About the project
Isles and islands features opportunities to enhance the growth of creative collaborations between the Philippines and the UK. These collaborations are not only a story of creativity, but a story of navigating bureaucracy. Making collaborations visible and identifying how institutional infrastructure can support Filipino relationships with the UK and with the lived histories of the contemporary Filipino diaspora is key to this growth.
This anthology explores the cultural relationships and shared knowledge circulating between the United Kingdom and the Philippines from the perspective of those who criss-cross that space. It brings together contributions from writers, artists, and academics – identifying as British, Filipino, Filipino-British and as global citizens – all working to make contemporary convergences visible.
The British Council is one of the main facilitators for exchanges between the UK and the Philippines. Founded in 1934 and working in the Philippines since 1978, the organisation has developed several programmes to encourage convergences within arts, culture and education. With a recent series of shifts emerging in the Philippine-UK relationship, this anthology, commissioned by the British Council, explores what it means to build complex cultural relationships through the arts, across geographies and within entangled global contexts.
SOAS Philippines Studies Center is a forum for Philippine-related teaching, research and cultural production in the UK and Europe. Established in part by a Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs grant to the Centre for South East Asian Studies in 2017, the PSS Committee develops and coordinates academic research and teaching on the Philippines and functions as an organising centre for conferences, public lectures, film screenings and language classes.