Three ways of noticing
The UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) proudly present this month’s Heo/Geo Lecture 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.
In this talk I suggest three ways of seeing possibility in the political economy of the early 21st century Philippines. I articulate a version of geography as it attuned to unevenness and difference, uniquely positioned as a mode of knowledge 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, I illustrate (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.
Kenneth Cardenas 