Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2023-16: Edward Nadurata on care and vulnerabilities during COVID-19

For the 16th and last talk of the Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2023, the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) present the ongoing research of Edward Nadurata on the various geographies of care and caring landscapes that emerge during the COVID-19 period that exposes greater vulnerability on the bodies of Filipino care workers who work as frontliners and their labor precarities.

The presentation is entitled Racial Capitalism, Care, and the Global Filipino Condition: Interrogating Risk and Contagion in the Philippines and its Diaspora During COVID-19. It is happening on Wednesday, the 6th of December 2023 at 5:30PM via Zoom.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the indispensability of the Philippines and its people as careworkers for the world. However, the pandemic also magnified the global inequalities around health and labor that were only exacerbated by the position of the Philippines as a key player in global health infrastructure as a source of cheap and flexible labor. This presentation juxtaposes how the Philippines as a labor exporting nation dealt with the uncertainty during the pandemic and the global organizing efforts of Filipino nurses and organizations amidst the rise in Anti-Asian violence during the pandemic. 

Edward Nadurata argues that examining the conditions that Filipinos faced globally highlights new ways of thinking about care that magnify a sense of citizenship rooted in the lived experiences of Filipinos as careworkers during COVID-19 who were proximal to contagion and as always at risk because of their racialized positions in the global economy. In doing so, this presentation considers different ideas around care and governance that have emerged and have been informed by COVID-19 that do not align with state-led visions of crisis management but rather with community-oriented approaches. 

This presentation furthermore interrogates how the centering of risk and contagion in our understanding of labor allows us to think of the global condition for Filipinos as a racialized group, the relevance of racial capitalism as an analytic in terms of the Philippines and its diaspora, and the different possibilities for the world for other pandemics to come.

Edward Nadurata is a PhD Student in Global and International Studies with Designated Emphases in Medical Humanities and Asian American Studies at the University of California at Irvine. He is currently an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation fellow and a Visiting Fellow in the Third World Studies Center at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. His research lies on the intersections of aging, retirement, carework, globalization, Disability Studies, and Filipino Studies. He received his MA in Asian American Studies from UCLA and serves as editorial assistant for Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies, the online open access journal of the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies at UC Davis and the Journal of Asian American Studies.

This lecture is in conjunction with the UP Department of Geography's 40th anniversary as an academic unit in the Philippines, as well as an homage to the 100 years when geography was first taught at the University of the Philippines (1923-2023). 

The lecture is sponsored by the Human Geography (HuG) research cluster of the UPD Department of Geography. It likewise touches on the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #3 (Good Health and Well-Being) and #10 (Reduced Inequalities). 

To participate in the lecture, please click this link to register. Likewise you can paste this URL to your browser: https://tinyurl.com/yc4wckxd

Call for Submission for the Philippine Geographical Journal - Vol. 67, 2023

Call for Articles for the 2023 issue of Philippine Geographical Journal (PGJ)

Geographies of Care: lives, spatialities, experiences, and practices

Geography is a caring discipline that takes the multi-scalar dimensions of care seriously. As former AAG (American Association of Geographers) president Victoria Lawson noted, geography examines climate change, ecological crises, disaster management, spatial justice, gender-ethnic divisions, spaces of exclusions, uneven development, environmental justice, extractivist capitalism, redistricting, necropolitics, among many spatialized manifestations of unevenness, inequalities and dispossessions (Lawson, 2007). These engagements speak of the substance of care that geographers involve themselves in research and practice.

For the 2023 issue of the Philippine Geographical Journal—a peer-reviewed journal of the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS)—multiple geographies of care is spotlighted in its varied iterative formations. The pandemic not only underlined the differentiated and multitudinous experiences and encounters of Covid-19 in terms of health access, empowered civil society, vulnerabilities of bodies and precarity of lives and livelihoods, it also ushered an emerging and emergent landscape of care founded on collective and mutual aid that underscore a network of relations built on the practical and emotional provision of support. From peoples’ cartographies that map several terrains of access of health and medical care, and the radical emergence of community pantries, to care ethics that tackle and question neoliberalism’s ideological constructs which can flatten nanosocial relations of care and intimate entanglements.

Care also manifest interstitially and in strange ways. For example, animal-human relations and the ethics of ‘killing’ as a form of caring in times of crisis. In some cases, informal carers who are invisible abound in places where local mores pathologise certain illnesses as taboo or not worth public discussion. Still other cases point to the silence of carers who tend to be ‘overprotective’ of people with intellectual disabilities that engender hidden social geographies of care that refused to be acknowledged as care. These examples shift the landscape of care and care provision.

For this call for article submission, we invite full-length papers that variously problematise, detail, analyse and imagine care geographies through either theoretical, relational, non-representational, artistic and performative praxis and lenses. We also seek provocative thought pieces that challenge care geographies, question geographical wisdom on topics such as distance, home space, care-giving, ‘care-ful’ geographies, or other geographical projects and practices beyond academic geography.

Photo: Nick Fewings    

Topics can be but not limited to:

– Place-based and emotion-based care and care-giving

– Care-ful and compassionate geographies

– Care ethics and responsibility

– Transactional and relational care

– Emergent and radical geographies of care

– Delayed and extended reciprocity of care

– Mutual aid and radical becomings

– Human-animal relationships of care

– Multi-scalar uncaring-ness and ‘false care’

– Mobilities, transportation and care infrastructures

– Children and child-friendly care

– Media representations of landscapes of care

– Personal, digital and online geonarratives of caring

– Health care and medical tourism

– Labor in care and care-giving

– Community-based care initiatives and state care

– Conservation management and care treatments of nature

– Informal caring and invisibilities

If you are interested in contributing to this volume, please send your article submission no later than 1 September 2023 to pgj.editor@gmail.com.   

Complete articles should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words (including endnotes, but excluding references) in length and must include a 200-250 word abstract. In addition, you should send a 50-word biographical note with your article. All submitted manuscripts will undergo double-blind reviews. Target publication is December 2023.

Particulars

- 6000-8000 word count excluding references

- 200-250-word abstract

- 4-6 keywords

- APA citation, 7th edition

- Signed conforme from author/s that submission is an original and is not being considered for publication elsewhere