UP Department of Geography

15/10/2026

Reposted from Geonarratives PH

Geonarrative mapping is happening later tonight in the Geography 246 (Geohumanities) graduate class.

The drill:

Everyone is given a prompt to create something 3D from 2D. Create worlds around the word. Tell stories.

15/10/2026

HEO/GEO LECTURE SERIES (October 2026) 🪩🎤🎶
Jayson Makoto Chun on music and culture in the Asia Pacific region

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What is the Pop Pacific?

The Pop Pacific describes a sphere of exchange in Asian popular music and culture that runs across the Pacific Ocean and within Asia itself, built over more than a century of contact across borders, empires, and diasporas.

This month’s talk, jointly sponsored by the Philippine Geographical Society and the UP Department of Geography, is the 11th for the Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2026. Happening on Monday, 19 October 2026 at 1:00PM Philippine Standard Time (7:00PM Hawai’i Standard Time, 18 October), Dr Jayson Makoto Chun from the University of Hawai’i – West O’ahu will deliver a talk entitled The Pop Pacific: A transnational cultural sphere of the US, Japan, Korea and the Philippines. This talk follows one strand of the Pop Pacific’s web: the transnational role of the United States, with popular music as the case study, moving from the Philippines to Japan to Korea, with a stop in China.

The United States played an outside role in this music’s development, but local musicians localized it and spread their own versions across the region. After the Philippines became a US colony in 1898, Filipino musicians on cruise ships carried jazz through port cities across Asia. After World War II, US base clubs in Japan and Korea trained the musicians who built the talent-agency system still running J-pop and K-pop today. J-pop grew out of City Pop, a sound shaped by African American funk and soul, before becoming a genre of its own. K-pop developed in the 1990s and is now a major part of Asia’s music scene. The Manila Sound turned homegrown Tagalog pop into a source of national pride in the 1970s, the same pattern P-pop acts like SB19 follow now. In China, Teresa Teng was banned on the mainland, yet her cassette tapes crossed over from Hong Kong anyway. No popular culture in Asia grew up alone but rather took shape in contact with others.

Jayson Makoto Chun is a professor at the University of Hawai’i–West O’ahu, specializing in Asian history. He is coeditor and writer for Pop Pacific (https://blog.iias.asia/pop-pacific), a blog on transnational popular culture hosted by the International Institute for Asian Studies. He is the author of “A Nation of a Hundred Million Idiots”?: A Social History of Japanese Television, 1953-1973 (2006), along with several articles on J-pop and K-pop. He currently serves as guest editor for a special issue of Education About Asia on Asian popular culture.

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 2019, and facilitated by the various research clusters of the UP Department of Geography. This talk is presented by the Media, Literary Geographies and Geohumanities (MELANGE) research cluster, in line with the SDG #4 (Quality Education) of the United Nations.

To participate in the lecture, register to this link: https://tinyurl.com/2hjkbzd7

06/10/2026

“UP Diliman (UPD) completed the external quality assessment of three academic programs to uphold its mandate to deliver quality education.

“The external quality review visit of the Master of Science (Geography) and Bachelor of Arts (Philosophy) programs under the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy and the Bachelor of Public Administration program under the National College of Public Administration and Governance officially concluded on Oct. 2.”

Read the article at https://upd.edu.ph/3-upd-programs-assessed/.

02/10/2026

The Master of Science (Geography) program of the UP Department of Geography underwent an external quality review (EQR) during the 5th External Review Visit at UP Diliman, held from September 30 to October 2, 2026.

The Department warmly welcomed the EQR team, including Lead Reviewer Professor Emeritus Irene Villaseñor and Associate Professor Nefertari Arsad, whose expertise and insights contributed to this important process of reflection and continuous quality improvement.

We extend our sincere appreciation to our students, alumni, and employers for generously sharing their experiences and perspectives, as well as to the support staff of the Department and the various college-level facilities for their invaluable assistance in facilitating the review.

Your participation, cooperation, and support helped make the 5th External Review Visit a meaningful and productive endeavor.

Maraming salamat! Padayon, Geografia! ❤💙💚

30/09/2026

ANNOUNCEMENT:

MS GEOGRAPHY APPLICATION
Now accepting applications for 2nd Sem AY 26-27

Deadline: 20 October 2026

Admission Requirements (to be submitted online):
⚠️ Note: To open any of the links below, remove the spaces after the dots (.)
a) Filled-out Application Form (tinyurl. com/OGPForm14)
b) Letter of Intent/Application letter addressed to the CSSP Dean
c) 2 recommendation letters (1 from a former professor, using the template from tinyurl. com/OGPForm15) to be sent by the recommenders directly to [email protected]
d) Transcript of Records or True Copy of Grades
e) PSA Birth Certificate
f) Curriculum Vitae
g) Proof of payment of the application fee

For more information on the MS Geog program, visit our website: geog. upd. edu. ph or scan the QR code
For inquiries and submission of your application, please email us at: [email protected]

29/09/2026

Join the editors and authors, together with our special guest, lge Ramos, on 14 October 2026 at Pilar Herrera Hall as we celebrate the book’s release as FREELY DOWNLOADABLE FOR ALL.

Hosted by the UP Department of Geography and the UP Department of Anthropology, 𝙃𝙖𝙡𝙤-𝙃𝙖𝙡𝙤 𝙀𝙘𝙤𝙡𝙤𝙜𝙞𝙚𝙨: 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙀𝙢𝙚𝙧𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙀𝙣𝙫𝙞𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙨 𝘽𝙚𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙙 𝙁𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙤 𝙁𝙤𝙤𝙙 is a recipe for a new storytelling tradition that combines critical studies of Filipino food and the environment. The first of its kind, the volume brings together a transnational community of food enthusiasts, engaged scholars, and social and environmental activists to set the table for a new canon in Philippine and Food Studies, reimagining what, how, and why we eat.

