Schedule

Field trip options include Whale watching, Downtown Victoria Food Tour, The Songhees Inner Harbour Walking, Free Walking Tour of UVic Neighbourhood. See the field trips page for more details.

Coffee & snacks with the Editor of Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes (registration required)

This event, hosted by the GIS study group of the CAG, brings together four fellows and more than a dozen mentors for an interactive session focused on geospatial research, mentorship, and community-building. Fellows will present their work and engage in structured discussion with mentors from a range of backgrounds and areas of expertise. The session is designed to support emerging scholars through constructive feedback, candid conversation, and opportunities for connection across career stages. By creating space for exchange around research, methods, publishing, and professional pathways, the event helps foster a stronger, more inclusive geospatial community. Lunch will be provided. Registration required. To register as a Geospatial Mentor, sign up here: https://arcg.is/9mrjP0 To register as a Participant, sign up here: https://arcg.is/n5GDe0

Facilitator: Zoe Nicoladis, University of Toronto This workshop invites participants to explore how marketplaces nurture resilience through the co-creation of a collaborative zine. I will lead an introduction to the topic, discussing public market culture in Canada, before letting the creativity commence. Using magazines, collage materials, and prompts, participants will create pages reflecting on what public markets mean to them. This might include memories of markets, personal food traditions, or hopes for a more just and inclusive food system. Participants might express these ideas through collage, poetry, sketches, or short written reflections. By the end of the session, participants will have co-created a zine, which will be digitized and shared with attendees. The workshop is designed to be hands-on and conversational, fostering new connections among participants while sparking interdisciplinary dialogue. It also aims to showcase how participatory, creative methods can inform geographic research and deepen our understanding of place. Ultimately, this session invites reflection on how we could procure, distribute, and consume food in ways that nurture both social and ecological resilience.

Facilitators: Liz Sutherland, Western University; Max Taylor Echeverria, Beringia Community Planning; Meghan Thompson, Chippewas of the Thames First Nation This session focuses on mapping workflows that center community ownership and ethical storytelling, featuring the Biinaagami Giant Floor Map as a hands-on example. Participants will learn how Land Guardians from Chippewas of the Thames First Nation (COTTFN) learned how to collect, capture, and manage geographic information based on a direct-to-digital mapping workflow taught by the Firelight Group. This session demonstrates how hands-on, community-led, and trauma-informed mapping practices embody the conference theme of resistance by challenging common top-down approaches to geographic knowledge, centering Indigenous and local control instead. Drawing on lessons from the El Salvador Surviving Memory Project, where sensitive stories of conflict and survival were spatially documented in ways that prioritize participant well-being. It also showcases collaborations with COTTFN, demonstrating how Indigenous communities can guide the mapping process, determine data stewardship, and embed cultural protocols into spatial storytelling. Through case studies, live demonstrations, and participatory exercises, attendees will see how direct-to-digital workflows allow communities to capture stories on the Biinaagami Giant Floor Map while maintaining data sovereignty and relational accountability. Participants will leave with a practical framework and tools for ethically capturing, managing, and sharing geographic information. Expected Outcomes: Understand how Land Guardians from COTTFN are using a direct-to-digital approach to immortalize Indigenous knowledge in a new format. Learn how OCAP® principles shape mapping workflows and data governance. Gain practical skills for direct-to-digital capture of stories using the Biinaagami Giant Floor Map. Explore strategies for building ethical, community-led mapping partnerships.

Facilitators: Kook Hu, McGill University; Sinead Earley, University of Northern British Columbia This workshop invites geographers at any career stage to return to the basic act of putting words on the page, to notice how it feels to be heard without interruption, and to experience how sharing first-draft stories can bridge social and disciplinary divides. By centring voices rather than status, and process rather than product, the session supports the CAG EDIA Committee’s mandate to create safer spaces for engagement within CAG, and across geographic thought and practice. Speaking directly to the 2026 theme of Resilience, the workshop emphasizes that connection itself is a form of resilience: writing together helps build belonging, courage, and shared capacity to face climate crisis, social injustice, and other interconnected challenges in geography. The session introduces participants to the Writers Collective of Canada (WCC) community writing methodology as a concrete, accessible EDIA practice for the geography community at CAG/CARTO 2026. WCC is a charitable arts-health organization that partners with libraries, health, and community agencies to offer free exploratory writing workshops that cultivate connection, increase resilience, and support self-advocacy, particularly among underserved and underheard communities. Participants will write in response to simple prompts, privately at first, and will be invited—but never required—to read a few lines of their unedited writing aloud. As outlined in WCC’s methodology (see wcc-cec.org/what-to-expect), the group practices deep listening and offers only strengths-based feedback, reflecting back what is strong, vivid, or memorable in each piece. There is no critique, no focus on craft or correctness, and no teaching of technique; all writing is treated as if it were fiction. These practices create a safer, judgment-reduced space where participants with different identities, roles, and language backgrounds can experiment on equal footing and experience the connective power of collective writing.

