Foreword to this Special Edition
This volume celebrates the 39th year of the Social Research Training and Development Office (SRTDO), the research arm of the Division of Social Sciences and Education of the Ateneo de Davao University. Founded in 1972 to advance the development of a research culture in the University, the SRTDO has since then gone on to undertake important studies that dealt with issues of development, such as wages, quality of health care, reproductive health, family planning, street children, politics, and environment, among others.
In 1994, the SRTDO formed the Ateneo Task Force and Mindanao Working Group (ATF-MWG) on Reproductive Health, Gender and Sexuality project for a more focused and issue-based capability-building program for the University and the stakeholders of development on the island. The ATF is an interdisciplinary group of faculty members from Ateneo de Davao while the MWG is a voluntary group of individuals representing different disciplines, sectors, and organizations from the four regions of Mindanao. The goal of the ATF-MWG is to contribute to uplift the status of women by advancing the knowledge, understanding, and involvement of relevant audiences in the fundamental issues of reproductive health, gender, and sexuality.
In 2005, MWG saw the need to better understand how armed conflict affects the experience of grassroots women in the various conflict-affected areas of Mindanao for implications on addressing reproductive health and gender development. The MWG tapped participating universities and colleges on the island to conduct a series of community studies to help draw its advocacy agenda for grassroots gender empowerment, especially for the most neglected and underprivileged among Mindanao women — the Muslims, the Lumads, and those in rebel transit areas. We now feature these studies for their relevance in shaping the growing gender discourse in Mindanao academe.
Admittedly, the conduct of these exploratory research efforts had been limited by time constraints and the security situation in the respective study sites, as well as by lack of access to the major players and pertinent documents on these local conflicts as they occurred in Cotabato, Agusan del Norte, and the Lanao provinces. As a result, they do not provide a comprehensive context to the arenas of battle that played out in the respondents' backyards, much in the same way that these communities continue to be denied the context why they have been and continue to be forced to play host to deadly encounters.
Also, academics might find the absence of a theoretical frame to be a serious flaw, but such caution had been deemed necessary to privilege opinions expressed by the respondents and avoid injecting researcher bias. Still and for all that, these cautions attempts to view war and its aftermath through the eyes of those who had been touched by it modestly capture the landscape of the conflict experience of those most affected by the recent wars in Mindanao. While the findings do not form the whole picture, this is a start. For this reason we find justifiable the limitations of these studies.
Collectively, these papers represent the shift in academic research agenda on the wars in Mindanao — from the traditional positivist inquiry to phenomenological investigation that acknowledge the validity of the respondents' experience of the subject under study. We offer our readers these MWG research reports, in part to hold true to the Tambara's mission to inform about Mindanao issues, but more importantly to showcase the efforts of the SRTDO to bring out the social costs of war on the least heard and most vulnerable of Mindanao constituents.
Gail Tan Ilagan, Editor
