Ilokana sociologist urges graduating students: Use discipline for service
By Ian Paul Villanueva
In an inspiring call to service, Australia-based Ilokana sociologist Athena Charanne Presto charged the graduating sociology students of the MMSU College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) to carry their discipline straight into the heart of the Ilokano community. She delivered her talk during the Department of Sociology’s ALPAS Program on May 12 at the CAS Audiovisual Room.
Drawing from her own journey as someone who grew up in a humble Ilokano family, Ms. Presto showed how Sociology helped her understand that individuals' struggles often stem from reasons far beyond their control.
“Sociology helped me to 𝘢𝘭𝘱𝘢𝘴 (break free) from a mindset that might have blamed my parents for circumstances that they did not choose and could not have changed alone,” she said.
From this, she encouraged the audience, composed of graduating sociology students and members of the organization, to consider their education as a tool to see “structural inequalities that are mistaken for social facts” and to apply the discipline wherever they may be.
Ms. Presto remarked, “We have the capacity to understand [that] the struggles of an individual life are not produced by that individual alone but with the social structures and relations of power within which that life is embedded,” adding, “Go and do your sociology. Do it with rigor and with humility. Do it in places that need it the most.”
This call to action mirrored the very purpose of the ALPAS Program, which anchored the identity of a sociology graduate on four essential pillars: Dunong (Wisdom), Lingkod (Service), Lingap (Care), and Lipunan (Society). Department of Sociology Chair Prof. Weena Franco described ALPAS as “a development, breaking free from the students’ challenging four-year stay in the university,” and “into the real world.”
CAS Dean Dr. Marlina Lino encouraged sociology seniors to embrace empathy, echoing the sentiments expressed by Ms. Presto. Addressing the hidden emotional and psychological traumas that many students carry from broken or dysfunctional households, Dr. Lino urged the future sociologists to use their training to actively break generational cycles of family brokenness.
“The sociologists know better than that,” Dr. Lino remarked, challenging the graduates to transform their personal struggles into a lifelong vow to build solid, nurturing homes. “I hope that as you get out from the portals of the College of Arts and Sciences and MMSU in general, you will really get to imbibe in your hearts and your minds what makes a positive social change agent in a sociologist like you,” she remarked.
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