in South Africa have utilized the photo voice project as a method of participatory research using photography and rigorous visual discourse analysis with a component book and exhibit to engage the public and empower the participants. Our own participatory research in the Philippines have used theater and videography workshops as tool for health impact assessments in mining communities. An exhibit and a video allowed for conversations beyond affected mining communities. Other academics slash artists slash activists in Hong Kong and Canada have explored diaspora and violence using personal letters dot gifs or gifs. That is one still from a website that shows anthropologists. So like very very short clips that are similar to ethnographic clips but shorter. And a card game even for works in comparative literature, anthropology and urban planning. So the good news is that we are in no shortage of individual academics that become more effective public intellectuals through artistic and activist engagements. I think this very symposium is a testament to that. Unfortunately when we do artistic and activist engagements our universities don't usually notice. Many of these works are dismissed as too soft or too hardcore. Gatekeepers in academia are not too thrilled when boundaries are blurred even if these works can be as rigorous as they are interesting. The bad news is that when scholars are becoming more effective public intellectuals through artistic and activist engagements the states and corporations notice. This is why scholars at risk network does important work protecting scholars. Yearly they provide sanctuary and assistance to more than 300 threatened scholars worldwide. In doing so they protect individual scholars but also the freedom to think, question and share ideas. The very premise of why academic work is valuable in the first place. But despite these challenges artistic and activist engagements in academic work are very rewarding. In my assessment knowledge created through cultural productions and collaborations result in more authentic forms and authorship. By authentic forms I mean forms of knowledge that are grounded and resonate with audiences and by authentic authorship I mean the acknowledgement of the collaborative nature of many kinds of knowledge production that are not given appropriate by lines. For instance our work on health impact assessment in the Philippines envisioned a staged theater production and good quality videos that can be entered in film festivals. But in contrast the results were community theater pieces and raw footages that captured the participants health impact assessment but also their pride and their sense of humor. They were not what we expected but they were better. When the people in the communities looked at the forms the research has taken shape they were familiar and accessible and they recognized their own images and their own voices. The project also required the collaboration with local communities but also indigenous theater and video groups in the Cordilleras in the northern part of the Philippines. The local health organization and a national environmental group was also collaborating with us. So it was more authentic to cite all of them as collaborators instead of just thanking them in an acknowledgement. We were very lucky to have found one of the few grants that supported the kind of research that we did. So it is something that scholars resist the neoliberal academia and that the neoliberal globalization despite material and discursive obstacles. I argue however that these exciting individual projects are probably not enough. In these dire times we recognize how academics as a collective have a task in addressing the poverty and creativity and critical thinking as neoliberal capitalist production poses complex challenges such as gender justice, climate justice and the likes. Public intellectuals need to step up our game and contribute to realizing utopias through collaborative productions. So I think we need to get our act together. One positive deviant example is a network of scholars from different parts of the world that met early this year in the Philippines to form the Scholars for Humanity International Network. After a week-long discussions with academics and grassroots or organizers from different sectors, members have put together a manifesto that says troubled by a world wherein our humanity and life-supporting systems are under unprecedented threat from severe inequalities and multiple forms of oppression, the network is committed to encouraging and supporting critical compassionate scholarships in the service of just peace and self-conscious people-responsive practices. The Declaration of Principles affirms commitment to among others reflexive intergenerational work that builds a better caring world and compassionate humanity, working critically with the wealth of knowledge produced by excluded groups and disrupting dominant structures of knowledge production which support interlocking forms of oppression. In November, Scholars for Humanity International Network will disrupt the Philippine Anthropology Association conference to examine the theory of insurgent scholarship, ethical insurgent methods and cultural productions as insurgent public engagement. I give this example of academics organizing themselves beyond unions because to me it provides a glimpse of a feminist utopia. It is part of a vision of transforming society that requires transforming the ways academics create and share knowledge. So my humble contribution this morning to a panel about thought shifting is to invite us to investigate the technology of ourselves as academics working in neoliberal institutions. I have explored ways in which academics could be more effective public intellectuals through artistic and activist endeavors.