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: 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

Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2026-05: Kevin Fox on geographic inquiries initiated by the Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute

When Derek Gregory published Geographical Imaginations in 1994, the book puts emphasis on relational understanding of individual worlds as intertwined with global-universalisms. Gregory was not the first one to discuss permutations of imagination in relation to geography. Hugh Prince, David Harvey, Yi-Fu Tuan, Katherine McKittrick and Jen Jack Gieseking added different interpretations, case studies, and situated ecologies to expand the scope and reach of geographical imaginations. 

It is perhaps in this spiritual vein that Kevin Fox's version of geographical imagination as formalized by founding The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute (The GIEI), stems from pluralizing the concept (like Gregory) and providing multi-scalar and multi-cultural examples of meaning-making that situate individuals and collectives in space and place.

For the fifth Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2026, the Department of Geography (DGeog) of the University of the Philippines-Diliman together with the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) proudly present a talk: Inner Geographies: Imagination, Experience, and Global Citizenship by Kevin Fox on Friday, 24 April 2026. To be delivered via Zoom, the talk starts at 5:30PM-Philippine Standard Time (11:30AM CET). 

The talk introduces the work of The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute (The GIEI), a non-profit initiative working across three interconnected geographical dimensions: the global, the local, and the inner. The GIEI translates key ideas from human geography into accessible and participatory forms, expanding popular understandings of geography to include the internal dimensions of perception, imagination, and meaning-making that shape how individuals locate themselves within an interconnected planet.

The name draws inspiration from the Detroit Geographical Expedition & Institute (1968–1971), an experiment in local, community-based geography that sought to democratize knowledge production and center marginalized perspectives.  Building on this legacy, The GIEI extends geographic inquiry inward, treating the inner world as a legitimate site of exploration. From this foundation, it develops participatory approaches to global citizenship education through interconnected practices including research, storytelling, simulation, advocacy, and lexicon-building.

Central to this work is The World as a Village of 100 People, a civic-assembly simulation that translates global inequalities into lived, dialogic experience. The process unfolds across three phases—orientation, imagination, and transformation—guiding participants from understanding global systems, to inhabiting diverse perspectives, to collectively envisioning alternative futures.

Moving from The GIEI’s earlier work in visual and audio storytelling toward a broader institutional vision (The GIEI 2.0), the talk reflects on the shift from project-based initiatives to the design of scalable frameworks for global citizenship learning.

Kevin S. Fox is a human geographer and the founder and director of The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute. With over 20 years of experience in global citizenship education, his work explores how individuals and communities understand their place within an interconnected world. He has developed programs that integrate storytelling, simulation, and field-based learning to make global systems more accessible and participatory. A National Geographic Grosvenor Teacher Fellow and Inner Development Goals Ambassador, he works at the intersection of human geography, critical pedagogy, and imagination to advance new models of global learning. Originally from Connecticut (USA), he currently lives on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a monthly resource talk / lecture given by academic geographers, geography-adjacent scholars, practitioners working in geospatial industries, and partners that engaged in multiple publics, and based locally and abroad. The talk ranges from the sharing of research findings to pedagogical practices and field-based experiences. This month’s Heo/Geo Lecture Series is facilitated by two research clusters at the UP Department of Geography: Human Geography (HUG) and Media, Literary Geographies, and Geohumanities (MELANGE) and is in line with the SDG #4 (Quality Education) of the United Nations.

To participate in the event, click this link to register. You can also click this link: https://tinyurl.com/4bmbjrz2

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Works cited:

Fox, Kevin S. The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute

https://www.geographicalimaginations.org/about/ 

Gieseking, Jen Jack. 2017. Geographical Imagination. In International Encyclopedia of Geography (eds. D. Richardson, N.Castree, M. Goodchild, A. Jaffrey, W. Liu, A. Kobayashi, and R. Marston). New York: Wiley-Blackwell and the Association of American Geographers.

Gregory, Derek. 1994. Geographical imaginations, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Harvey, David. 1973. Social Justice and the City. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Prince, Hugh C. 1962. The Geographical Imagination. Landscape 11: 22–25. 

Tua, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press.

Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2025-12: Jessica Jacobs on the use of filmmaking and storytelling in community-led projects

In a Film Quarterly interview in 1970, Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha extolled that "we must be able to conceive of people all over making films in any form, in any shape, in any manner ... in every different way." His exhortation might as well apply to the newer and more progressive call to involve communities in employing film to tell local narratives using site-specific modes of production. In geography, the shift to the digital somehow opened up different modes and approaches in visual storytelling. Geographer and filmmaker Jessica Jacobs said that because "film is ... integral to the way people in the 21st century understand their world ... [it] helps geographers achieve a better understanding of how we experience our lived environment" (2016, p. 453).

For the 12th and last Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2025, the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) together with Film Geographies (Films in Place), the Film Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), the Geographic Society of UP (GeogSoc) and the Junior Philippine Geographical Society (JPGS) present Place-making intangible heritage and climate mitigation with storytelling to be delivered by Jessica Jacobs on Thursday, the 4th of December 2025 at 5:00PM in Pavilion 2248. In her presentation, Dr Jacobs will talk about the research endeavor called Storytelling for All.

Storytelling for All was a community-led research project providing heritage focused filmmaking workshops to Bedouin communities in the South Sinai. The films created from this project include a series of short felted animations made by Bedouin women from St, Catherine's and Dahab. Each film offers a different story of a unique place, told by the people who live there.

The project set out to critically engage with the ways in which Bedouin cultural heritage, particularly women’s heritage, has been romanticized, extracted, or rendered invisible within national development agendas, tourism economies, and Eurocentric academic frameworks (Jacobs 2020). While there is a reasonable amount of digital content available online about Bedouin culture, the vast majority of it is about men and produced by men. This presentation argues that community practices of handcrafting held by women are a form of matrilineal knowledge transfer that, if adapted for digital use, can contribute to a future oriented practice able to support climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as being a form of engagement with a hard to reach community that can contribute more broadly to sustainable economic development.

For her presentation, Dr Jacobs will discuss the films produced by the project and argue that the stories they contain not only offer advice on sustainable practices for climate change mitigation and adaptation they also show us vital the role of matrilineal intergenerational knowledge transfer is, in keeping this knowledge, alive.

The Heo/Geo Lecture by Dr Jacobs is preceded by a 2-hour film workshop called 'Crafting Your Research Story with Film' from 2:30-4:30PM on 4 December in Pavilion 2248. To join in this workshop, please click this link to participate, or just paste this link to your browser: https://forms.gle/zzE6UQ8CajhRhHXr6

Dr Jacobs is a Research Fellow at the Queen Mary University of London. Her work focuses on heritage and tourism in the Middle East with a particular interest in how heritage is visualized, remembered and enacted through the production of tourist space. Dr Jacobs' research methods and outputs use filmmaking, creative mapping and other community focused strategies that aim to engage a wider audience within the scope of academic research and knowledge production.

Dr Jacobs is the founder of Film Geographies, an online forum for films and filmmaking as a form of academic practice and knowledge production. Film Geographies organise two annual calls for films AAG Shorts and RGS-IBG Shorts, to promote films by geographers and films about geography. Founded in 2016, Film Geographies now have over 150 films online.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a monthly lecture given by academic scholars, field-based geography practitioners, members of the local community, and spatial justice advocates to share their knowledge- and practice-based research undertakings. Jointly presented by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS), the Heo/Geo Lecture Series which previously underwent several iterative rebranding, emplaces geography as a discipline that not only straddles the realms of natural/physical and social sciences, humanities, political ecologies, regional and area studies, GI technologies and geospatial storytelling, it is also a vibrant and convivial space that welcomes multiplicities and a plurality of voices. The name Heo/Geo is itself an acknowledgment of the various understandings, meanings and pronunciations of geography in its indigenous and vernacular forms as well as the Anglicized name that has since been adopted and adapted to the local lexicon.

Dr Jacobs's lecture is the inaugural MELANGE Lecture speaker presented by the MELANGE research group of the UP Department of Geography. MELANGE stands for Media, Literary Geographies and Geohumanites, and the lecture is in line with the SDGs #4 (Quality Education), and #13 (Climate Action) of the United Nations.

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Notes:

Gordon Hitchens (1970). The Way to Make a Future: A Conversation with Glauber Rocha, Film Quarterly, 24.1 (Autumn, 1970), pp. 27-30.

Jessica Jacobs. (2020). Fabricating herstory: Using embroidery to map Bedouin tribal borders in South Sinai. Journal of Arts & Communities, 11.1-2, pp. 109-127.

Jessica Jacobs (2016). Filmic geographies: the rise of digital film as aresearch method and output, Area, 48.4, pp. 452–454.