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
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