Banwa

I have been working on the design and customization of Banwa's website in the past months. It's almost finished, almost! =)

Banwa is a peer-reviewed academic journal published biannually by the University of the Philippines Mindanao under the auspices of the Office of Research, which addresses relevant issues in the fields of the humanities, natural and applied sciences, social sciences, and management and economics. The journal is devoted to promoting scholarship and insightful debate by publishing a broad range of critical and scholarly articles, research reports, reviews, short notes, lectures, policy statements, and advocacies across the various disciplines, written by both emerging and established scholars, local and international.

In the vernacular, the term banwa / banua is commonly understood in its modern social and geopolitical sense as “community” and “territory.” But this term, within the context of the Austronesian or Malayo-Polynesian family of languages, encompasses a whole range of meanings. The banwa, therefore, can be understood as the totality of the world; a space, both physical and conceptual, that encapsulates the whole gamut of human-nonhuman interlockings, with emphasis not only on human individuals and groups—and by extension, human constructs—but also on the various aspects of nature that they engage in, in complex and contingent ways.