Presented here are projects from Knowledge Kapamilya's 2025 cohort. Kapamilya is a space for Filipino/a/x students to interact, engage, and connect with museum collections at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.

The foundation of museums is inherently colonial, as a tool that has caused harm in numerous communities through ways of looting, extraction, and display. This year, Kapamilya students were asked to curate their own museums as their culminating project, thinking thoughtfully about how displays communicate ideas and, even stereotypes regarding the Philippines, its people, and the diaspora. This project also placed students at the center of decision-making of how they wish to see their community portrayed and the stories they would like to share and see. Appointing students as curator provided a multimodal way to think about and analyze several crucial key points:

Students curated their own museum as a multimodal way to think about and analyze several crucial keypoints:

• How the Philippines and her people have been historically represented;
• How previously established stories can be re-examined and re-told through different perspectives;
• And how representation, experience, and perspective (or lack thereof) informs the way that one collects and displays.

In reflecting upon their curatorial duties, they discovered that each of their museums’ main themes were tied to stories of community resilience and community building. Through kwentuhan (Filipino storytelling) and a curatorial project, Kapamilya student museums considered the desires of the diaspora to be in community with one another, and the opportunities in which this could be achieved: what are the ways in which we can build a community together? While curating large-scale museums might seem to be a far and distant dream and there are a multitude of potential answers to that question, Kapamilya student curators re-imagined the possibilities of the Philippine collections when community members are able to connect with their history. Kapamilya demonstrated the ways in which belongings and archives can help us understand beyond the past, but also re-examine the cataloged record to analyze the context of objects more critically. Kapamilya proved that communities are cultivated in resilience and through storytelling.

Any images used in this project are credited to their sources.