27/07/2026
Applications are open for the Tropical Internet Research Fellowship 🐠
Developh invites applications for our inaugural Tropical Internet Research Fellowship, supporting researchers, writers, and artist-technologists at any stage of their career who are investigating the cultural and material conditions of the internet across the Philippines and Southeast Asia.
The fellowship seeks to nurture work examining how the internet is lived, built, resisted, and felt: from its materiality to its cultures.
* Apply at https://develo.ph/tropics/opencall — due August 22, 2026
* The research & writing portion of the fellowship unfolds over 5 months, with expectations to produce a written artifact by January 2027
* The publishing & presentation part of the fellowship continues in early 2027, with expectations to publish an aspect of your work online and present it between March–April 2027
Email questions to [email protected]
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We term the 'tropical internet' to speak to condition of the online as experienced/lived from the tropic regions of the Philippines and broader Southeast Asia, concerned with heat, extremes, monsoons, distance, islandedness, improvisation, pluralities, and diasporas. Think extremes and edges: how technology operates under those conditions as a totalizing infrastructure. We view the internet not as a frictionless, invisible global system but as an ecology: a living, intertwined layer to the world, one that is vulnerable, at risk, adaptive, entangled, and continuously rewritten by those who live at the eye of the storm and its peripheries. We think of fragility, ecology, maintenance, and vernacular ingenuities that sustain connection in the global south.
