Ross Tugade

A Personal History of Histories Writing about and working in the face of annihilation

I hesitated posting this, but maybe it’s time to share so it serves its original purpose: an internal accounting, to bookend this part of my life.

Not Another Drug War Essay but also, yes another drug war essay. One that does not aspire to do grand things at all.

open.substack.com/pub/rosselle...

A Quezon (2025) review by way of three book titles:

- The Foundations of the Modern Philippine State (Leia Castañeda Anastacio)
- Massacre in the Clouds (Kim Wagner)
- Everything is Tuberculosis (John Green)

Screening in some HOYTS cinemas!!

Fifth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Perceiving Time and Hope in International Law Through Hadestown [Ruby Rosselle ‘Ross’ Tugade is a PhD student at the Faculty of Law & Justice, University of New South Wales (Sydney), researching anti-communicst state violence in the Philippines] Anaïs Mitch…

Fifth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Perceiving Time and Hope in International Law Through Hadestown

opiniojuris.org/2025/10/31/f...

Many thanks to @szarmsky.bsky.social and @alonso-gd.bsky.social for including this essay in this year’s series.

Fifth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Perceiving Time and Hope in International Law Through Hadestown [Ruby Rosselle ‘Ross’ Tugade is a PhD student at the Faculty of Law & Justice, University of New South Wales (Sydney), researching anti-communicst state violence in the Philippines] Anaïs Mitch…

Weekend reading, for your consideration: a piece I wrote that’s included in the 5th Annual Pop Culture and International Law Symposium of @opiniojuris.bsky.social.

opiniojuris.org/2025/10/31/f...

We have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so...

What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?

Their Professors Caught Them Cheating. They Used A.I. to Apologize.

Two professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said they grew suspicious after receiving identical apologies from dozens of students they had accused of academic dishonesty. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/u...

Stream Slay Accla

In the Philippines, we mostly call aunts “tita” and this includes even your parent’s friends. Anyway this is Filipina drag artist Tita Baby. She is your tita now.

I hope I did justice to it in the essay!!

Fifth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: An Introduction [Dr Sarah Zarmsky is a Lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast School of Law and Deputy Managing Editor of Opinio Juris Dr Alonso Gurmendi is a Fellow in Human Rights and Politics at the London Scho…

I made the cut in this year’s @opiniojuris.bsky.social Pop Culture and IL symposium. My piece comes out on Friday.

opiniojuris.org/2025/10/27/f...

Two water-hungry abominations we ought to despise: AI data centers and golf courses. I will not explain

Gonna watch Quezon on Friday so I can join the Discourse

Exactly one angry netizen complaining about the 1935 Constitution in the comments section of a review of “Quezon” (in Mr Avanceña’s wall no less). Legal transfers bleeding out into Facebook thanks to Jerrold Tarog’s film, I guess??

Someone has to write how increasingly corny the Philippine Bar Exams have become. The 2026 Bar chair’s special letter to examinees took it up a notch by sounding like an Alpha Male motivational script.

Spring is shaping to be me versus wattle and my inner saboteur.

Nothing like a rawdogged 6km afternoon walk under the sun to make me realise a key concept I overlooked in my project. I call this the idiot walk

Encountering truly devastating grief four months into the PhD—TWICE—not in my bingo card but it is life, which must go on, and the best way to honor the people I lost is to just believe in me and make the distance make sense

The only Rodrigo to whom Ninoy’s quote applies on the Filipino worth dying for. The other Rodrigo, let us make sure he never returns.

One of the few times I will invoke that Filipino nationalist card is to defend our pop girlie Olivia Rodrigo. I have claws out.

Myanmar: Making sure there is no return On September 29, the UN Fact-Finding Mechanism on Myanmar publishes a report on “the destruction and seizure of Rohingya homes, farms, mosques, and other property in 2017.” An integral part of the gen...

The IIMM has released a report on the destruction of #Rohingya property in #Myanmar, positioning this as #genocide. I spoke to @janethanderson.bsky.social, who covered the report. www.justiceinfo.net/en/150350-my...

Extracting every last centavo from Filipinos whom they see as disposable. BILLIONS of cash stacked on top of each other as spoils for politicians. I hate this so much

'All Bulacan 1st District projects from 2019 to 2025 are substandard' – Brice Hernandez (1st UPDATE) On average, only 30% to 50% of the contract amount actually goes to the construction of the project

This is probably the biggest PH corruption scandal I have seen in recent memory. This is just one district, one province. They build poor infra on purpose to rake in BILLIONS. Meanwhile, it is so common now for Pinoys to die and lose homes in floods.

www.rappler.com/philippines/...

Starting Duterte’s presidential campaign to the present, ‘DDS’ has earned a certain currency. To be a ‘proud DDS’ is to signal loyalty to the President and his violent vision. Now ‘DDS’ appears in the charges to refer to the perp group. It’s only apt. After all, DDS is really ‘Davao Death Squad.’

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Feminist Legal Studies Feminist Responses to the Regression of Trans Rights: Strategies, Alliances, Hope Amidst continuing backlash against trans rights, recognition and inclusion, two recent decisions from the UK have substantially impacted not only trans people’s legal status but also legal and social narratives of sex, gender and identity. The narrative that trans inclusion has a chilling effect on the rights of others, particularly women, has been adopted uncritically by both the UK Supreme Court in For Women Scotland and the Office for Students in its finding that the University of Sussex’s trans-inclusion policy had a chilling effect on free speech. These cases highlight a backlash that has been ongoing for some time, and sparks debates and fear of what may lie in the near future for trans people and kin, as well as other gender-variant persons, not only in the UK, but across jurisdictions and in a global perspective. The discourse of the ‘gender critical’ movement is splintering both the feminist and LGBT+ movements globally, with some aligning politically with the Far- and Christian Right against trans rights, adopting their terminology of ‘gender ideology’ and potentially posing a wider threat to sexual and reproductive rights. While this a difficult situation for trans people, kin and allies, this special issue seeks to emphasise that legal battles – including battles (temporarily) lost – are also an opportunity to seek to reinforce old alliances and to form new ones, to find new legal frontiers and imaginaries, to reinforce the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of legal arguments as well as intergenerational memory of what feminist legal work is, has been and should be about. How, we ask, do these decisions (and those like them globally) reflect and reproduce structures of coloniality, heteronormativity and cisnormativity? What do these decisions add to critiques of legal feminism? What would be construct…

📣🏳️‍⚧️ Call for Papers

We are inviting papers for our special issue, “Feminist Responses to the Regression of Trans Rights: Strategies, Alliances, Hope.” The issue will be dedicated to trans-inclusive feminist legal analysis that addresses attacks on trans rights & lives.

Details below. Please share.

The outrage in Manila shouldn’t come as a surprise when state violence has always been an everyday reality.

Photos by Ezra Acayan.

In solidarity with the protests happening back home.

I am only 60% successful in making Filipino-style spaghetti without the Del Monte cheat code sauce.

José Rizal, the best of us, consoling us centuries after that we are not indolent, we are simply built for another weather system