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.

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

Works cited

Alastair Bonnett (2015). Off the Map: Lost Spaces, Invisible Cities, Forgotten Islands, Feral Places, and what They Tell Us about the World, Aurum Press.

Fiona Miller (2026). Responding: Absence, Loss and Power, Stories of Place: Geographies of Meaning, Memory and Connection, Palgrave Macmillan.

Richard Powers (2019). The Overstory, W. W. Norton & Company

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (2020). Taiwan Travelogue, Graywolf Press.

The Storying Geography Collective (2026). Stories of Place: Geographies of Meaning, Memory and Connection, Palgrave Macmillan.