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

Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2026-09: Angelo Galindo on sense of place among Filipinos in diaspora

In 1975, Yi-Fu Tuan argued that to know a place well requires long residence and deep involvement. "Experience takes time. Sense of place is rarely acquired in passing" (164)*. This humanistic perspective has since undergone various revisions, reiterations and reinterpretations, but this tenet's school of thought persisted and has stood the sediments of time. 

A recent research on sense of place was undertaken to explore how first-generation Filipino immigrants in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (LPGC) develop and negotiate a sense of place through emotional, cultural, and spatial practices in an island setting. On Monday, 24 August 2026 at 5:30PM, Angelo Galindo will give a talk for the Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2026: Tracing First-Generation Filipino Immigrants’ Sense of Place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Migrant Narratives and Spatial Patterns of Attachment, Identity, and Dependence. Jointly sponsored by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS), the talk -- the ninth for 2026 -- will be done via Zoom (5:30PM PHT / 11:30AM CEST).

 

Grounded in sense of place theory—the talk revisits the dimensions of place attachment, place identity, and place dependence. The study utilizes a multimodal framework for representing migrant spatial experience by combining ethnography, participatory mapping, and spatial-statistical analysis. With 14 participants, the study generated both rich qualitative narratives and 126 spatial data points for LPGC of Gran Canaria —a peripheral island setting with a demographic that remains understudied. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria is the capital of Gran Canaria Island of the Canarian archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean. 

Findings reveal that, place attachment is shaped by sensory and nostalgic connections to built and natural environments as well as spiritual and social connections to people within community spaces; Place identity is enacted in intimate built environments such as churches and Filipino gathering sites spearheaded by Filipino grassroots organizations; Place dependence is strongly linked to the migrant labor landscape, migrant obligation, and the pursuit of actualization—both self and familial. Moreover, while the island setting forms a relevant spatial backdrop, it is the transnational labor experience that most significantly structures Filipino migrant sense of place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Ultimately, this study invites further work exploring multimodal approaches that foreground migrant place experiences for diasporic island contexts.

Angelo Galindo earned a BSc in Environmental Science from Ateneo de Manila University (with minors in creative writing and literature) and completed his MSc in Geography at the University of the Philippines Diliman, with a thesis on land cover change simulations and the lived experience of urban transitions. After which, Angelo pursued an Erasmus Mundus Research Master in Spatial Sciences in the University of Groningen and Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (cum laude); his thesis combined spatial narratives with spatial statistical analyses—exploring sense of place of Filipino immigrants in Spain. Prior to moving to the Netherlands, Angelo worked in local environmental consultancy firms, tech (ML) startups, government-funded research projects, and as an environmental science and GIS lecturer in the Philippines. He is currently a PhD candidate at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) where he works to reconstruct the history and spatial patterns of deforestation in the Philippines since 1850 and trace its enduring colonial legacies through archival research and spatial analyses.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a monthly event that brings together geography-focused scholars, field and industry practitioners, communities and civil society to engage in a conversation about a broadly geographic topic based on research, pedagogy, field practice, and new innovations in geospatial technology. In its rebranded form, the Heo/Geo Lecture Series was carried out continuously since August 2019, and facilitated by the various research clusters of the UP Department of Geography. This talk is co-sponsored by the Human Geography (HUG) research cluster and in line with the SDG #4 (Quality Education) of the United Nations.

To participate in the lecture, register to this link: https://bit.ly/4bZBV7o

* Tuan, Y. F. (1975). Place: An experiential perspective. Geographical review, 151-165.

Geowriters Lab: Writeshop for thesis-stage MS Geog students

The Geowriters Lab of the UP Department of Geography is inviting thesis-stage MS Geography students for a Writeshop for Geography Grad Students. This event is a mini-workshop where members of the Geography Graduate Faculty provide tips and offer suggestions how to overcome writer’s block, compose coherent, cogent and AI-free problem statements, research questions and objectives. This event hopefully allows students to interact with other similarly situated graduate students in the MS Geog program, as possible thesis writing partners or as a support group.

The event is on Saturday, 22 August 2026 from 1:00 to 5:00 in the afternoon in Pavilion 2250. Click the link below to register for this event. Do this on or before 5:00PM on Monday, 17 August 2026.

https://bit.ly/4hWpoVW

This event is organised by the Research Committee and the Geography Graduate Program of the UPD Department of Geography. This event aligns with SDG #4 of the United Nations Sustainable Development.