Arnisson Andre Ortega

• 2025 Fall
  • GEO 382 Counter-Mapping
  • GEO 105 World Urban Geography
• 2025 Spring
  • GEO 700 Selected Topics - Postcolonial Geographies
  • GEO 364 Urban Social Justice
• 2024 Fall
  • GEO 382 Counter-Mapping
  • GEO 105 World Urban Geography
• 2024 Spring
  • GEO 323/623 Quantitative Methods in Human Geography
  • GEO 364 Urban Social Justice

I am a human geographer whose work is driven by a deep commitment to social justice and to understanding—and transforming—the spatial inequalities that shape everyday life.

My research lies at the intersection of urban, population and community geographies, with a focus on the spatial politics of urbanization in the Global South. I examine how urban transformations are constituted through transnational circulations of migrants, capital and ideas, and how these processes generate uneven geographies of accumulation and dispossession.

Over the past several years, my work has centered on urban change in the Philippines, contributing to broader theoretical conversations on emergent urban forms in the Global South, transnational urbanisms and geographies of displacement and loss.

Across my scholarship, I advocate for decolonial approaches to geography—foregrounding commitments to place, community accountability, and the dismantling of rigid boundaries between academic knowledge production and praxis. I pursue creative and mixed-method research designs, including participatory and community-engaged methodologies, to explore how mapping, storytelling and spatial analysis can become tools for resistance, solidarity and world-making.

My theoretical interventions draw from Global South contexts not as cases to be compared to a presumed norm, but as fertile terrains for advancing geographic knowledge and interrogating the neo-colonial relations that continue to shape material and discursive spaces.

My work has been published in a range of leading journals, including Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Antipode, Urban Studies, Urban Geography, Cities, and Geoforum, among others. My research projects have been supported by major funding bodies such as the Fulbright Program, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Urban Studies Foundation, among others.

Current projects include collaborative decolonial cartography initiatives with Indigenous communities in the Philippines, the role of New American communities in urban revitalization in U.S. Rust Belt cities; Native Alaskan–Filipinx solidarities and transpacific belonging in Alaska, and the spatial politics of post–military-base urban development in the Philippines.

I am currently not accepting new graduate students for direct supervision. However, I welcome conversations and inquiries about research, academia, activism and the multiple geographies we inhabit.

"Land is Life (Ang Lupa ay Buhay): Decolonial cartographies and geo-narratives for Indiginous land justice in the Philippines", Sponsored by American Council of Learned Societies.

"Feminist Mapping: Developing an alternative approach to map symbolization, iconography, and an open-source symbol library.", Sponsored by National Endowment for the Humanities.

"Geographies Of Refugee Resettlement And Post-Industrial Urban Renewal In Rust Belt Cities", Sponsored by Regional Studies Association.

"Land is Life (“Ang Lupa ay Buhay”): Decolonial Cartographies for Indigenous Land Justice in the Philippines", Sponsored by American Council for Learned Societies.

"Geographies of refugee resettlement and post-industrial urban renewal in Rust belt cities", Sponsored by Regional Studies Association.

