ICGS 2026: Stories, Places: Storying, Storytelling, and Storymaking Worlds - Call for Abstracts (First Call)

How do stories begin? 

“Many stories begin with a moment of unexpected change,” according to Will Storr in his book The Science of Storytelling. Change is hope, change is promise, continues Storr. With promise and hope, here’s a sampling how stories begin from the first lines of a random selection of books:

“First there was nothing. Then there was everything.”

(Richard Powers, The Overstory)

“Our fascination with remarkable places is as old as geography.”

(Alastair Bonnett, Off the Map)

“’Hold on. What’s going on here?’”

(Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Taiwan Travelogue)

Opening lines in stories position and suture the readers to narratives that unspool in the next paragraphs, pages, chapters. The Storying Geography Collective maintain that stories matter because “they are central to the ways we produce and share knowledge, make meaning and communicate the world.” Stories can mean a lot to different people, communities and collectives. In geography, there is a recognition that a story is a form of worlding and geographers are storytellers that map, re-map, and un-map relations traversing bodies, natures, identities, spaces, power and various entanglements.

The storying of landscapes, lives, and processes of becoming can heighten noticing and listening to places. As Fiona Miller notes: “[s]tories have the capacity to reveal patterns across space, making manifest the changing nature of social, cultural, economic and political relations of place.” Telling, creating, embodying and performing stories, collaborative storying and even in producing counter-narratives point to the power and potential of stories in mapping a whole range of tableaus and predilections ranging from retrospective narratives to self-reflexive introspections.

Whether you are recounting narratives of island and islandness to telling stories of cartographic anxieties, the International Conference on Geographical Studies (ICGS) 2026 wants to hear them for this year’s gathering with a theme Stories, Places: Storying, Storytelling and Story-making Worlds. Happening on two consecutive days in the second week of November (13-14 November), the conference invites abstracts, panels, films, map exhibits, book talks, and geovisual storytelling sessions. The conference will be conducted remotely.

So send us your abstracts that tell stories with a broadly geographic sensibility. The topics below are incomplete but should serve as road maps for you to think through what academic research, creative project or cartographic undertakings you are working on.

- More-than-human / posthuman entanglements

- Emotional and affectual geographies

- Geospatial humanities

- Disaster risks and management

- Collaborative / participatory mapping

- Island and archipelagic narratives

- Environmental humanities

- Re-storying loss and trauma

- Digital lives and alterities

- Web 2.0 and neogeography

- Forest governance

- Geonarratives and place-based stories

- Indigenization and indigeneity 

- Storying of vernacular landscapes

- Queering geomorphologies

- Violence and carcerality 

- Historicizing spatialities

- Creative methodologies in geography

- Radical and geographies from the Antipodes

- Urbanities and peri-urbanism 

- Political ecologies

- Geocosmologies

- Storying changed climatologies

- Mourning and grieving for lost worlds

- Gender and sexualities

- Geographical / cartographical imaginations

- Social movements and progressive politics

- Wayfinding and spatial cognition

- Secret lives of watersheds

- Liminal and paradoxical spaces

- Heritage and intangible culture

- Cinematic cartographies

- Toxic ecologies

- Storying aging

- Countercartographies and critical mapping

- Geographies of activism

- Gardening and earthing

- Body map and corporeality

- Literary geographies

- Coastal and maritime geographies

- Carescapes and geographies of care

Send us your intellectual, creative, performative submissions and provocations on or before 15 September. The submission link is provided here: http://tinyurl.com/ICGS2026AbstractSubForm

Works cited

Alastair Bonnett (2015). Off the Map: Lost Spaces, Invisible Cities, Forgotten Islands, Feral Places, and what They Tell Us about the World, Aurum Press.

Fiona Miller (2026). Responding: Absence, Loss and Power, Stories of Place: Geographies of Meaning, Memory and Connection, Palgrave Macmillan.

Richard Powers (2019). The Overstory, W. W. Norton & Company

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (2020). Taiwan Travelogue, Graywolf Press.

