• 2026 Fall
  • GEO 382 Counter-Mapping
  • GEO 105 World Urban Geography
• 2026 Spring
  • GEO 333 Southeast Asia: From Internationalism to Globalization
  • GEO 364 Urban Social Justice
• 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 scholarship is grounded in a 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 particular focus on the spatial politics of urbanization in the Global South. I examine how urban transformations are constituted through transnational circulations of people, capital and ideas, and how these processes produce uneven geographies of accumulation, dispossession, displacement and belonging.

Much of my research has focused on urban change in the Philippines, where I examine the contested geographies produced through migration, development, militarism and capitalist urbanization. Through this work, I contribute to broader theoretical conversations on emergent urban forms in the Global South, transnational urbanisms and geographies of displacement and loss.

Across my scholarship, I advance a decolonial approach to geography grounded in place, community accountability and the reworking of rigid boundaries between academic knowledge production and praxis. I use creative, mixed-method, participatory and community-engaged approaches to explore how mapping, storytelling and spatial analysis can become practices of resistance, solidarity and collective world-making. Central to this work is a commitment to producing knowledge with communities rather than simply about them.

My theoretical interventions begin from the Global South, not as a collection of cases to be measured against a presumed universal norm, but as a fertile terrain for producing geographic knowledge and theory. I am particularly interested in how concepts emerging from Global South experiences can unsettle dominant geographic assumptions while revealing the colonial and neocolonial relations that continue to shape material, political and discursive spaces.

My scholarship has appeared in leading journals, including Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Antipode, Urban Studies, Urban Geography, Cities, and Geoforum, among others. My research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Urban Studies Foundation, and other institutions.

My current projects extend these commitments across several interconnected geographies. These include collaborative decolonial cartography initiatives with Indigenous communities in the Philippines; research on the role of New American communities in urban transformation and revitalization in U.S. Rust Belt cities; work on Native Alaskan and Filipinx solidarities, migration and transpacific belonging in Alaska; and research on the spatial politics of post-military-base urban development in the Philippines. Across these projects, I remain interested in how communities negotiate displacement, dispossession and exclusion while creating alternative geographies of belonging, solidarity and possibility.

I am currently not accepting new graduate students for direct supervision. I nevertheless 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)