ICGS 2026: Extension of Abstract Submission to 30 September (Second Call)

Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.

That quote was attributed to composer and musician Brian Eno, and whether you believe in the minimalist wisdom of that quote, or you only heed words of wisdom from ambient composers, then we are in full agreement with you. 

The deadline for abstract submission for the International Conference on Geographical Studies (ICGS) 2026 was 16 September but we at the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) and the UP Department of Geography are extending it to 30 September not because we are fans of Brian Eno (or music for airports) but we think your persuasive yet-to-be-written abstract will fully complement the engaged submissions we had already. Our theme – Stories, Places: Storying, Storytelling and Storymaking Worlds – hope to solicit abstracts that tell stories of various advocacies, research, pedagogies, situated practices, and geography-centered passion projects. Whether you plan to story-tell cartographic anomalies, quantitative-based narratives, immersive travelogues, geopoetics of movement, shifting toponymies, or aquapelagic phenomenologies, send these stories to us. Check out our original call for papers here: https://tinyurl.com/3u38kps6

Consider what Damien Rudd said in his book Sad Topographies: “Behind each place name there exists a story … and like a weathered signpost that points at a disused path, only the name remains, echoing a time immemorial” (2017, 12). Stories are powerful testaments of our past and current worlds, or of permanence and of transitory liminalities. In describing a city, Dionne Brand in A Map to the Door of No Return observed that “[a] city is not a place of origins. It is a place of transmigrations and transmogrifications” (2001, 62). But places can be encountered in its haptic messiness too, as Ivan Emil Labayne reflected on the incipient transmogrifications of a tiny place in his book Beckoning Baguio: “How … can we spell the ills of turning Igorot Park into a smelly Parking Lot? I think of personalization: locating ourselves in the issue and seeing it from that location and not in the more distanced way where we spout argumentations” (2024, 9). This is quite similar to an “intimate geography of vicinity” that Giuliana Bruno wrote about in Atlas of Emotion (2002). 

Send us your stories of possibilism, of shifting geonarratives, of postgeographic imaginaries; yes, send them to us. While long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad tells us that life is determining one’s own finish line, make sure your finish line is congruent with our new (and final) deadline: 30 September 2026. Send them to this link: http://tinyurl.com/ICGS2026AbstractSubForm

References

Brand, Dionne (2001). A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Vintage Canada.

Bruno, Giuliana (2002). Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. Verso.

Labayne, Ivan Emil (2024). Beckoning Baguio: A Decade of Walking in a City of Pines, University of Santo Tomas Publishing House.

Rudd, Damien (2017). Sad Topographies. Simon and Schuster.

Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2026-10: Kenneth Cardenas on the geography of possibility

In 2005, David Prytherch and Sallie Marston posed a question regarding an urban geography of possibility: How may we better see the potential of people and localities, where new spatial networks are forged by actors who embody and must negotiate a world of material and symbolic flows? Prytherch and Marston offer a possible first step: "[C]hallenge ... a rethinking [of] urban geography’s dominant perspectives on the city, neoclassical positivist and Marxian political-economic, and their chronic blind spot: social and cultural practice" (p. 99).

The UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) proudly present this month's Heo/Geo Lecture Series with Dr Kenneth Cardenas as speaker. This will be on Monday, 14 September 2026 at 5:30PM (Philippine Time) / 5:30AM (Eastern Standard Time) via Zoom. The talk, titled For a geography of possibility for the 21st century Philippines: Three ways of noticing, intersects some of the question's broad strokes. 

The talk suggests three ways of seeing possibility in the political economy of the early 21st century Philippines. Dr Cardenas will articulate a version of geography as a mode of knowledge attuned to unevenness and difference, uniquely positioned for reading against ‘damage-centred’ accounts of neoliberalism, underdevelopment, and inequality. Specifically, reflexive, careful attention to scale and abstraction, as dimensions to how we theorize about the Philippines, can help sensitize us to how projects of concentrating wealth and power had never fully consolidated in this place, and to the ways that non-, anti-, and post-capitalist practices co-constitute its economic and political life. 

Through completed and in-progress research on capitalism and state formation in the Philippines, the talk illustrates (1) attention to long timescales, (2) small spatial and institutional scales, and (3) unlikely comparisons across places, periods, and commodity relations as elements to a research repertoire in the aid of noticing possibility.

Dr Kenneth Cardenas completed his PhD in Geography at York University, where he remains affiliated as a research associate with the York Centre for Asian Research. He holds an MA (distinction) in Sociology from the University of Manchester, and a BA in Sociology from the University of the Philippines Diliman. His PhD dissertation, Land, infrastructure, and the new geographies of class power in the 21st century Philippines, is an urban and economic geography of the Philippines' ruling rentier class, as it has been transformed by remittances and a globally-deployed workforce. His Heo/Geo talk draws from feminist and institutional economic geographies to attend to non-, anti-, and post-capitalist possibilities, as they inhere in the Philippine landscape. See more of his work at https://kennethcardenas.com/.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series exists because of an abundance of geography-related undertakings in multiple scales. The Lecture Series which is a rebranded version earlier brown bag iterations brings together place-based ideas, intellectual provocations, and practices from scholars, geography practitioners, and communities. This monthly talk remains online to reach a broader audience, especially those outside of Metro Manila and the Philippines. It is in line with the SDG #4 (Quality Education) of the United Nations. This is also co-sponsored by the Human Geography (HUG) research cluster of the UP Department of Geography.

To participate in the lecture, use this link to register: https://tinyurl.com/y7mfud2p

Work cited: 

David L. Prytherch & Sallie A. Marston (2005) Editorial: An Urban Geography of Possibility, Urban Geography, 26:2, 97-99, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.26.2.97

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