Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2025-10: Yaw Ofosu-Asare on landscape, decolonisation and everyday design

In The Four Seasons of Ethnography (2014), scholar and writer Sarah Amira de la Garza asserted that a Eurocentric perspective has insinuated itself to the wisdom traditions of local communities everywhere in ways that insist on domination, superiority and ownership. Providing a 'rich tapestry' and culture-specific contexts to emphasize lived experiences, scholar Yaw Ofosu-Asare employs storied-ethnography as a qualitative methodology that finds kindred affinity to postcolonial theory and participatory research towards "centring and valuing the narratives of those traditionally marginalized in scholarly research" (2025, p. 10). Through counter-acts, storied ethnography and creation-centered ontologies, there is an active refusal in the "erasure of lifeworlds" (Gagnon, 2024, p. 100). 

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series presents a lecture titled Land, Story and Design: Cultural Geographies of Care and Decolonisation from Dr Yaw Ofosu-Asare from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University on 17 October 2025, Friday at 5:30PM (Philippines Standard Time / 7:30PM AEST) via Zoom. 

The talk explores the geography of design as lived practice, showing how communities inscribe memory, resilience, and identity into landscapes through storytelling, ritual, and everyday design. Reading from his most recent book African Design Futures (2024), Ofosu-Asare centres the narrative of Efua from Edina, a coastal town in Ghana, to illustrate how coastal life, market spaces, and communal rituals embody forms of environmental care and spatial knowledge. These ideas may find echoes in the Philippines, where Indigenous practices, local markets, and rituals also root people’s relationship to land and sea. Alongside this, Dr Ofosu-Asare draws on Decolonising Design in Africa to pose a provocation: in seeking to decolonise, how do we avoid creating new hierarchies of knowledge? Together, these perspectives invite us to see landscapes not only as sites of ecological management but also as cultural geographies where futures are imagined and lived.

Yaw Ofosu-Asare is a Ghanaian designer, educator, and researcher based in Australia whose work bridges decolonial design, critical pedagogy, and African futures. He is the author of Decolonising Design in Africa: Towards New Theories, Methods, and Practices (Routledge, 2024) and African Design Futures: Decolonising Minds, Education, Spaces, and Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). With a PhD in Education, his research explores the intersections of Indigenous knowledge systems, storytelling, and visual communication as tools for liberation and transformation.

Currently he is a Lecturer in Communication Design at RMIT University, where he  guides students in connecting theory and practice through industry-partnered studios and critical approaches to design pedagogy. Alongside his teaching, Dr Ofosu-Asare designed for grassroots organisations, educational institutions, and global social change movements, blending community-based design with speculative thinking. He also contributes to projects on climate justice, disability inclusion, and cultural sustainability. His work is rooted in a deep commitment to equity, memory, and creative reimagination.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a monthly lecture given by academic scholars, field-based geography practitioners, members of the local community, and spatial justice advocates to share their knowledge- and practice-based research undertakings. Jointly presented by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS), the Heo/Geo Lecture Series which previously underwent several iterative rebranding positions geography as a discipline that not only straddles the realms of natural/physical and social sciences, humanities, political ecologies, regional and area studies, GI technologies and geospatial storytelling, it is also a vibrant and convivial space that welcomes multiplicities and plural voices. The name Heo/Geo is itself an accommodation to the various understandings, meanings and pronunciations of geography in its indigenous and vernacular forms and the Anglicized name that has since been adapted in the local lexicon.

Dr Ofosu-Asare's lecture is also presented by the Human Geography (HUG) and Media, Literary Geographies and Geohumanites (MELANGE) research groups of the UP Department of Geography and is in line with the SDG #4 (Quality Education) of the United Nations.

To participate in the lecture, please register through this link: https://tinyurl.com/5bvfkrjn

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Works cited:

De la Garza, S A (2014). The Four Seasons of Ethnography: A Creation-Centered Ontology for Ethnography, In The Global Intercultural Communication Reader, 2nd edition (M K Asante, Y Miike and J Yin [eds.]), Routledge, pp. 151-173.

Gagnon, T (2024). Storying Against Dispossession: Nurturing Memories of Other Worlds, In Embodying Biodiversity: Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty (T V Gagnon [ed.]), The University of Arizona Press, pp. 79-104.

Ofosu-Asare, Y (2025). Reimagining foundations: Storied-ethnography as a pathway to decolonized design education, Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, pp. 1-29.

Ofosu-Asare, Y (2024). African Design Futures: Decolonising Minds, Education, Spaces, and Practices. Springer Nature/Palgrave Macmillan.

Ofosu-Asare, Y (2024). Decolonising Design in Africa: Towards New Theories, Methods, and Practices, Routledge.

Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2025-09: Chris Sorio on spatial justice among Filipino migrants in Canada

In writing about urban labor migration of Filipinos in Canada, Philip Kelly emphasized the spatiality of class in studying mobilities because "class subjectivities might be complicated by the spatiality of migration, which is an ... important feature of the global economy" (Kelly, 2012, p. 154). While scholarly materials have been written about Filipinos in Canada in relation to assimilation and identity, labor migration and transnational habitus, few have been written about migrant geographies from the perspective of a labor organiser and worker. 

