Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2026-10: Kenneth Cardenas on the geography of possibility

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

Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2024-06: Scholar-activists discuss various forms of radicalized geographies

In reviewing and evaluating the genealogy of development studies, professor, geographer and former chair of the Royal Geographical Society Uma Kothari emphasizes critical lenses and perspectives to challenge orthodoxies and highlighting "those concealed, critical discourses that have been written out of conventional stories of development or marginalized in mainstream accounts of ideas that have influenced contemporary understandings of development thought" (2019, 1). 

For the sixth Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2024, an onsite forum will take place -- a first since March 2020. The Forum on Radical Geographies brings together five scholar-activists in a panel that chronicles counter-cultural, radical, anarchist and emancipatory stories and narratives emanating from fieldwork in South Africa, the United States, Colombia and the Philippines. Happening on Friday, 28 June 2024 in PH 207 at 3:00 in the afternoon, with the following lineup of speakers:

Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City

Yousuf Al-Bulushi, University of California-Irvine

How are poor people in South Africa confronting the persistent legacy of apartheid spatial segregation? And what can movements across the world engaged in a global struggle against racial capitalism learn from the South African experience? This talk explores the relationship between shack dwellers and the African National Congress (ANC)-led government in South Africa. Grounded in the local realities of the struggle for housing and basic survival, the project makes broader interventions in national, continental and global debates about urban geography, African studies, social movements, and race. I argue that the shack settlement is emblematic of a democratic South Africa still profoundly shaped by apartheid's afterlife.

Yousuf Al-Bulushi teaches in the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. His research engages political economy, political geography, and anti-systemic movements.

The Story of the Lungs, or How Atmospheric Racism Becomes Embodied

Pavithra Vasudevan, University of Texas-Austin

In these excerpts from my book, A Toxic Alchemy, I adopt Frantz Fanon’s description of colonialism as “atmospheric” violence to describe how racism becomes embodied through the inhalation of contaminated air. For Black workers in a southern US company town, whose lungs toiled to maintain life under the burden of toxic wastes, respiratory distress is symptomatic of an underlying pathology: a racist world that perverts the essential matter sustaining life into a tool of systematic violence. The story of the lungs reconsiders the body as a living archive of racist environments, and examines how biomedicine, in collusion with industry, is used to deny and dismiss Black lived experience. The struggle for breath and for clean air asks us to refuse capitalist dependence on disposability and demand a reimagining of the world. 

Pavithra Vasudevan is an assistant professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She received the 2022-23 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for her first book project, A Toxic Alchemy: Race and Waste in Industrial Capitalism. Their research is grounded in creative praxis, employing performance, film, poetry and creative writing methods to reimagine scholarship as storytelling, in service to building a better world. 

Radical Performance Geography: Peace communities, international solidarity, and popular struggle in Colombia

Chris Courtheyn, Boise State University

This talk describes rural peace communities in Colombia and international solidarity activists who accompany their resistance to armed conflict, displacement, state violence, and capitalist extraction. I analyze nonviolent peace communities’ role in broader popular struggle in Colombia, in an effort to invite parallels and discussion about zones of peace and resistance to United States imperialism in the Philippines (as well as Palestine and beyond). Finally, I describe the methodology I call ‘Radical Performance Geography,’ which combines performance ethnography, radical geography, and feminist geopolitics as a spatially-focused form of participatory action research.

Chris Courtheyn is Associate Professor in the School of Public Service at Boise State University. He earned his PhD in Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds a BA in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Community of Peace: Performing Geographies of Ecological Dignity in Colombia.

Being Human is a Barrier: Work and Obsolescence in the Logistics Economy

Stevie Larson

Logistics is rapidly becoming one of the principal sectors of global employment, yet the operations and impact of logistics work remain largely occluded to the general public. In this talk I draw from excerpts of a manuscript in progress to highlight how the rising demands of online retail are transforming the fundamentals of this labor. Based on an ethnography of working at multiple Amazon warehouses over two years, I illustrate how both employers and employees increasingly participate in this field as a transactional economy of flex work, subcontracting and gigs - a logic of 'planned obsolescence' that heightens the contradictions of late capitalism.

Stevie Larson is a writer based in Atlanta, Georgia and former professor of sociology at Spelman College. As a member of the Team Colors Collective, Larson co-authored the book Wind(s) from Below: Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible and co-edited the anthology Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States. He is currently writing a manuscript on labor and logistics called No Mercy in the Land of Deliverance: Working at Amazon.

