Affective articulation: Emotion as public reasoning in Filipino digital publics

This article develops affective articulation to explain how emotion becomes public reasoning in Filipino digital publics. Rather than treating emotion as mere reaction or expressive intensity, the study argues that emotion becomes publicly meaningful when feeling is organized as judgment: naming a social problem, evaluating why it matters, and assigning responsibility to political actors, institutions, or broader structures. Drawing on X (formerly Twitter) posts from undergraduate Sociology students at the University of Santo Tomas, Manila, the study uses qualitative digital discourse analysis to examine how students discussed governance, gender inequality, LGBTQ+ rights, inflation, and transport policy as shared concerns rather than purely personal feelings. The findings show three movements of affective articulation: affective expression, where feeling first becomes legible as public judgment; affective mediation, where hashtags, code-switching, emojis, replies, retweets, and quote tweets shaped the public form of these judgments; and affective resonance, where repeated judgments became shared concerns through recurring issue framings and visible platform interactions. Grounded in a bounded Philippine digital public, the study shows that digital platforms do not remove public reasoning. They reorganize its form, tempo, and visibility. Emotion does not stand outside reason; it can become one way through which Filipino students interpret social life and make moral judgment visible online.