Geographers Conduct Workshop on Peer Review at PSSC

The Philippine Social Science Council (PSSC) invited three resource speakers for a workshop called Peer Review in the Social Sciences for the whole day on Monday, 16 February 2026. 

The three geographers -- Drs Vanessa Joy Anacta, Yany Lopez and Joseph Palis -- are members of the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) and full time faculty of the University of the Philippines-Diliman Department of Geography. 

Attended by 24 participants coming variously from the cities of Bacolod and Quezon City, the workshop divided the topics into four major areas pertaining to effective, mindful and reflective peer review: fundamentals, processes, writing and ethics. Two breakout sessions were facilitated to allow the participants to reflect as a group and individually, on the prepared manuscripts for review. 

The resource speakers represent a broad swath of experience in peer review for journal and book publications. They provided examples of standard practice from the regions where they spent considerable time when completing their doctorate degrees: Europe, the United States and Australia. While standards vary, the resource speakers emphasize the different review practices consistent with the goals of specific publishers (single/double/triple blind reviews as well as transparent, collaborative and post-publication practices). Also proceeding ethically in the peer review undertaking, and developing mentorship mentality especially for early career researchers are the essentials in reflective and constructive peer review.

Feedbacks from the audience range from the challenge in searching qualified peer reviewers, to realizing that peer review can be an opportunity to frame 'flaws' as remedial.

To know more about the peer review for geography, contact geography.upd@up.edu.ph or visit the Department's website  or PGS. 

Geography Lecture: Michael Pretes on conducting and data-gathering for research in geography

Do you want to know more about how to conduct geographic research? While standard practice is far from homogenous and/or universal, here's a chance to know more about gathering and collecting data in geography.

Professor Michael Pretes from the Department of Geosciences of the University of North Alabama will share insights on practiced-based research in geography. Dr Pretes teaches courses about world geography, economic geography, geography of music, geography of islands, and geography of national parks. He has travelled to all seven continents (including Antarctica). 

The onsite talk is going to be on Thursday, 26 February 2026 at 2:30PM in Pavilion 2248. Geography juniors and seniors and graduate students are invited to join the talk.

This Geography talk is sponsored the UP Department of Geography through the Graduate Program and the Undergraduate Program and is in line with the SDG #4 (Quality Education) of the United Nations.

Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2026-03: Sayd Randle on her book 'Replumbing the City'

In a 2022 article on water and storage focused on Los Angeles, political ecologist Sayd Randle opined: "[T]he infrastructural ecology ... demands new spatial and infrastructural practices for the thousands of residents sited above the aquifer, an arrangement that raises questions of environmental justice rarely associated with urban space" (Randle, 2022, 2295). For what are the ways the seeming urbanization of nature reflect local and global situations of resource  storage, particularly subterranean water, and how does it shape spatial and social relations. 

For the third Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2026 jointly sponsored by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS), Sayd Randle will discuss water storage in a talk titled Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles, which is also the title of her book which came out in 2025. The talk happens on Friday, 27 February 2026 at 5:30PM (UTC +8) via Zoom. Dr Randle's talk marks the 100th lecture since the Department of Geography initiated the Heo/Geo Lecture Series which is the rebranded name after earlier iterations.

Moving between shower drains, aqueducts, rain gardens, and even kitchen sinks, Replumbing the City traces the enormous urban waterscape of Los Angeles in a state of flux. For more than a century, the city of Los Angeles has relied on faraway water for the vast majority of its municipal supply, but climate change is making these distant sources much less dependable. To adapt, Angelenos - including city engineers, advocates at NGOs, and residents - are developing new water supplies within the space of the city. Sayd Randle’s ethnography examines the labor of replumbing LA’s sprawling water system, detailing how a desire to sustain unlimited and uninterrupted water provision for paying customers is reshaping the urban environment and its management. Tracking how such projects redistribute the work of water management, the book explores thorny questions of how the labor of climate adaptation should be mobilized and valued.

Sayd Randle is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Singapore Management University. Trained as an environmental anthropologist, she studies processes of urban ecological transformation with a focus on infrastructure, water, and climate change. Her peer-reviewed research has been published in a wide range of outlets, including American Anthropologist, Antipode, City & Society, Environment and Planning E, Journal of Political Ecology, and WIREs Water.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a monthly lecture given by academic scholars, field-based geography practitioners, members of the local community, and spatial justice advocates to share their knowledge- and practice-based research undertakings. Jointly presented by the UP Department of Geography and PGS, the Heo/Geo Lecture Series which previously underwent several iterative rebranding positions geography as a discipline that not only straddles the realms of natural/physical and social sciences, humanities, political ecologies, regional and area studies, GI technologies and geospatial storytelling, it is also a vibrant and convivial space that welcomes multiplicities and plural voices. The name Heo/Geo is itself an accommodation to the various understandings, meanings and pronunciations of geography in its indigenous and vernacular forms and the Anglicized name that has since been adapted in the local lexicon. 

This Heo/Geo Lecture is presented by the Environment and Development Geographies (EDGE) research group of the Department and is in line with the SDG #11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), and #15 (Life on Land) of the United Nations.

To participate in the lecture, please click this link to register: https://tinyurl.com/yvtantve

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References:

Randle, S. (2022). Holding water for the city: Emergent geographies of storage and the urbanization of nature. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 5(4), 2283-2306. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211047387

Randle, S. (2025). Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles. University of California Press.