Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2025-06: Joycel Dabalos on the literary imagination of disaster

How does fiction imagine a disaster? How does the imagined disaster disturb/redefine the Filipino concept of family? 

For the sixth Heo/Geo Lecture for 2025, Joycel Vincent Dabalos' talk titled Rain and River: How Fiction Imagines Disaster and Disappearance, shares how he creatively wrote his two young adult stories populated with Filipino characters dealing with the wrath of disaster while carrying their distinct (yet playful) Filipino family identities. The lecture which is co-presented by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) will include his writing politics—how he perceives tangible world and how his stories offer an alternative world. The talk will take place via Zoom on Friday, 20 June 2025 at 5:30PM.

Joycel Vincent V. Dabalos is a creative writer and literature educator. He penned "Kulimlim: Mga Imahen ng Paglaho" (2024) and "Heterotopic Dissidences" (2025). He is currently completing his PhD in Philippine Studies (Presidential Scholarship Grant) at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. He obtained his MA in Language and Literature from De La Salle University Manila. He is a fellow for maikling kuwento of the 12th Palihang Rogelio Sicat held at UP Los Baños. His poems have been featured in the Heights Ateneo, Kawing Journal, and panitikan.ph. His latest poem "The Long History of Virus" will be published in ANI 42, the literary journal of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. His research interests span heterotopic spaces, queer disaster, narrative theory, literary ecology, and creative writing.

Jointly presented by the Geographies of Disasters and Hazards (G-DASH) and Media, Literary Geographies and Geohumanities (MELANGE) research clusters of the UP Department of Geography, the talk satisfies the Social Development Goals of United Nations Sustainable Development especially #4 (Quality Education) and #15 (Life on Land). 

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series started out as the Brown Bag Lecture Series/Geography Webbynar but later rebranded as Heo/Geo to accommodate the multiple ways Geografia/Heograpiya is perceived. The lecture series in its present iteration serves and provides a space where practical, discursive and embodied discussions and performativities from academic geographers, geography-adjacent scholars, practitioners and civil society can come together and share ideas to popularise the discipline of geography.

To register for the lecture, please click this link to participate.

Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2025-05: Laura Rodríguez Castro on ancestral knowledges and on research that is participatory and politically grounded

In Epistemologies of the South, Boaventura de Sousa Santos acknowledges that the transformation of the world comes from alternative perspectives that 'reinvent social emancipation on a global scale' (2016). 

Along these lines and embedded in Latin American (Abya Yala) ancestral knowledge, sentipensar (feeling-thinking) has developed as a way of feeling and knowing the world. From the experiences of Colombian fishermen (Escobar 2014; Fals Borda 2015) to the ancestral living of the Mayan Tzeltal in the Chiapas highlands of Mexico (Méndez Torres et al. 2013), feeling and thinking processes are experienced as interconnected and fundamental to living in harmony with mother earth (Pachamama). 

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series, co-sponsored by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS), presents a talk entitled 'Decolonial feminisms, power and place: Sentipensando (feeling-thinking) with rural women in Colombia' by Laura Rodríguez Castro. The talk is scheduled on Friday, 9th of May 2025 at 11:30AM (PHT) and 1:30PM (AEST). 

In this talk, Dr Rodríguez Castro reflects on embodying and understanding feeling-thinking and its entanglement with undertaking participatory research that is politically grounded in decoloniality and feminisms. She proposes that feeling-thinking addresses epistemic questions of the praxis of decoloniality, including how we embody research, how we understand place and how we unlearn to feeling-know other worlds.

Dr Laura Rodriguez Castro is a Colombian Vice-Chancellor Senior Research Fellow and educator at the Faculty of Education's Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education Research Centre at Southern Cross University, Australia. Her research focuses on Southern knowledges of anti/decoloniality and feminisms, critical and public pedagogies, memory studies and rurality. Her work also contributes to methodological debates on arts, visual and participatory methods. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Intercultural Studies. Laura’s book with Palgrave Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place: Sentipensando with Rural Women in Colombia (2021) explores how rural women enact and imagine decolonial feminist worlds. 

As in previous iterations, the Heo/Geo Lecture Series aims to bring various geography practitioners from the academy, civil society, industry and community to share their geography-informed research, pedagogies and practices that operate in multiple scales. This lecture is facilitated by the Human Geography (HUG) and Media, Literary Geographies, and Geohumanities (MELANGE) research groups of the UP Department of Geography. It also satisfies the Social Development Goals #4 (Quality Education) and #15 (Life on Land) of the United Nations Sustainable Development. 

To participate in our Lecture Series, please register through this link or paste this in your URL: https://tinyurl.com/ms572xk8

Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2025-04: Chantelle Bayes on relationships between practices of research-creation and geographies

What activities connect writers with environments and how do these connections sit alongside environmental and social justice aims?

For the 4th Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2025, that question will be discussed by Dr Chantelle Bayes who will give a talk entitled Writing with Place: More-than-representational Geographies and Creative Writing Practices on Thursday, 24 April 2025, at 5:30PM PHT (7:30PM AEST) via Zoom. More-than-representational geographies are the non-tangible aspects of geographies such as affects, practices, and processes. Dr Bayes' talk considers the relationships between practices of research-creation and geographies.

It’s well known that many writers, researchers and creatives have moments of inspiration while undertaking some sort of mundane activity from walking and commuting to cleaning. Knowing this, many writers and researchers have sought to engage with place as an intentional practice whereby they undertake activities such as walking to facilitate their thinking and making. These creative practices also inform our understanding of cultural geographies by diffracting experiences of place including the mundane, the intangible, the affective and the embodied. 

In Dr Bayes' research, writers most often talked about four activities in place that formed part of their writing process: walking, swimming, surfing, and gardening. Walking was by far the most noted activity with a deep history in connection with storytelling. The two main processes at work during such activities are firstly a close attention to place, and secondly an inattentive engagement with place through day-dreaming, creative thinking, thought making, and editing. These two processes are not always separate but may occur simultaneously, or like a camera lens drifting in and out between the two. Being in place and engaging with local geographies impacted the writing process in several ways by bringing attention to the ways that places, authors and texts are entangled in relationships of care, damage, or disruption. Dr Bayes will discuss anecdotes from several writers who use place-based creative practices so we can consider what this does to our shared understanding of geographies.

Dr Chantelle Bayes is a creative writer, researcher and educator living in Queensland, Australia. Her research areas are the environmental humanities, arts-based environmental education, contemporary literature and creative writing practices. Her book Reimagining Urban Nature: Literary Imaginaries for Posthuman Cities came out with Liverpool University Press in 2023. She is currently working at Southern Cross University as a postdoctoral research fellow on the ARC funded project 'Climate Country: Advancing Child and Youth-Led Climate Change Education with Country'.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a joint project of the University of the Philippines Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS). The Lecture Series is a monthly resource talk / lecture given by academic geographers, geography-adjacent scholars, practitioners working in geospatial industries, and partners working in multiple publics based locally and abroad. The talk ranges from the sharing of research findings, pedagogical practices, and field-based experiences. This month's Heo/Geo Lecture Series is facilitated by two research groups at the UP Department of Geography: Human Geography (HUG) and Media, Literary Geographies, and Geohumanities (MELANGE), and in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals #4 (Quality Education), and #15 (Life on Land). 

To participate in the lecture, click this link to join: https://tinyurl.com/2dvuj8du