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
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