Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2023-03: Philippe Rekacewicz on the radical potentials of cartography

Maps are a powerful way to reflect the world as we see it, rather than what it really is. In this context, they act as a “dreaming machine” with which we can mix reality with our fantasy. 

For the third Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2023, geographer, cartographer, and information designer Dr Philippe Rekacewicz will provide a critical overview of the map as an invention, multidimensional, complex, and systemic object, and as a powerful tool for representing diverse sources of information (quantitative and qualitative data), as well as emotions.

Philippe's Heo/Geo lecture, entitled Radical and Experimental Practices in Cartography, on Tuesday, the 7th of March 2023 at 5:30PM Philippine Standard Time (10:30AM CET), is a joint project of the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society. The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a forum for academic geographers and geography-adjacent scholars as well as geospatial industry practitioners to share their research and projects that survey multi-scalar publics. This lecture is also in line with the year-long activities of the UP Department of Geography for its 40th year anniversary (1983-2023).

Philippe Rekacewicz is a French geographer who co-published a book entitled Cartographie radicale: Explorations with Nepthys Zwer in 2022. After the completion of his study in geography at the University of Paris la Sorbonne, he became a permanent collaborator of the international newspaper Le Monde diplomatique in Paris until 2014. From 1996 to 2007, he was also heading the cartographic unit of a relocated office of the United Nations Environment Programme in Norway and was associated with various international initiatives with the UNDP and OSCE. Since 2014, he has been involved in projects linking art and cartography with art museums, research institutes, and international organizations. He is co-coordinator, with Philippe Rivière, of the website visionscarto.net, a research website dedicated to “radical and experimental cartography and geography”. Since January 2017, he acts as an associate researcher at the Department of Anthropology for the University of Helsinki for the program “Crosslocations” - 2017-2022. Currently, he is affiliated with the Social Science Group at the Wageningen University & Research for the Programme Embodied Ecologies.

To register for the lecture, please register through this link or through this link: https://tinyurl.com/pvsd3jtn

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Geography 293 (Cultures of Mapping and Countercartographies) graduate class, 2nd semester 2022-23.

ICGS 2022: Time and deadlines and Abstract Submission

"Time does not bring relief, you all have lied..." 

That's Edna St Vincent Millay berating humanity for reminding her that she'll soon forget a missing loved one. But Edna, time is not only contextual and relational, it can be final as well. Like deadlines. Someone once said that a deadline is negative inspiration. Excuses, excuses.

Speaking of deadlines, the 'negative inspiration' for abstract submission for the International Conference on Geographical Studies 2022 remains unchanged (and will not be extended). It is Saturday, 15 October 2022. Our theme remains the same: Emotional Geographies: Passion in the Geographical. 

Read our original call here. Versions of the original call are also here and here. 

From ficto-critical geographies to marine ecologies, aging demographies to emotional cartographies, monstrosities to green cities, novels to hovels, let's hear from you. Submit your abstracts on time. 

And although Millay said that time may not bring relief, José Saramago expressed it this way: time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place.

The rightful place for your abstract submission is https://tinyurl.com/ICGS2022Abstracts

ICGS 2022: Grief and Mourning and Abstract Submission

"The first thing I feel when I see the lagoons is sadness." 

That came from an indigenous Mixteca fisherwoman living in the Pacific Coast of Oaxaca, grieving over the loss of her community's lagoons due largely to neoliberal policies. Geographies of grieving are "spaces of complex collective loss due to multiple interconnected forms of violence" (Aguilera, 2022). 

The demise of nature have been well-documented by geographers who narrated various environmental losses from the Anthropocene. Grief and mourning have also been mobilised as an analytic to bear witness to painful emotions (Head, 2016) and as space to narrate stories of "the dead and dying in relation to the living" (van Dooren, 2014).

In the upcoming International Conference on Geographical Studies 2022 (ICGS) from 10-11 November 2022 with a theme Emotional Geographies: Passion in the Geographical, the Philippine Geographical Society welcomes abstracts that acknowledge the alternative spaces occupied by grief and mourning. It can be about the empty space phenomenon, anticipatory grief, how more-than-humans mourn, private memorials in public spaces, and storying losses from a broken heart.