The Storying Geography Collective (2026). Stories of Place: Geographies of Meaning, Memory and Connection, Palgrave Macmillan.

ICGS 2024: Situated-in-Practice: Geography Praxis, Mapping and Doing - Call for Abstracts

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

International Conference on Geographical Studies

15-16 November 2024

Via Zoom

SITUATED-IN-PRACTICE: GEOGRAPHY PRAXIS, MAPPING, AND DOING

Twenty years ago, Eric Sheppard challenged geographers with this call to action: “[I]f we take seriously the idea that good geographic practice entails giving voice to the widest possible variety of situated knowledges, then fieldwork should involve people in the places we study as full participants in our research—challenging the hierarchy of expertise that is presumed to separate academics from their informants” (2004, p. 744). As we strive to animate, engage and co-produce spaces and places that give voice and agency to various situated knowledges in the world we inhabit, oftentimes we find ourselves in particular junctures where we question whether our end goals attend to emancipatory and liberatory ecologies against spatial injustices. How do we ensure these goals are in place? How do we practice geography?

As in lessons gained from multiverses, the ways to enact geographical practices can be diverse, plural and multi-scalar. For instance, and in reference to Sheppard’s point, in what ways can field respondents be fully acknowledged and recognized as co-producers of knowledge rather than as sources of information who will provide substance to a yet-to-be-written academic article? Would it make sense that for every knowledge co-produced, there is what Oliver Ibert calls a situated-in-practice ethic? Is it enough that one’s research is ‘critical’? 

In her research on critical geographies of home, Katherine Brickell questions the tendency of geographers to map and survey spaces to spotlight exclusions, spatial inequalities, and dispossession but stop short at suggesting ways to concretise these mappings. She advocates that ‘mapping’ and ‘doing’ are mutually constitutive because both practices tap not only in illuminating and visibilising but also in enacting. As Brickell argues: “while critical geographers must arguably devote more energy to moving beyond the pursuit of empirical production and theoretical sophistication … ‘mapping’ remains an important prerequisite for ‘doing’ if interventions or otherwise are to be appropriately tailored and actioned” (2012, p. 238). 

In the aftermath of the spatial turn and the radical geography revolution, more geographers, activists, and various community-based collectives, found themselves ostensibly engaging in various mappings and doings. Some undertakings attend to locating and situating the direst spaces of need during the lockdown through new cartographies to make way for food sharing; others engage in gathering geo-stories from the grassroots communities to facilitate opening of spaces to identify and hopefully rectify areas of core tension and conflict; while still others fight for the creation of independent and autonomous peace zones in disputed territories which emanate from mappings of peasant and indigenous peoples that point to the intricate webs of complicity among institutions of power that continually inflict physical, structural and epistemic violence.

For this year’s theme of the International Conference on Geographical Studies (ICGS) and co-sponsored by the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) and the UP Department of Geography, we focus on the practice of geography that offer interventions, mappings and doings, and activist and non-activist undertakings inside and outside of the academy. We solicit stories, map curations, film interventions, book panels, and academic presentations centering on a broadly conceived ‘geography praxis’ that engage across a variety of places, spaces and scales. Not only that, as Eric Sheppard reflects: “practicing geography … involves passion, compassion and inclusion”. 

Send your abstract to https://bit.ly/ICGS2024Abstracts by 20 October 2024. All abstracts will undergo review and evaluation from a panel of reviewers. Notice of acceptance of abstracts is on 28 October 2024.

Your 250-word abstract should include the following. 

- Name/s of author/co-author

- Institutional affiliation

- Email address

- 3-5 keywords

Registration deadline is 14 November 2024. 

Payments:

For paying undergrad students: Php 300.00

For paying grad students and professionals (local): Php 1,000.00

For paying grad students and professionals (overseas): $40.00

Abstract topics that fall within the remit of our theme are particularly welcome. If your topic is not listed from the general topics listed below but intersects the substance of practice-based undertakings, send us your abstract just the same. In some cases, we might advise you which slant of your presentation you should focus more. 