Register for the chance to win a free paperback copy of the book using this link: https://forms.gle/EDkjWJUb39FybWky6

28/09/2026

Two days to go before the deadline of submission of abstracts! Please submit here: http://tinyurl.com/ICGS2026AbstractSubForm 🪁

ICGS 2026: Last Call for Abstract Submission (Third Call)

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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, visit this link: https://updgeography.blogspot.com/2026/09/icgs-2026-stories-places-storying.html?m=1

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 (http://tinyurl.com/ICGS2026AbstractSubForm). Results of abstract acceptance will be sent to your email by 16 October. You can also reach us via [email protected]

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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.

21/09/2026

Reposted from the UP College of Social Sciences and Philosophy page.

One of our faculty members, Dr. Jake Rom D. Cadag, is resource speaker. 🌏 Other faculty members will serve as reactors (Dr. Lou Angeli A. Ocampo and Dr. Trina G. Isorena) and moderator (Dr. Darlene J. Occeña-Gutierrez) for the talk.

Ang Opisina ng Kawaksing Dekano Para sa Usaping Pang-Akademiko ng KAPP at sa pakikipagtulungan ng Departamento ng Geografiya ay inaanyayahan ang mga g**o at mag-aaral na lumahok sa ikalima at huling KAPP Serye ng Panayam 2026. Ito ay gaganapin sa ika-25 ng Setyembre 2026, Biyernes, 2:30 ng hapon sa Pilar Herrera Lecture Hall, CSSP.

Tampok na tagapagsalita si Kaw.Prop. Jake Rom D. Cadag, Ph.D. na magbibigay ng lektura na may pamagat na Whose Disasters Count? Rethinking Disaster Statistics in the Philippines through SAKUNA.PH .

17/09/2026

The deadline of submission of abstracts for the International Conference on Geographical Studies (ICGS) 2026 is extended until September 30, 2026.

Submit your abstracts here: http://tinyurl.com/ICGS2026AbstractSubForm

09/09/2026

HEO/GEO LECTURE SERIES (Sept 2026) 🌏🏙️
Kenneth Cardenas on the geography of possibility

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In 2005, David Prytherch and Sallie Marston posed a question regarding an urban geography of possibility: How may we better see the potential of people and localities, where new spatial networks are forged by actors who embody and must negotiate a world of material and symbolic flows? Prytherch and Marston offer a possible first step: “[C]hallenge … a rethinking [of] urban geography’s dominant perspectives on the city, neoclassical positivist and Marxian political-economic, and their chronic blind spot: social and cultural practice” (p. 99).

The UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) proudly present this month’s Heo/Geo Lecture Series with Dr Kenneth Cardenas as speaker. This will be on Monday, 14 September 2026 at 5:30PM (Philippine Time) / 5:30AM (Eastern Standard Time) via Zoom. The talk, titled For a geography of possibility for the 21st century Philippines: Three ways of noticing, intersects some of the question’s broad strokes.

The talk suggests three ways of seeing possibility in the political economy of the early 21st century Philippines. Dr Cardenas will articulate a version of geography as a mode of knowledge attuned to unevenness and difference, uniquely positioned for reading against ‘damage-centred’ accounts of neoliberalism, underdevelopment, and inequality. Specifically, reflexive, careful attention to scale and abstraction, as dimensions to how we theorize about the Philippines, can help sensitize us to how projects of concentrating wealth and power had never fully consolidated in this place, and to the ways that non-, anti-, and post-capitalist practices co-constitute its economic and political life.

Through completed and in-progress research on capitalism and state formation in the Philippines, the talk illustrates (1) attention to long timescales, (2) small spatial and institutional scales, and (3) unlikely comparisons across places, periods, and commodity relations as elements to a research repertoire in the aid of noticing possibility.

Dr Kenneth Cardenas completed his PhD in Geography at York University, where he remains affiliated as a research associate with the York Centre for Asian Research. He holds an MA (distinction) in Sociology from the University of Manchester, and a BA in Sociology from the University of the Philippines Diliman. His PhD dissertation, Land, infrastructure, and the new geographies of class power in the 21st century Philippines, is an urban and economic geography of the Philippines’ ruling rentier class, as it has been transformed by remittances and a globally-deployed workforce. His Heo/Geo talk draws from feminist and institutional economic geographies to attend to non-, anti-, and post-capitalist possibilities, as they inhere in the Philippine landscape. See more of his work at https://kennethcardenas.com/.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series exists because of an abundance of geography-related undertakings that touch on multiple scales. The Lecture Series which is a rebranded version earlier brown bag iterations brings together place-based ideas, intellectual provocations, and practices from scholars, geography practitioners, and communities. This monthly talk remains online to reach a broader audience, especially those outside of Metro Manila and the Philippines. It is in line with the SDG #4 (Quality Education) of the United Nations. This is also co-sponsored by the Human Geography (HUG) research cluster of the UP Department of Geography.

To participate in the lecture, use this link to register: https://tinyurl.com/y7mfud2p

Work cited:

David L. Prytherch & Sallie A. Marston (2005) Editorial: An Urban Geography of Possibility, Urban Geography, 26:2, 97-99, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.26.2.97