UP Department of Geography

04/09/2026

The Environment and Development (EDGE) Research Group of the UP Department of Geography, in collaboration with Seoul National University, invites you to a special lecture on rural and urban development.

Join us on 8 September 2026 at PH 410 for a discussion featuring Edo Andriesse's 𝘙𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘐𝘯𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘗𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘺 𝘙𝘦𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘯 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘈𝘴𝘪𝘢 and Blažka Rupnik's 𝘈𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘙𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘜𝘳𝘣𝘢𝘯 𝘋𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘱𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘙𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴: 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘩 𝘒𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘢'𝘴 𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘯𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘵 𝘓𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘦𝘴.

03/09/2026

INVITATION TO APPLY FOR TEACHING POSITIONS
Deadline is on 2 October 2026 (Friday), 5 PM

03/09/2026

📢ICGS 2026 CALL FOR ABSTRACTS 🌏
International Conference on Geographical Studies
Stories, Places: Storying, Storytelling and Storymaking
13-14 November 2026
Online Conference

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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 STORYMAKING. 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
- Countercartoraphies 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

26/08/2026

Soon!

Watch out for ICGS 2026 this November!

20/08/2026

Congratulations and padayon, Team Philippines! 🏆🇵🇭

19/08/2026

HEO/GEO LECTURE SERIES (August 2026) 🌏✈️
Angelo Galindo on sense of place among Filipinos in diaspora

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In 1975, Yi-Fu Tuan argued that to know a place well requires long residence and deep involvement. “Experience takes time. Sense of place is rarely acquired in passing” (164)*. This humanistic perspective has since undergone various revisions, reiterations and reinterpretations, but this tenet’s school of thought persisted and has stood the sediments of time.

A recent research on sense of place was undertaken to explore how first-generation Filipino immigrants in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (LPGC) develop and negotiate a sense of place through emotional, cultural, and spatial practices in an island setting. On Monday, 24 August 2026 at 5:30PM, Angelo Galindo will give a talk for the Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2026: Tracing First-Generation Filipino Immigrants’ Sense of Place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Migrant Narratives and Spatial Patterns of Attachment, Identity, and Dependence. Jointly sponsored by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS), the talk — the ninth for 2026 — will be done via Zoom (5:30PM PHT / 11:30AM CEST).

Grounded in sense of place theory—the talk revisits the dimensions of place attachment, place identity, and place dependence. The study utilizes a multimodal framework for representing migrant spatial experience by combining ethnography, participatory mapping, and spatial-statistical analysis. With 14 participants, the study generated both rich qualitative narratives and 126 spatial data points for LPGC of Gran Canaria —a peripheral island setting with a demographic that remains understudied. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria is the capital of Gran Canaria Island of the Canarian archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean.

Findings reveal that, place attachment is shaped by sensory and nostalgic connections to built and natural environments as well as spiritual and social connections to people within community spaces; Place identity is enacted in intimate built environments such as churches and Filipino gathering sites spearheaded by Filipino grassroots organizations; Place dependence is strongly linked to the migrant labor landscape, migrant obligation, and the pursuit of actualization—both self and familial. Moreover, while the island setting forms a relevant spatial backdrop, it is the transnational labor experience that most significantly structures Filipino migrant sense of place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Ultimately, this study invites further work exploring multimodal approaches that foreground migrant place experiences for diasporic island contexts.

Angelo Galindo earned a BSc in Environmental Science from Ateneo de Manila University (with minors in creative writing and literature) and completed his MSc in Geography at the University of the Philippines Diliman, with a thesis on land cover change simulations and the lived experience of urban transitions. After which, Angelo pursued an Erasmus Mundus Research Master in Spatial Sciences in the University of Groningen and Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (cum laude); his thesis combined spatial narratives with spatial statistical analyses—exploring sense of place of Filipino immigrants in Spain. Prior to moving to the Netherlands, Angelo worked in local environmental consultancy firms, tech (ML) startups, government-funded research projects, and as an environmental science and GIS lecturer in the Philippines. He is currently a PhD candidate at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) where he works to reconstruct the history and spatial patterns of deforestation in the Philippines since 1850 and trace its enduring colonial legacies through archival research and spatial analyses.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a monthly event that brings together geography-focused scholars, field and industry practitioners, communities and civil society to engage in a conversation about a broadly geographic topic based on research, pedagogy, field practice, and new innovations in geospatial technology. In its rebranded form, the Heo/Geo Lecture Series was carried out continuously since August 2019, and facilitated by the various research clusters of the UP Department of Geography. This talk is co-sponsored by the Human Geography (HUG) research cluster and in line with the SDG #4 (Quality Education) of the United Nations.

