Anabelle is a Philippine-born community-engaged qualitative researcher in social work based in what is now referred to as Canada.

The focus of her research is on the unpaid data work of solo mothers on social assistance, the datafied welfare state, critical data and AI studies, social policy, and diaspora activisms. More broadly, her interest is in examining whose labour and whose bodies absorb the shocks of AI and data-driven systems, particularly in welfare states and global labour chains.

She has held roles as: the PhD Stephen Lewis Fellow in Social Policy and Archival Research, Graduate Resident at the Lewis & Ruth Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship, the Social Work PhD Fellow & Caucus Convenor, and past and present research affiliations with the Asian Parents Participatory Action Research, Critical AI Talks, Filipino Canadian Social and Community Workers’ Network, Generative AI and the Settlement Sector, and Understanding Social Work Leadership in Canada.

Her work appears in Bloomsbury (in press), the British Journal of Social Work, the Canadian Woman’s Journal (in press), Nations and Nationalism, and Springer, among others.

She is an ad hoc reviewer for the Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, Critical and Radical Social Work, and Southeast Asia: A Multidisciplinary Journal, and was a member of the Editorial Team for the December 2025 Special Issue on Social Work Leadership in the British Journal of Social Work.

Before academia, she worked across international and community development, nonprofit governance, teaching, and program evaluation in Manila, Bonn, Cairo, Jakarta, and Perth. In Southeast Asia, she supported regional diplomacy at ASEAN, taught at the University of the Philippines, and worked in legislative and social science publishing roles. In Canada, she continues program development and evaluation work in the settlement sector.

Anabelle co-convened the Hamilton Asian Alliance and co-founded Filipinas of HamOnt, during which she developed and successfully applied for funding of the monthly Sadya: Filipino Conversation Circle hosted at the Hamilton Public Library.

Anabelle divides her time between Hamilton, Bandar Seri Begawan, and Manila.