Philippine Geographical Society
2021 International Conference on Geographical Studies
November 4-5, 2021
UP Diliman (virtual)
Geographies of Care: spatialities, lives, experiences, and practices
[P]eople actually do care and ... to care is a political act. (A.H. Neely and P.J. Lopez 2020)
Nearly all of us care, because we ourselves know what it means to have our hearts cut away by life . . . (B. Kingsolver 2002)
“This is what I do, all day every day: I care,” says a character in a film entitled I Care a Lot (2020). Given the ambiguous morality of this character in the film further advances, complicates and problematises what and how care is understood, represented, lensed, imagined and analyzed from the personal and private to the public and global scales.
Geography is a caring discipline that takes the multi-scalar dimensions of care seriously. As former AAG (American Association of Geographers) president Victoria Lawson noted, geography examines climate change, ecological crises, disaster management, spatial justice, gender-ethnic divisions, spaces of exclusions, uneven development, environmental justice, extractivist capitalism, redistricting, necropolitics, among many spatialized manifestations of unevenness, inequalities and dispossessions (Lawson, 2007). These engagements speak to the substance of care that geographers involve themselves in research and practice.
For the 2021 International Conference of the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS), we wish to spotlight multiple geographies of care in its varied iterative formations. The current pandemic not only highlighted the differentiated and multitudinous experiences and encounters of Covid-19 in terms of health access, empowered civil society, vulnerabilities of bodies and precarity of lives and livelihoods, it also ushered an emerging and emergent landscape of care founded on collective and mutual aid that underscore a network of relations built on the practical and emotional provision of support. From peoples’ cartographies that map several terrains of access of health and medical care, and the radical emergence of community pantries, to care ethics that tackle and question neoliberalism’s ideological constructs that flatten nanosocial relations of care and intimate entanglements.
Care also manifest interstitially and in strange ways. For example, animal-human relations and the ethics of ‘killing’ as a form of caring in times of crisis. In some cases, informal carers who are invisible abound in places where local mores pathologise certain illnesses as taboo or not worth public discussion. Still other cases point to the silence of carers who tend to be ‘over protective’ of people with intellectual disabilities that engender hidden social geographies of care that refused to be acknowledged as care. These examples shift the landscape of care and care provision.
For this conference, we invite papers, panels, short films, map curation and performance art that detail, problematise, analyse and imagine care geographies in theoretical, relational, non-representational, artistic and performative praxis and lenses. We also seek provocative thought pieces that challenge care geographies, question geographical wisdom on topics such as distance, home space, care-giving, ‘care-ful’ geographies, or other geographical projects and practices beyond academic geography.
Topics include but not limited to:
- Place-based and emotion-based care and care-giving
- Care-ful and compassionate geographies
- Care ethics and responsibility
- Vulnerabilities of social bodies
- Caring for LGBTQI+ individuals and collectivities
- Transactional and relational care
- Emergent and radical geographies of care
- Home-spaces and challenges of living alone
- Care storying of pandemia
- Violent geographies, brutal spatialities
- Delayed and extended reciprocity of care
- Hazards,disasters,riskscapes
- Community and collective countercartographies
- Carceral geographies
- Carers’ daily geographies: routes, paths, places
- Therapeutic landscapes
- Mutual aid and radical becomings
- Human-animal relationships of care
- More-than-human relationalities
- Grieving, mourning and deathscapes
- Multi-scalar uncaring-ness and ‘false care’
- Work and precarity of labor
- Urban and peri-urban entanglements
- Adaptive mechanisms in physical ‘landscapes of despair’
- Mobilities, transportation and care infrastructures
- Children and child-friendly care
- Climate change, ecological crisis and the Anthropocene
- Media representations of landscapes of care
- Personal, digital and online geonarratives of caring
- Historical and archival geovisualizations
- Island/archipelagic entanglements
- Health care and medical tourism
- Informal caring and invisibilities
- Artistic mappings, geopoetics and performativities
- Nocturnal economies and ecologies
- Metafictive and literary GIS
- Labor in care and care-giving
- Chthulucene and ecopoetics
- Foucauldian pastoral power and state care
- Conservation management and care treatments of nature
Submit your abstracts and panel session proposals to bit.ly/ICGS2021Submissions on or before September 15, 2021.
For inquiries, send an email to the ICGS 2021 Secretariat at icgs.ph@gmail.com. The conference is co-sponsored by the UP Department of Geography.
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