Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2026-11: Jayson Chun on music and culture in the Asia Pacific region

What is the Pop Pacific?

The Pop Pacific describes a sphere of exchange in Asian popular music and culture that runs across the Pacific Ocean and within Asia itself, built over more than a century of contact across borders, empires, and diasporas. 

This month's talk, jointly sponsored by the Philippine Geographical Society and the UP Department of Geography, is the 11th for the Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2026. Happening on Monday, 19 October 2026 at 1:00PM Philippine Standard Time (7:00PM Hawai'i Standard Time, 18 October), Dr Jayson Makoto Chun from the University of Hawai'i - West O'ahu will deliver a talk entitled The Pop Pacific: A transnational cultural sphere of the US, Japan, Korea and the Philippines. This talk follows one strand of the Pop Pacific's web: the transnational role of the United States, with popular music as the case study, moving from the Philippines to Japan to Korea, with a stop in China.

The United States played an outside role in this music's development, but local musicians localized it and spread their own versions across the region. After the Philippines became a US colony in 1898, Filipino musicians on cruise ships carried jazz through port cities across Asia. After World War II, US base clubs in Japan and Korea trained the musicians who built the talent-agency system still running J-pop and K-pop today. J-pop grew out of City Pop, a sound shaped by African American funk and soul, before becoming a genre of its own. K-pop developed in the 1990s and is now a major part of Asia's music scene. The Manila Sound turned homegrown Tagalog pop into a source of national pride in the 1970s, the same pattern P-pop acts like SB19 follow now. In China, Teresa Teng was banned on the mainland, yet her cassette tapes crossed over from Hong Kong anyway. No popular culture in Asia grew up alone but rather took shape in contact with others.

Jayson Makoto Chun is a professor at the University of Hawai'i–West O'ahu, specializing in Asian history. He is coeditor and writer for Pop Pacific (https://blog.iias.asia/pop-pacific), a blog on transnational popular culture hosted by the International Institute for Asian Studies. He is the author of "A Nation of a Hundred Million Idiots"?: A Social History of Japanese Television, 1953-1973 (2006), along with several articles on J-pop and K-pop. He currently serves as guest editor for a special issue of Education About Asia on Asian popular culture. 

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 2019, and facilitated by the various research clusters of the UP Department of Geography. This talk is presented by the Media, Literary Geographies and Geohumanities (MELANGE) research cluster, in line with the SDG #4 (Quality Education) of the United Nations.

To participate in the lecture, register to this link: https://tinyurl.com/2hjkbzd7

ICGS 2026: Last Call for Abstract Submission (Third Call)

In a playful mapping project undertaken by three geographers, kites were deployed instead of drones and GPS, to gather data. In an effort to democratize cartography, this analogue-adjacent project relies on citizen science, crowdsourcing and the ethos of participation. More importantly, Jiří Pánek, Vít Pászto and Chris Perkins are just as interested in the affectual and emotional geographies that this creative methodology engendered to the researchers who participated. 

If kites are stories, perhaps kite-flyers and kite-makers are storytellers. 

Stories need storytellers, so to all academics, storytellers, cartographers, artists, marine ecologists, writers and kite-flyers: there is still time to send us your abstracts for the International Conference on Geographical Studies (ICGS) for 2026, before the submission link closes automatically on 30 September 2026. This year’s theme is Stories, Places: Storying, Storytelling and Storymaking Worlds. To read our original calls for abstract, click here and here.

Approach this call for abstract as akin to storytelling a narrative that unfolded a long time ago or continue to unfold as we speak. As Rebecca Solnit opines in Whose Story Is This: “[let’s] make a society in which everyone’s story gets told” (2019, 89). So send us your stories about aquatic ecologies and ludic geographies, whimsical wayfinding and transversal multitudes. Whether they are set in upland mining communities, mangrove barangays or urban coffeeshops, you decide on the scale, site and situation. They can also be sites of tension and rupture, as Maria Borovnik in storying the Tarawera region she encountered in New Zealand, mused: "the full story of this place will not be adequately understood" (2026, 101). Send us those stories-so-far, too!

Click this link to send your abstract. Results of abstract acceptance will be sent to your email by 16 October. You can also reach us via icgs.ph@gmail.com

Works Cited:

Maria Borovnik (2026). Relating: Storying Atmosphere of Place, Stories of Place: Geographies of Meaning, Memory and Connection, Palgrave Macmillan.

Jiří Pánek, Vít Pászto and Chris Perkins (2018). Flying a kite: playful mapping in a multidisciplinary field-course, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 42(3), 317-336.

Rebecca Solnit (2019). Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters, Haymarket Books.

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.