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:

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