• Book
  • Ortega, A. C., Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession. Lexington Books-Rowman & Littlefield Press, 2016.
• Journal Articles
  • Ortega, A. C., "Visualizing the global deployment of Filipina workers." Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2025.
  • Dizon, H. M., Ortega, A. C., "Resistance and reproduction: urban poor women and the struggle for a socially just urban future in Manila." Gender, Place & Culture, 2024.
  • Ortega, A. C., "The point is to change it: Locating community geography and praxis in a neoliberalizing academia." Dialogues in Human Geography, 2023.
  • Ortega, A. C., Dizon, H., "The women's place is in the struggle: Social reproduction as a site of resistance for urban poor women in Manila." Gender, Place, and Culture, 2023.
  • Ortega, A. C., "Toward critical demography 2.0." Human Geography, 2023.
  • Ortega, A. C., "Bodies of transnational island urbanism: Spatial narratives of inclusion/exclusion of Filipinas in Philippine islands." Urban Studies, 2022.
  • Ortega, A. C., "Geonarratives of Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) in Negros Island, Philippines." Banwaan: The Philippine Journal Of Folklore, 2022.
  • Ortega, A. C., "The Urban Geographies of Philippine Transnationalism.." Current History, 2022.
• Book Chapters
  • Ortega, A. C., "Mappings." In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Cultural and Social Geography. Wiley, 2025.
  • Ortega, A. C., Dela Cruz, B., Dayrit, C., Angeles, E., Saguin, K. K., Garcia, L. M., Martinez, M. S., De Guzman, M. T. and Lopez, Y., "Counter-Cartographies of Resistance - Exposing Everyday Authoritarianism in the Philippines." In Edition Politik. transcript Verlag, 2024.
  • Ortega, A. C., "Desakota and beyond: Neoliberal production of suburban space in Manila's fringe." In The Planetary Gentrification Reader. , 2023.
  • Ortega, A. C., "Building dreams back “home”." In The Routledge International Handbook of Transnational Studies. Routledge, 2023.
  • Ortega, A. C., Yeoh, B. and Collins, F., "Transnational urbanism in the south – connectivities, localities, and the transnational politics of urbanization in the Philippines." In Handbook on Transnationalism. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022.
  • Ortega, A. C., "Desakota and beyond." In The Planetary Gentrification Reader. Routledge, 2022.
  • Ortega, A. C., "Mega-regionalization of a nation." In Routledge Handbook of Urbanization in Southeast Asia. Routledge, 2018.
• Commentary
  • Ortega, A. C., "Towards geographies beyond the urban-rural divide?." In "Geographies of Ruralization" in Dialogues in Human Geography. , 2022.
• Magazine/Trade Publication
  • Ortega, A. C., "New Clark City: Building an Eco-city of the Future." DOMUS: the Magazine for Architecture, Design and Art Lovers, 2018.
• Online Articles
  • Ortega, A. C., Counter-mapping for urban social justice: notes from the urban periphery in the Philippines. , 2020.
  • Ahmad, S., Hyman, T. A., Mora Vega, R. and Ortega, A. C., World Social Science Fellows report on the 2016 Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador. , 2018.
  • Kareem, B., Adegun, O., Adjei Mensah, C., Ahmed, S., Angeulovski, I., Chen, R., Chigbu, U., Grover, A., Hertzog-Fraser, A., Hyman, T. A., Kinyasha, G., Leck, H., Lukasiewicz, K., Maldonado, M., Ortega, A. C., Pasquini, L. and Zomer, A., "The Quest for Governance Modes on Sustainable Urbanization." In The Nature of Cities. , 2015.
  • Marquez, M., Ortega, A. C., "Reproductive Health." In 2013 Young Adult Fertility & Sexuality (YAFS) Study 4 Key Findings. , 2014.

Indigenous Lands in the Philippines: A Workshop on Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (October 26, 2023)

Institute of Australian Geographers Conference, "Post urban-rural frontiers? Examining diverse island urbanisms in the Philippines" (July 7, 2023)

International Sociological Association World Congress of Sociology, "Post urban-rural frontiers? Examining diverse island urbanisms in the Philippines" (June 30, 2023)

Space for Engagement and Epistemic Diversity (SEED) and Cities and Environments Research Network (CERN), "Post Urban-Rural Frontiers? Examining Diverse Island Urbanisms in the Philippines" (June 24, 2023)

Canadian Association of Geographers, "Filipinx Geographies" (May 10, 2023)

Departmental Colloquium, University of Illinois Urbana Champagne, "From the gates to the islands: examining geographies of transnational urbanisms in the Philippines" (February 3, 2023)

Counter-mapping the City International Virtual Conference (March 15, 2022 - March 16, 2022)

Philippines Social Science Seminar Series, Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Humboldt University of Berlin, and SOAS University of London, "Island urbanisms in the Philippines: gender, urban development, and transnationalism" (October 21, 2021)

Ural Federal University Ural Humanitarian Institute, "Meet the Authors: a roundtable session on academic writing" (October 11, 2021)

Philippines webinar presentation, "Geo-narratives of Human Rights Defenders in Negros Island" (July 9, 2021)

Makasaysayang Pakikibaka sa Isla ng Negros, "Defend the Defenders: Talakayan sa Sosyo-Ekonomikong Krisis" (March 26, 2021)

Award for Best Global Research About the Philippines, Institute of Philippine Culture (2018)

International Publication Award, University of the Philippines (2017)

The Virginia A. Miralao Excellence in Research Award, Philippine Social Science Council (2017)

World Social Science Fellowship, International Social Science Council (2016)

World Social Science Fellowship, International Social Science Council (2015)