Author: Joseph Palis
-
Less-than-human geographies
[W]here this world means potentially a hillside of shallow graves sticky with mud, blood, brain, guts, spades, cartridges and unutterable inhuman horror. Stripped down; hollowed out, winnowed away; splintered, shattered, smashed; dis-assembled, dis-located, dis-membered; subtracted from, again, again, again: such is the melancholy cry, or embittered scream, of a less-than-human…
-
Scents and sensibility
What scents shape the city? How does scent contribute to placemaking? How do we design smell environments in the city? Victoria Henshaw, 2013 In Nikolai Gogol’s satirical short story The Nose (1836), Collegiate Assessor Kovalev’s nose went missing. “The nose can’t have removed itselfof sheer idiocy,” Kovalev thought. The nose…
-
Creating a fictional city
Fictional cities … invite us to explore extraordinary urban landscapes that either defy the constraints of reality or let us better examine them. The Other Atlas The city can be an imagination. In most science fiction films, a city is transformed to resemble a space with radically changed structures, citizenry…
-
Autobiographical memories of places
Memories of place can produce different social ramifications for different people. On one hand, nostalgia can play a significant role in reminiscences that can romanticise places (see also what media scholar John Fiske said about indulging in nostalgia); on the other hand, there is a propensity for ‘appropriating places’ through…
-
UP captured on 15 x 10 cm papers
“Micro” Mapping of UP Diliman In two undergraduate Geography 1 (Places and landscapes in a changing world) classes, micromapping the campus was instituted and assigned by Assistant Professor Fernand Francis Hermoso not only to assess the students’ highly subjective cartographic imagination of their campus, but also enable them to concretise…
-
Road ecologies and transport geographies
[T]he study of mobility and transport reveals existing power relations and offers opportunities to challenge those relations. Julie Cidell, José Acosta-Córdova, Andrea Pimentel Rivera & Ricardo Zapata, “Critical geographies of transport and mobility”, 2021, p. 2 Transport geographies has a long history that predated the arrival of traditional conveyances and…
-
‘Hazardous’ cartographies
There is a map for everything. Even in identifying hazards and attendant vulnerabilities in communities. During Midyear Term 2023, the UP Department of Geography conducts an extension program through its Geography 192 course (Field Methods in Geography). The program was instituted in the 1990s and involves faculty and undergraduate students…
-
Meaning-making in community cartographies
Participatory mapping has proven to be effective in generating the diversity of how different local communities view disasters, vulnerabilities, and other concepts related to DRR. Emmanuel Garcia, “Of Disasters and Participation”, 2021 Maps started out from the graphic representation of the earth. They were (and continue to be) rendered as…
-
The precarious lives of human rights defenders
“Collectively produced by the efforts of ordinary people rather than by a political class of professionals following pregiven political strictures … maps … serve as a testament to the political potentials of those from below … to create a world where they can finally fit.” Linda Quiquivix, “Art of War,…
-
This bird has flown
How do scientists survey the number of birds in a given area? In a highly cited paper by Ben Vallejo, Alexander Aloy and Perry Ong (2009) on bird mapping, they employed several approaches and methodologies in mapping urban birds in Metro Manila. One approach involved a lot of fast-paced walking:…
Geonarratives PH 