Olivia Mendoza is a migrant Filipina PhD candidate at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance in Canberra, Australia, on unceded Ngunnawal land. She studies emotions and deliberation from a critical feminist and decolonial lens.

Before moving to Australia, she was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Department of History and Philosophy, University of the Philippines Baguio. I taught courses on Development Ethics, Moral Philosophy, and Ancient and Medieval Philosophy among others. For her work, she was awarded the One UP Faculty Grant in Philosophy for Outstanding Teaching and Public Service, the UP International Publication Award, and Mateo Tupaz Grant.

She is an active member of Women Doing Philosophy (WDP), a global feminist organization that aims to create and claim spaces that promote the scholarly, professional, and personal flourishing of Filipina philosophers.

Dissertation

Olivia's PhD thesis imagines a structure-oriented account of emancipatory democratic politics that stresses the importance of emotions and their role in relations of domination. It engages with the emotions and inequality literature in feminist and deliberative democratic theory and practice.

PhD Supervisors

• Hans Asenbaum (primary supervisor)

• Adele Webb  (secondary supervisor)

• John Dryzek (secondary supervisor)

Scholarship and Prizes

• Deliberative Democracy PhD Scholarship (2023-2027), Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra.

• One UP Faculty Grant Award in Philosophy (Ethics) for Outstanding Teaching and Public Service in the University of the Philippines Baguio, College of Social Sciences, University of the Philippines Baguio (2022-2024).

• Mateo Tupaz Grant (2019-2022), University of the Philippines Baguio. Research Project: Reviewing Emotion Theories in light of Filipino Emotions.

Key Publications

• Olivia S. Mendoza. 2024. “Emotions and Filipino Resilience” In Llanera, Tracy (ed). Resilience: The Brown Babe’s Burden. Routledge Book Series on the Post- CoViD World: Academics, Politics and Society.

• Liz Jackson, Nuraan Davids, Winston C. Thompson, Jessica Lussier, Nicholas C. Burbules, Kal Alston, Stephen Chatelier, Krissah Marga B. Taganas, Olivia S. Mendoza, Jason Lin Cong, Addyson Frattura & Anonymous and P. Taylor Webb. 2022. "Feeling like a philosopher of education: A collective response to Jackson’s ‘The smiling philosopher’." Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2022.2063719.

Conference Presentations

• Olivia S. Mendoza, “Emotional and Hermeneutic Labour: Feminist Philosophy Meets Deliberative Democracy." 11th Swiss Summer School in Democracy Studies and 7th Deliberative Democracy Summer School. University of Zurich, Switzerland. 2025.

• Olivia S. Mendoza. “Emotional Labour: A Feminist Agenda for Deliberative Democracy." Reimagining Democratic Politics in the Contemporary Symposium. Centre for Democratic Futures, University of Southampton, UK. 2025.

Teaching

• Development Ethics (SDS 271, Master’s Course in Social and Development Studies), 2022

• History of the Social Sciences (Soc Sci 100), 2021-2022

• Ethics (Philo 171, for Philosophy Students), 2019-2022

• Ethics and Moral Reasoning (Ethics 1, General Education Course), 2019-2022

• Ancient Philosophy (Philosophy110) and Medieval Philosophy (Philosophy 111), 2014-2022.

  
  

Public Service

• Member, Women Doing Philosophy. 2020-present.