Summer is a peculiar season. It is hot. It is cruel. It is fun.

Upon squinting our eyes to the sun, we feel our skin wrapped with sunlight that provokes feelings for the summer season, causing us to quiver lightly, always ambiguous at its memory and attracted to its significance.

For some people, summer brings a gratifying sense of liberation from institutional obligations and daily rituals. For others, academics in particular, it serves as a reminder of how the sun cares little for our methods of exploring the field, of our deadlines, and of our attempts at examining social and natural phenomena.

This year’s summer in the Philippines made itself memorable. We were able to delay the execution of Mary Jane, a Filipino woman in Indonesia, witness the devastation of the Nepali earthquake, inspect our own backyard in order to prepare ourselves for “The Big One,” and watch in dismay the plight of the Rohingya people within our own region, among others.

These issues come in different forms and are often layered with social and cultural nuances. Such complexity demands that we look at these multiple layers in order to arrive at well-informed insights of our social world.

With a new site design out of the box, let us push for more questions and seek more answers as we stand in what’s left of the summer sun.

-The Editors

Featured image from this site.