Although stories about the world and the performative aspects of storytelling these narratives are as old as the formal definitions of place, there have been many iterations of place-based stories where individuals and groups try to make sense of their environments. Whether it is through the act of narrating everyday phenomena, processes or encounters with new experiences of place and situations, telling stories predate folklore.
Geonarratives is not a new invented term but for the purpose of this site, it is defined as ‘place-writing – subjective stories that define, portray, delineate, emphasize, expand, rewrite, and imagine a place’ (Palis, 2022, p. 700).
This site therefore aims to collect various stories told by maps, mappings and map-making practices. The hope is to build a repository of geocultural data contained in illustrations, drawings and several other permutations of images that describe, encode and question multi-layered realities as dictated by subjective knowledges of individuals and collectives.
First conceived in 2019 and concretized through geonarrative mapping workshops in the university and beyond, the geonarrative mapping withstood lockdowns and pandemic-dictated protocols by continuing to document and co-produce knowledges with participants.
The site therefore contains a section that comprised of past and ongoing geonarrative mappings as geohistorical data. Together with team leader Joseph Palis, it is maintained by university research associate and geography graduate student Sea Bautista.
Another section – Pagmamapa sa Kapuluan – is an OICA-approved project that aims to collect maps accompanied by stories. The maps were products of various cartographic projects undertaken by graduate and undergraduate geography students as well as those that were co-created by faculty members stemming from their engagements with agencies as well as communities. Aside from Joseph Palis, this project is currently being managed by Fernand Francis Hermoso, and Dominique Amorsolo, with technical guide and assistance by Peachy Manasis.
The aim of the site is to generate content springing from submitted and curated images such as maps, illustrations and other forms of cartographic outputs. Stories will accompany the images or series of images that talk about worlds and various worldmaking undertakings. As AAG honorary geographer Rebecca Solnit says about stories: “[s]tories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice” (2013, p. 3).
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References:
Palis, J. (2022). Geonarratives and countermapped storytelling, in Reimagining Futures: Decolonisation and Doing Development Differently: Routledge Handbook of Global Development, K. Sims, et al (eds.), New York: Routledge, pp. 700-712.
Solnit, R. (2013). The Faraway Nearby, London: Granta Publications.
Geonarratives PH 