The Agrarian Question of Semi-Feudalism in the Philippines
Sarah Raymundo, University of the Philippines-Diliman
This intervention tackles semi-feudalism—-as both an analytical concept and a historical product of social investigation and class analysis—-that partly yet significantly frames the theory and practice of national liberation struggle in the Philippines.

Sarah Raymundo is an Assistant Professor at the UP Center for International Studies. She is the President of the Philippine-Bolivarian Venezuela Friendship Association. She undertakes political and educational campaigns with BAYAN as part of its National Executive Council. She organizes for the International League of Peoples Struggles.

Sponsored by the UP Department of Geography through the Human Geography research cluster, the Philippine Geographical Society and co-sponsored by the UP Center for International Studies, the Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a space of convergence where academics, activists, civil society and local collectives share stories and engage in conversations on topics that intersect broadly geographical inquiries in both theory and praxis. This forum continues the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the UP Department of Geography (1983-2023).

Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2023-15: Jely Galang on the 19th century deportation of Chinese criminals in the colony's frontier

The state-sanctioned criminals had a checkered past in the history of the world in their banishment to sparsely inhabited terrains. Serving various state-ordered directives such as these castaways' rehabilitation, sending them to the far fringes also tests the limits of control of the state to newly acquired territories. The Spanish colonial government in the Philippines did the same during the nineteenth century: it invariably banished hundreds of Chinese criminals—vagrants, drunkards, beggars, idlers, pickpockets and unemployed—to far-flung places, especially in the southern part of the archipelago. 

In observance of the 40th anniversary of the Department of Geography as an academic unit at the University of the Philippines, the Department in tandem with the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) presents the 15th lecture for 2023 through the Heo/Geo Lecture Series. Dr Jely Galang will speak on Friday, 10 November 2023 at 5:30PM via Zoom. His presentation entitled Chinese Criminals and the Frontier in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines, traces the historico-geographical morphology of these territories in the Philippines during the Spanish era.

Apart from being a form of punishment and a means to rehabilitate these social outcasts, deportation also served as a tool of the state in occupying and pacifying the colony’s “frontier” or sparsely populated areas which were usually newly-acquired territories that existed beyond the authorities’ direct control. This presentation will revolve around the following questions: Who were these criminals? What mechanisms were involved in their forced transportation? How did such measures contribute to the economic and socio-spatial transformations of the receiving locales?

Dr Jely Galang is an associate professor of History at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. He currently serves as the Deputy Director of the UP Third World Studies Center and Editor-in-Chief of the Chinese Studies Journal. His research interests include the nineteenth century Philippines, Chinese in Southeast Asia, modern history of China and history of crime and punishment.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a rebranded forum for the intellectual sharing of ideas and practices of  geographers (academic, industry, alumni community) and geography-adjacent scholars for our students, staff and faculty. Jointly managed by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society, the forum has invited speakers who variously shared state-of-the art geotechnologies as well as provide intellectual provocations regarding new conceptions of space and place from disaster studies and participatory mapping, to geohumanities and island and archipelagic geographies. 

To participate in the lecture, please register using this link. Or you can copy this URL to your browser: https://tinyurl.com/4ubxmcxs

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Human Geography (HuG) research cluster of the UP Department of Geography.

Geography Webbynar #3 (2021-2022) – Jesus Federico Hernandez on place-based lexicon

How is language entrenched in places and landscapes?

The UP Department of Geography Webbynar Series is proud to present the final lecture for 2021 by Prof Jesus Federico Hernandez from the UP Department of Linguistics. The talk is via Zoom on Saturday, 4 December 2021 at 2:00PM.

The lecture entitled Reconstituting space: Exploring place lexicon in Philippine languages will focus on particular lexical items within the domain of place that are pan-Philippine or are shared across various Philippine ethnolinguistic groups. Lexical cognancy with non-Philippine languages within the Austronesian language family will also be explored. It is hoped that understanding how the concept of place is coded in the lexicon, markers, and affixes will provide insights into our indigenous place-making system.

Jesus Federico C. Hernandez is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and coordinator of the Folklore Studies Program of the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy of the University of the Philippines. His research interest includes Philippine languages and culture history, the documentation of endangered languages in the Philippines, and Philippine folklore. He is a board member of the Asian Association for Lexicography and a member of the Linguistic Society of the Philippines. Outside of work, he is a part-time hermit.

To participate in the Geography Webbynar, click this link or paste this URL link to your browser https://bit.ly/3peIuKa

This webinar is co-sponsored by the Philippine Geographical Society and the UP Department of Linguistics.