Re-examining the Cultural Worker in the Philippine Context

Across broad progressive movements in the Philippines, cultural workers are a designated profile of activists that are known to advance revolutionary struggles: those who engage in socio-political actions through cultural means. The term and the praxis itself have origins as an operational tactic of progressive movements: art and literature are directed to serve the struggles of the masses, as well as to reorient individualistic aims and dismantle bourgeois notions of art-making. The praxis is in part a legacy of the National Democratic movement (Staal 2013; Leano 2014; Flores 2019; Mercado et al 2025; and more) that emerged in opposition to Martial Law during the 1960s, which continues organizing ‘cultural workers’ through its alliances to this day. Drawing from critical theorist Neferti X. Tadiar’s recent conceptions, cultural workers—like many artists of the Global South—furthermore resist “from the side of remaindered life” that remains a political heuristic challenge in navigating structural entanglements of activism, political organizing, and mass mobilization. The cultural worker is, in other words, a historically constructed and specific way of doing activism in the Philippines.

This presentation examines the historical origins of the cultural worker as a specific ideological paradigm and political strategy of National Democratic organizing, and dislodges its reified category in Philippine activism by interposing a class analysis. Informed by my autocritical, artistic-pedagogic project slant school, I assess and argue that the cultural worker is a reified conception of activism that has resulted from the unequal distribution and reproduced hierarchies of metropolitan university education—especially in the epistemic center of Manila’s most prestigious universities. By historicizing and analyzing literature on conceptualizations of cultural workers in the National Democratic movement, I point towards alternative critical pathways for activism borne from complex, social locations of an urban educated middle-class—including an intervention on the Filipino concept of pagkamulat, which translates to political awakening.

Carissa Pobre holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Interdisciplinary Art and Regenerative Culture from University of New Mexico, and Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Creative Writing from Ateneo de Manila University, and is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and creative strategist.