Aging in place

Agriculture and food systems

Agroecology / bungkalan

Alternative development

Carescapes and geographies of care

Climate justice 

Countermapped storytelling

Art and creative interventions

Critical climate studies

Critical geographies of home

Disaster and riskscapes

Emotional and affective geographies

Engaged and reflexive fieldwork

Fluvial and river stories

Gender and sexualities

Geo-stories and geonarratives

Geografiyang Pilipino

Health, healing and alternative healing practices

Heritage tourism

Historical geographies

Manufactured landscapes

Literary cartographies

Ludic geographies

Local and alternative solutions to hazards

Mining and extractive industries

Participatory mappings and GIS

Performative mapping and fieldwork

Radical frameworks and embodiments

Rights to the city

Situating island studies

Transportation and mobilities

Urban ecologies

Violent geographies

Visual culture and media

Wayfinding and spatial cognition

----

References

Brickell, K. (2012). ‘Mapping’ and ‘doing’ critical geographies of home. Progress in Human Geography, 36(2), 225-244. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511418708

Ibert, O. (2007) Towards a Geography of Knowledge Creation: The Ambivalences between ‘Knowledge as an Object’ and ‘Knowing in Practice’, Regional Studies, 41:1, 103-114, DOI: 10.1080/00343400601120346

Sheppard, E. (2004). Practicing Geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94(4), 744–747. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2

ICGS 2023: Practices - A Love Story (Or Send Us Your Abstracts for ICGS 2023)

Can a practice be performed? How does one embody and perform work, mappings, or artistic encounters?

Rather than us telling you, why not tell us how you’d go about this narrative like when you tell a story, sing a song, recite a pledge of allegiance, perform a dance, recall a dream, or when enacting a daily routine.

For Filipino mapping practices in the archipelago, describing the world is  performative, enacted and creative. There are various ways to describe and portray what is static and mobile in our worlds. Like indigenous mapping, the storytelling of worlds can be danced, sung, and performed in an endlessly looping wheel of multiplicities that bring together bodies and landscapes, emotions and places, and self, collectivities and territories.

So whether your story infuses Judith Butler’s performativities or Isabelle Stengers’ ecology of practice, or Taylor Swift’s brand of folklore, or none of the above, send them to us. The deadline is 6th of November. Submit your abstract through this link:  https://bit.ly/ICGS2023Abstracts

The original call can be found here. And also here. 

We’re waiting for your stories. 

ICGS 2023: 'Acting out' and 'doing' and Abstract Submission Reminder

You're nothing but a ....

Remember that enduring scene in Philippine cinema? 

Lavinia lashed out her judgmental exasperation towards Dorina's seeming lack of creditable talent. One can argue that Lavinia was 'acting out' and Dorina was 'making do' in the performance of the 'self'. Or was it the other way around? According to Judith Butler, performance and practice produce and subvert discourse and knowledge that likewise enable and discipline subjects and their performances.

Following Butler, geographers Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose argue for the recognition that spaces, too, need to be thought of as performative, and we need to unpack the complexity and instability of performances and performed spaces.

So what are you waiting for? If you have ideas that intersect performative geographies broadly, send an abstract to the International Conference on Geographical Studies (ICGS) that is happening 24-25 November 2023 via remote platform. The original call can be found here, or you can click this link instead: 

https://tinyurl.com/mr3a8ntp

To further illustrate Lavinia and Dorina's relational entanglements, your topic can be about non-essentialized constructions of marginalized identities, landscapes, practices and various conflicts in combinations and intersections with historiographies, environmental humanities, theatre studies, visual anthropology and other lenses, methods, and discourses.

You can also use performativities, embodiments, enactments or 'doing' in a broad range of topics: the performance of violence in housing displacements, caring for adults who are living alone, dance as playful and expressive embodiment, class-based conflicts in the enactment of different versions of masculinity, establishment of safe spaces, queer identities, erasures and 'quantum entanglements' (following Niels Bohr), filmed performances, toxicities in classrooms, or the emotional lives of cartographers. Surprise us with your stories and provocations by sending us your abstract. 