We also welcome other topics that address and intersect a broader understanding how emotion, compassion, friendship, care and the various affective dimensions of space manifest in multiple contexts. See our original call for papers here.

Send your 250-word abstracts by 15 October 2022 to this link, or simply click this: https://tinyurl.com/ICGS2022Abstracts. 

We also welcome organised panel sessions, cartographical exhibits, film screenings, and book discussions. Our conference is a space for analysis, catharsis, exchanges, finding meanings, breathing hope to various broken hearts. As writer Stephen Crane once wrote:

... I like it

Because it is bitter,

And because it is my heart.

Geography Webbynar #2 (2022-2023): Ryan Alvin Pawilen discusses houses, emotions and folklore

Gaston Bachelard once said: "the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace."

For the second Geography Webbynar of the UP Department of Geography, for academic year 2022-2023, Assistant Professor Ryan Alvin Pawilen will deliver a talk entitled Housing Culture and Emotions: A Countermapping Exercise with the Laguna Historical Data Papers, 1950s on Thursday, 13 October 2022 at 5:00PM.

Drawing from cultural geography, social anthropology, and cultural history, the focus is on the cultural role of the house as a series of chambers echoing folklore and emotions. Utilizing the Historical Data Papers compiled during the 1950s, Prof Pawilen investigates house-related beliefs in Laguna. Emotions evoked by beliefs will be explored together with a (counter)mapping of interior rooms following theoretical inspirations from cultural and feminist geographers. By using folklore as source, this presentation depicts an intimate place that houses private experiences which connect them to the public sphere through shared cultural beliefs. By adding the aspect of emotions, the resulting maps support the idea that the house is not necessarily the home, and that the home is not a static and purely positive place. The house can also be a physical manifestation or mental image filled with frustration, disappointments, sadness, and even power struggles.

Prof Pawilen is an assistant professor of the Division of History, Department of Social Sciences, University of the Philippines Los Baños. He completed his degrees in Social Sciences (Social Anthropology and Psychology) at the University of the Philippines Baguio. He also obtained his MA in Philippine Studies from the Asian Center, University of the Philippines Diliman and currently a PhD student in History with cognates in Geography from the same university. His research interests include social and cultural history, martial arts, intercultural interaction, and heritage.

To participate in this lecture, please register by clicking this link or through this link: https://tinyurl.com/3nzfbwf3

This Geography Webbynar is co-sponsored by the Philippine Geographical Society and the UP CSSP Folklore Studies Program. 

ICGS 2022: Love and Invitation for Abstract Submission

What do we do when we talk about love? 

We compose songs, we make films, we write poems. Or we dance across differences, imagine radical futures, empathise with political struggles. 

Or begin by writing an abstract about love in its various iterations: nationalistic, romantic, erotic, maternal, material, spatial, ontological, animal and liminal, for the International Conference on Geographical Studies 2022 the theme of which is Emotional Geographies: Passion in the Geographical. 

Love is just one of the topics that we accept for our conference. Read our original call for papers here: 

ICGS 2022 will take place virtually on 10-11 November 2022. You can still submit your abstracts to us until 15 October 2022 via this link: https://tinyurl.com/ICGS2022Abstracts

So come and join us. As Lacan once said: "to speak of love is in itself a jouissance". And in support of this jouissance, we invite you to interpellate aspects of geography to affect, emotions, intimacies, ethics, care, and politics. 

As poet Joi Barrios says in 'Leaving Home'

I speak and my love

does not hear

what I say,

what I do not say.

ICGS 2022 - Emotional Geographies: Passion in the Geographical

ICGS 2022

Emotional Geographies: Passion in the Geographical

10-11 November 2022

The late Yi-Fu Tuan (1930-2022) argued that “much of human life is… driven by passion—by the desire to reach what is out of reach or even beyond reach” (2014, p. 4). 