For the ninth lecture for 2025 of the Heo/Geo Lecture Series of the UP Department of Geography and co-sponsored by the UP Center for International Studies (UP CIS), Chris Sorio will talk about narratives of Filipino labor migrants: his and other Filipino workers in Canada. Sorio's talk titled Radical Routes: Filipino Migrant Narratives and Spatial Justice in Canada happens on Friday, 12 September 2025 at 5:30PM Philippine Standard Time (5:30AM Eastern Standard Time) via Zoom. 

The talk is preceded by a screening of filmmaker Alfredo Ruzol's short film Recipe for Change which focused on Chris Sorio, and which was shown in Toronto in 2024. The Philippine Reporter which covered the event in Seneca Polytechnic singled out Ruzol's film, thus "[t]he documentary revisits Sorio’s harrowing experience during the Marcos Sr. dictatorship in the Philippines. At just 21 years old, Sorio was arrested and tortured by soldiers in Manila in 1982. Now living in Toronto, he continues his activism to ensure that this dark chapter of history is not forgotten."

Sorio's presentation, on the other hand, examines the lived experiences of Filipino migrants in Canada through the lens of spatial justice, drawing upon radical geography to illuminate the intersections of displacement, labour, and resistance. By foregrounding personal narratives and community histories, it explores how Filipino migrants navigate and contest the socio-spatial inequalities embedded within Canada’s immigration and labour systems. The analysis highlights the ways in which migrants transform everyday spaces—such as workplaces, community centres, and domestic environments—into sites of agency and solidarity. Through this exploration, the presentation aims to shed light on the broader implications for understanding migrant geographies and the pursuit of spatial justice in contemporary Canada.

Chris Sorio is currently the secretary general of Migrante Canada—a grassroots organization supporting temporary foreign workers and immigrants. He is currently an MA student in critical human geography at the Environmental and Urban Change of York University. Alfredo Ruzol is a filmmaker and media producer who pursues untold stories about climate justice, human rights, social issues, and peacebuilding. Recipe for Change was recently shortlisted in the Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia 2025. 

The event is co-sponsored by the UP Diliman Department of Geography, the Center for International Studies, and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS). The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a monthly resource talk / lecture given by academic geographers, geography-adjacent scholars, practitioners working in geospatial industries, and partners that engaged in multiple publics, and based locally and abroad. The talk ranges from the sharing of research findings to pedagogical practices and field-based experiences. This month's Heo/Geo Lecture Series is facilitated by two research clusters at the UP Department of Geography: Human Geography (HUG) and Media, Literary Geographies, and Geohumanities (MELANGE). 

To participate in the event, click this link to register. You can also click this link: https://tinyurl.com/2t9b6b8t

Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2025-08: Trina Isorena on the consultative process towards landscape management and restoration

Consistent with one of the extension goals of the UP Department of Geography, which is to engage with local government units and communities, and forge partnership activities, this month's talk for the Heo/Geo Lecture Series highlights the partnership aspect in relation to landscape management and restoration. 

For the eighth Heo/Geo Lecture Series, this talk draws from the experience of the Protect Wildlife Project, which developed an iterative method for piloting and scaling up Payments for Ecosystems Services (PES) as a means of securing additional funding for landscape restoration and management. These case study landscapes are located in the watersheds of Mt. Mantalingahan Protected Landscape in southern Palawan, Mount Matutum Protected Landscape in South Cotabato, and Bataan National Park in Bagac, Bataan. The talk which will be presented by Dr Trina Isorena is titled Paying for Nature’s Work: Cost-Based Valuation Strategy to Support Local PES. The lecture is jointly sponsored by the Philippine Geographical Society and the UP Department of Geography and will happen on Friday, 29 August 2025 at 5:30PM PHT. 

The talk details the establishment of landscape-based PES systems starting from framework development, piloting, and replication to diversify the sources of funds for watershed protection, restoration, development, and management. It also includes the processes involved in setting up multiple PES agreements between watershed and protected area managers, as well as users and consumers of ecosystem goods and services. 

Dr Trina Isorena is currently a senior lecturer at the UP Department of Geography where she handled graduate and undergraduate courses on river systems and watersheds, as well as digital cartography. Trina specializes in natural resource management, spatial planning, and the application of GIScience to environmental governance. Her interests include rural water management, land cover change analysis, REDD+ national forest monitoring system, resource tenure, community-based natural resource management, indigenous peoples’ rights, and ancestral domain mapping.

In her role as the Protect Wildlife Project’s Spatial Planning and GIS Manager, Dr Isorena contributed to the interdisciplinary team that developed the said PES system.

The monthly Heo/Geo Lecture Series was first conceived as a Brown Bag Colloquium and later easing into Geography Webbynar during the pandemic period. It was later rebranded as the Heo/Geo Lecture Series to capture not only the multiplicities of the discipline's specializations, but also on how it is pronounced in light of the increasing directive to provide space for geography's vernacularisation. Formally, the Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a discipline-based hobnobs where geography (as well as geography-adjacent) studies, extension and community work, industry pep talks, and spatial practices come together to meet and discuss. Sponsored by the Environment and Development Geographies (EDGE) research group of the UP Department of Geography, the talk is in line with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals #6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), #11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), #14 (Life Below Water), #15 (Life on Land). 

To participate in Dr Isorena's lecture, please register via this link or just click this: https://tinyurl.com/6zwurcef