The deadline for abstract submission is 6 November 2023 via this link: https://bit.ly/ICGS2023Abstracts

We love what Filipina geographer Vanessa Banta said about performance space. It is a strategic place to meet in which "everyone could encounter each other." Lavinia will probably not like that, but Dorina might.

ICGS 2023 - Performative Geographies: Spatialities of Embodiment, Performance, Ideology and Practice

Human encounters with physical, emotional and imaginative spaces entail that individuals and collectives perform themselves in negotiation not only with people, landscapes and territories but also with power, ideology, and discourse. Perform. If performance is to ‘act out’ in the articulation of, among many others, spaces and places, performativity is a set of ‘citational practices that reproduce and subvert discourse’. Geographers Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose argue that both performance and performativity are ‘important conceptual tools for a critical geography concerned to denaturalise taken-for-granted social practices, and concur with their emphasis on the creativity of everyday life.’ But we are still confronted with the question: whose stories get told, to whom, and how?

For the 2023 iteration of the International Conference on Geographical Studies (ICGS), the focus on the performative aspect in and of geography necessitates the creation of productive (and performed) spaces to hear stories of geography-informed practices in research, pedagogy, community-based work and various advocacies. This year’s Performative Geographies theme spotlights multiple performative acts and practices. Whether this is about care-ful and caring geographies of older persons and differently-abled individuals, or cartographic interventions in a marginalised community, we would like to hear stories how these spaces are produced, destroyed, re-created and subjected to multiple transformations. 

Stories can also be about the performative ‘doing’ of identities, storying violence in agroecological landscapes and bungkalan, re-spatialising performative activism for climate justice, participating in creative strategies of communities in relation to disaster preparedness, displacement of the heteronormative alignment of sex and gender (following Judith Butler), or documenting the affective practice of digitising and bringing to life the old and forgotten maps. 

Send us your narratives that describe, question, analyse, and un-think  performances and performativities in research, practice, and in everyday life advocacies, in the form of a 250-word abstract on or before 6 November 2023.

Topics include but are not limited to:

Affect and emotion 

Performing labor and work

Geographies of care

Construction of non-heteronormative spaces

Emotional geographies of mapping and mapmaking

Participatory and community mapping

Artistic and creative performativities

Landscape of violence

Post-human and more-than-human entanglements

Disaster and disaster preparedness

Geohumanities and ecocriticism

Literary geographies

Geographies of media

GIS and geovisualizations

Climate studies and climate justice

Islands, blue humanities  and tidalectics

Right to the city and the urban

Peforming aging and aging gracefully

Geopolitics and territorial disputes

Emotive cartographies

Historical geographies and heritage studies

Geonarratives, storying and storiation

Environmental sustainability

Playful and ludic geographies 

To participate in ICGS 2023, here are following guidelines:

For paper presentation, please submit the following:

- 250-word abstract

- 3-5 keywords

- Presenters and co-presenters’ names, affiliations, email addresses, bionotes

For panel sessions that feature, address, and engage with social, critical and theoretical issues relevant to geography, submit panel session proposals with the following information:

- 300-word abstract

- 4-5 keywords

- Names of at least 3 panelists, with email addresses, affiliations, and bionotes

Submit individual abstracts and panel session proposals on or before 6 November 2023. Notification of abstract acceptance is on 10 November 2023. 

ICGS 2023 runs from 24-25 November 2023 and will be held remotely. All presentations are to be recorded. These 15-minute video recordings of presentation are due on 15 November 2023. Those that exceed 15 minutes will be returned to paper presenters and will only be accepted when the 15-minute videos are re-submitted.

All submissions should be sent via this link or you can just paste the following link in your browser: https://bit.ly/ICGS2023Abstracts

For inquiries, contact the ICGS 2023 Secretariat at icgs.ph@gmail.com. For updates, please visit our social media accounts:

X [formerly Twitter] (pgs_ph)

Facebook (International Conference on Geographical Studies)

Instagram (updgeography)

ICGS 2022

 Details soon!