Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2025-06: Joycel Dabalos on the literary imagination of disaster

How does fiction imagine a disaster? How does the imagined disaster disturb/redefine the Filipino concept of family? 

For the sixth Heo/Geo Lecture for 2025, Joycel Vincent Dabalos' talk titled Rain and River: How Fiction Imagines Disaster and Disappearance, shares how he creatively wrote his two young adult stories populated with Filipino characters dealing with the wrath of disaster while carrying their distinct (yet playful) Filipino family identities. The lecture which is co-presented by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) will include his writing politics—how he perceives tangible world and how his stories offer an alternative world. The talk will take place via Zoom on Friday, 20 June 2025 at 5:30PM.

Joycel Vincent V. Dabalos is a creative writer and literature educator. He penned "Kulimlim: Mga Imahen ng Paglaho" (2024) and "Heterotopic Dissidences" (2025). He is currently completing his PhD in Philippine Studies (Presidential Scholarship Grant) at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. He obtained his MA in Language and Literature from De La Salle University Manila. He is a fellow for maikling kuwento of the 12th Palihang Rogelio Sicat held at UP Los Baños. His poems have been featured in the Heights Ateneo, Kawing Journal, and panitikan.ph. His latest poem "The Long History of Virus" will be published in ANI 42, the literary journal of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. His research interests span heterotopic spaces, queer disaster, narrative theory, literary ecology, and creative writing.

Jointly presented by the Geographies of Disasters and Hazards (G-DASH) and Media, Literary Geographies and Geohumanities (MELANGE) research clusters of the UP Department of Geography, the talk satisfies the Social Development Goals of United Nations Sustainable Development especially #4 (Quality Education) and #15 (Life on Land). 

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series started out as the Brown Bag Lecture Series/Geography Webbynar but later rebranded as Heo/Geo to accommodate the multiple ways Geografia/Heograpiya is perceived. The lecture series in its present iteration serves and provides a space where practical, discursive and embodied discussions and performativities from academic geographers, geography-adjacent scholars, practitioners and civil society can come together and share ideas to popularise the discipline of geography.

To register for the lecture, please click this link to participate.

Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2023-08: Trisha Remetir on pipeline as metaphor

The pipeline—as a carrier of oil, water, or fiberoptic cables—is a military infrastructure that brings dispersed geographical sites in political and economic relation. 

Lowered onto seabeds or buried underground, pipelines change ecologies and shape relations in invisible yet irrevocable ways. But as a literary metaphor, the pipeline can be a tool for noticing submerged connections between literary cultures and even reveal weak nodes in organizing structures. 

For the 8th Heo/Geo Lecture Series, the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society present a talk by Dr Trisha Remetir from the University of California-Riverside. Titled, Pipeline Poetics, the lecture is on Friday, 26 May 2023 at 4:00 PM Philippine Standard Time | 12:00 AM Pacific Standard Time. 

This talk asks: what can a close consideration of pipelines reveal about contemporary Filipino literary geographies? By reading poets like Eunice Andrada alongside critical ocean studies and logistics theorists such as Liz Deloughrey, Nicole Starioselski, Charmaine Chua and Craig Santos Perez, Dr Remetir will discuss how an attention to pipelines (as physical structure and as literary metaphor) might reroute literary analysis away from focusing on experience to focusing on structure. For example, in Eunice Andrada’s 2021 poetry collection 'Take Care', an engagement with pipelines in stanza and image reveals the larger industries of capitalist extraction that require Filipino transnational labor. 

Following Filipinos along the pipeline, the talk hopes to reveal the limits of a literary analysis that is oriented towards a diasporic longing for home, and instead gestures toward spaces (such as the Gulf, the Pacific) that demand our attention and imagination.

Trisha Federis Remetir is a writer who specializes in narratives of race, extraction, and migration in and across the Pacific. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2022 and is currently a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her book project, Unfamiliar Waters, traces how extractive industries over waterscapes have influenced contemporary films, poetry, and experimental media. In her research and creative life, she is interested in witnessing the racial and environmental histories of the Philippines and connecting to other sites of environmental survival and struggle through the comparative potential of water.

This Heo/Geo lecture is part of the department's ongoing observance and celebration of the 40th anniversary of geography in Philippine academy. 

To participate for this talk, register here through this link or through this: https://up-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEvdOCqqTMuEtJQzyykGtlO0VthM35BH_WC#/registration