First drawing breath from informal circles and intellectual niches among cultural and feminist geographers, the passion behind the emplacement of emotions in geographical research and fieldwork and in formal channels became the spark plug that ignited its emergence in the academy. In 2009, feminist and political geographer Joanne Sharp observed: “It has been noted that this interest in emotion may be a reflection of changes in contemporary society where neoliberal notions of the internalized individual have made emotion a commodity to be consumed as a spectacle or a target for therapeutic intervention” (2009, p. 76). The conditions that made possible the recognition of emotion in geographical research spring from the transformative and emancipatory dimensions of fieldwork from cultural and feminist geographers whose research intersect public-private boundaries that accommodate both the expressed and the inexpressible and other ‘affective flows and rhythms’ (Tolia-Kelly, 2006).

Research that both intersect and incorporate emotion have been explored in multiple publics and discursive spaces: Sarah Wright’s research among agricultural workers in Negros Occidental to Lou Angeli Ocampo’s fieldwork among miners in Benguet. In both cases, the spaces of precarity are interwoven with gender, class, and agency. But there is also space that allows affective explorations like Danny Dorling’s work on kindness, and ethical reflections that navigate tricky terrains when claims such as "our hearts are in the right place, but it’s still not coming together” (Frankenberg, 1993) further complicate various intersectionalities.

This year’s International Conference on Geographical Sciences (ICGS) is enabling the deepening, broadening, and enrichment of our understanding of emotion and its deployment in and through multiple geographical practices, from field-based research and activist work to various pedagogies that straddle human, transhuman, post-human and more-than-human relationalities.

Topics and interventions that use, deploy, and mobilize emotions are encouraged for paper presentations, panel sessions, film screenings, map curations, art installations, book discussions, formations of reading groups, Q&As, and performances. 

Among possible areas of explorations within global and local frameworks include:

• Emotional geographies in research, field work and pedagogies

• Sentiments and affective publics

• Stories, storytelling, and geonarratives 

• Dwelling, housekeeping, homelessness

• Affective geographies of care 

• Emotional cartographies and the making and unmaking of self

• More-than-human, transhuman, and post-human relationalities

• Visualizing and curating people’s intimate and emotional data

• Mappings of the spectral and the unseen

• Romantic and passionate geographies

• Radical and activist community-based fieldwork and practice

• Place and emotions among older adults 

• Feminist and Marxist geographical praxis

• Therapeutic landscapes, spaces of healing

• Kindness and care-ful spatialities  

• Alternative body politic of place 

• Topophilia and geographies of love

• Violent geographies of the everyday

• Dis/abilities, dementia, and later life geographies

• Emotion and affect in nightscapes and nocturnal landscapes

• Emotional geohumanities, and literary geographies

• Geographies of grief, mourning, and bereavement

• Trans, queer and non-binary identification and sexualities

• Nature and environmental ethics

• Affective natures, ecologies, physical geographies, physiographies 

• Death, dying and final geographies of care

• Carceral geographies and spatialities

• Heterotopic spaces of pandemic isolation and the ‘new normal’

• Labor and geographies of work

• Emotional geographies of hazards and disasters

• In/out of place and narratives of outsiderness

• Spatialities of pleasure

• Horror geographies and abjection

• Diasporic and migrant stories 

To participate in ICGS 2022, here are the following guidelines:

For paper presentations, please submit the following:

- 250-word abstract

- 3-5 keywords

- Presenters and co-presenters’ names, affiliations, email addresses, bionotes

For panel sessions that feature, address, and engage with social, critical, and theoretical issues relevant to geography, submit panel session proposals with the following information:

- 200-word abstract

- 3-5 keywords

- Names of at least 3 panelists, with email addresses, affiliations, and bionotes

Submit individual abstracts and panel session proposals on or before 15 October 2022. Notification of abstract acceptance is on 22 October 2022. 

ICGS 2022 runs from 10-11 November 2022 and will be held remotely. All presentations are to be recorded. These 15-minute video recordings are due on 5 November 2022. Those exceeding 15 minutes will be returned to paper presenters and will only be accepted when the 15-minute videos are re-submitted.

All submissions should be sent via this link: https://tinyurl.com/ICGS2022Abstracts

For inquiries, contact the ICGS 2022 Secretariat at icgs.ph@gmail.com. For updates, please visit our social media accounts:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/pgs_ph

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