2026 Session at IGS annual conference

IGU commission C24.34 proposed a session for RGS/IBG Annual International Conference 

Geographies of inequalities: toward just places.

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The session is titled: Marginality and questions of (in)equality and justice.

About the Session

Walter Leimgruber - Dept. of Geosciences, Geography, University of Fribourg/CH (session coordinator)

The mission of the IGU Commission is to research marginality and the processes of marginalisation from different perspectives and with a geographical basis. The main focus is to better understand multi-scalar relations between the globalisation process and how geographical marginality evolves at the local and regional levels. Moreover, we seek to improve our understanding of local and regional responses to different forms of marginality and marginalisation processes.

This aligns very closely with the Conference’s 2026 theme, namely: Geographies of inequalities: toward just places, in that our Commission’s work focusses on spatial, social and economic differences and inequalities across geographical space and potential interventions to address such disparities in a just manner.

To this end, we have compiled a set of papers which we propose to present at the conference in 2026, centred on the shared topic of inequalities and marginalisation/de-marginalisation. The papers demonstrate the existing variety of marginality and marginalisation facets, whether social and/or spatial, encompassing rural, urban, and in-between places, as well as environmental (in)justice leading to the marginalisation of groups. The selection also highlights different, and perhaps the most dominant, encounters with marginality in various places and regions across the world. We have organised the proposed papers and topics according to their main focus: social inequalities and marginalisation and environmental (in)justice, which mostly concern mixed social and cultural groups and the resulting marginalisation, and the underlying processes of marginalisation and environmental (in)justice and (attempts at) de-marginalisation in urban and rural places.

Session Presentations

#1389 Persistent inequalities in housing policies: from state institutioanlisation to the production of new slums in Brazil

·       Sara Raquel Fernandes Queiroz de Medeiros, Institute of Public Policy, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Brazil (x.saramedeiros@gmail.com)

#1361 Urban form, social structure, and the organization of space in the planned Bedouin towns of the Negev

·       Havatzelet Yahel, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel ( yahelh@bgu.ac.il)

#1353 Pathways to de-marginalising the commons in Croatia

·       Lana Slavuj Borčić, University of Zagreb, Croatia (lslavuj@geog.pmf.hr)

·       Marin Cvitanović, Bournemouth University, UK (mcvitanovic@bournemouth.ac.uk)

#1350 What does the developing concept of One Health implicate for the advancement of environmental justice?

·       Birgit Kuna, Dept. Climate and Adaptation Research, Bonn (birgit.kuna@dlr.de)

#1337 Transcending differences from tropics: The recognition of mixed populations towards just places

·       Hugo Capellà Miternique, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain (hugo.capella@uib.eu)

#1284 3. At the edge of precarity: working poor in an affuent society. An image problem of Switzerland?

·   Walter Leimgruber, University of Fribourg/CH (walter.leimgruber@unifr.ch)