To participate in the lecture, register to this link: https://bit.ly/4bZBV7o

* Tuan, Y. F. (1975). Place: An experiential perspective. Geographical review, 151-165.

10/08/2026

GEOWRITERS LAB: Writeshop for thesis-stage MS Geog students 🌏✍️

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The Geowriters Lab of the UP Department of Geography is inviting thesis-stage MS Geography students for a Writeshop for Geography Grad Students. This event is a mini-workshop where members of the Geography Graduate Faculty provide tips and offer suggestions how to overcome writer’s block, compose coherent, cogent and AI-free problem statements, research questions and objectives. This event hopefully allows students to interact with other similarly situated graduate students in the MS Geog program, as possible thesis writing partners or as a support group.

The event is on Saturday, 22 August 2026 from 1:00 to 5:00 in the afternoon in Pavilion 2250. Click the link below to register for this event. Do this on or before 5:00PM on Monday, 17 August 2026.

https://bit.ly/4hWpoVW

This event is organised by the Research Committee and the Geography Graduate Program of the UPD Department of Geography. This event aligns with SDG #4 of the United Nations Sustainable Development.

04/08/2026

📢 AVAILABLE GRADUATE ELECTIVES 📢

Looking for graduate electives? Check out these available graduate Geog courses and find the perfect subject to match your interests!

04/08/2026

📣ANNOUNCEMENT📣
Please read these guidelines for the registration period, 1st Sem AY 2026-2027

24/07/2026

𝗛𝗘𝗢/𝗚𝗘𝗢 𝗟𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗦𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗘𝗦 (𝗝𝘂𝗹𝘆 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲) 🌏💻📍
𝗟𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗻 𝗗𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗻 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗴𝗲𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗴𝗲𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴

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What stories are underlain in the 2-dimensionality of a map?

While maps have always been powerful tools, they are frequently viewed as technical instruments for data. Reducing spaces to raw data, tables, and layers strips away the human element that gives those locations their true meaning.

For the 8th Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2026, the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) are presenting a lecture titled Weaving Narratives into Spaces with ArcGIS StoryMaps. To be given by Lou Benedict Daran of Geodata Systems Technologies, the lecture happens on Wednesday, 29 July 2026 at 5:30PM via Zoom.

This presentation explores how to use ArcGIS StoryMaps as an immersive digital storytelling platform. By shifting our focus from technical aspects of data toward narrative design, we can weave together images, videos, and interactive maps to build a genuine emotional connection with the places we showcase. We are hoping that attendees will leave with a different perspective from the traditional norm and present spatial data as compelling, human-centered stories.

Lou Benedict "Levin" Daran is a GIS instructor from the Training and Technical Support Division of Geodata Systems Technologies, Inc. A graduate of the University of the Philippines with a Bachelor of Science in Geography, his technical competencies include spatial analysis, map design, and application configuration. He has extensive experience equipping major organizations such as the City Government of Makati, Batangas State University, and MMDA with spatial data skills through ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Online. His professional portfolio also extends to high-impact humanitarian initiatives. He previously contributed to the PhilAware project, mapping and validating critical lifeline facilities in Pampanga and Quezon City for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team – Philippines (HOTPH).

Jointly sponsored by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS), the Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a monthly talk / lecture given by academic geographers, geography-adjacent scholars, practitioners working in geospatial industries, and partners that engaged in geography through their multiple publics. Speakers are invited for the relevance of the talk to our local to global allies and partners. The talk ranges from the sharing of research findings to pedagogical practices and field-based experiences. This current lecture is facilitated by the Geographic Information Systems and Techniques (GIST) research cluster at the UP Department of Geography and is in line with the SDG #4 (Quality Education) of the United Nations.

To participate in the lecture, click this link to register: https://tinyurl.com/53u6w53w