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.

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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ICGS 2022

 Details soon!