Facilitator: Sabrina Guzman, University of Victoria As inheritors of the climate crisis, young people in particular are struggling with disproportionately high rates of climate anxiety and related forms of eco-distress triggered by current and anticipated climate impacts. This can have a myriad of short-long term impacts, including burnout, apathy, PTSD and disruption of daily functioning (ability to eat, sleep etc.) In her thesis, Sabrina Guzman Skotnitsky (M.A. in Environmental Studies, 2025) investigated can visual artmaking and dialogue help young people cope with climate anxiety and related eco-emotions? Furthermore, in what ways can these arts-based approaches help youth generate active hope? Mobilizing methods from Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and arts-based research (ABR) her project engaged youth ages 17 - 21 in so-called Victoria in a series of artmaking sessions in Fall 2023. Participants were provided the space and materials to discuss and create artworks about climate emotions, particularly climate anxiety and their visions for what a climate resilient and socially just future could look like. Her findings support existing evidence from psychology, social work, art therapy and related fields of the power of arts-based approaches for healing, resilience-building and fostering community among people who share similar mental health challenges. This conference session will include a short presentation on Sabrina’s thesis “Creating Climate Resilience: An Arts-based Approach for Helping Youth Process Climate Anxiety and Generate Active Hope” followed by an interactive artmaking activity employing her novel approach. Attendees will take away 1) A greater appreciation for the unique challenges but also the strengths of youth living through the climate crisis, 2) Ideas of how to integrate arts-based approaches in research, pedagogy and/or practice and 3) A list of climate-aware mental health resources. They will also get to take home artwork they will produce in the session, exploring their own relationship to their climate emotions.

Facilitator: Carolina Monteiro de Carvalho, University of Victoria This workshop aims to present the concepts of participatory mapping applied to urban planning with a gender perspective. Through a combination of theoretical discussion and practical participatory approaches and participatory mapping exercises, participants will explore how participatory methods (specially the mapping) can serve as a powerful tool to identify and address the unique needs, experiences, and challenges faced by women and gender diverse groups within urban environments. The session will delve into methodologies that empower community members—particularly women, gender-diverse, and marginalized populations—to actively contribute to the planning process, ensuring that their voices inform decisions about public spaces, transport, safety, and accessibility. By highlighting case studies, the workshop will demonstrate how integrating a gender lens into participatory mapping fosters more equitable and inclusive urban development benefiting society in general. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding participatory methods suitable to implement gender-sensitive planning initiatives in our cities. Suggested program is: A short theoretical background about participatory mapping and other approaches that can be integrated into it, an overview about urban planning with a gender perspective lens and participatory mapping exercises applied to identify places in Victoria and other cities where a change is needed. Lastly, we will work in groups to build local proposals for urban planning considering the mapped information.

Facilitators: Hazim Ismail, Benjamin Ajabuin; University of Victoria Archival research is a staple of many fields, as a way of interrogating not only what is understood as ‘the past’, but also understanding processes of constructing histories, in all their multiplicities. Archival research is couched in many sociopolitical dynamics that influence how particular versions of events become more dominant than others, especially those from marginalized communities. Identifying these influences is a process in itself, requiring methodologies that both center and decenter positionality in ways that highlight biases, while making space for forgotten narratives to emerge. In this interactive workshop, we invite doctoral students whose research focuses on the Global South to reflect on their experiences in conducting research using the archives and historical collections. We facilitate researchers in reflecting on insider-outsider dilemmas in researching ‘home’ while being ‘away from home.’ We encourage researchers to highlight the opportunities, setbacks, and (inter)personal tolls that are associated with researching home because of one’s positionality and colonial impacts. Researchers are also invited to reflect on how identity politics complicate insider-outsider perspectives, showcasing how identities constantly shift and inform methodological choices. This includes, but is not limited to, how positionality can be a locus of reference for engaging in research processes, and how research is conceptualized and interpreted. We engage questions of epistemic categorizations, how storage practices of archival resources can hinder researchers’ access to them, and the challenges of researching one’s own communities. Overall, our session seeks to discuss the importance of examining positionality in archival research by foregrounding the complexity of power dynamics, vulnerabilities, and personal memory. This generative discussion equips participants with new critical questions and methods in confronting the research unknowns.

This paper examines how firms and states manage concentrated dependence under conditions of geopolitical uncertainty. Drawing on Global Production Networks (GPN) theory, it conceptualises `China risk’ not as a discrete shock but as a form of relational risk embedded in territorially anchored production networks. Using subsidiary-level data for seventeen Japanese electronics transnational corporations between 1985 and 2022, the analysis demonstrates that risk within the `China Circle’ accumulated gradually through rising costs, regulatory tightening, geopolitical tension, and supply-chain concentration. Firms did not abruptly decouple. Rather, restructuring unfolded incrementally and unevenly, shaped by inherited production embeddedness and market dependence. The paper then pivots to Canada. Unlike Japanese electronics firms, which were deeply embedded in Chinese production systems, Canada’s exposure to China is largely externalized and trade-mediated. At the same time, Canadian firms in 2025 confront growing volatility in their most important relationship: the United States. The result is not a single “China risk,” but a broader problem of relational concentration risk across multiple major partners.Byadapting an embeddedness-dependence matrix to the Canadian case, the analysis shows that most Canadian actors occupy high market-dependence but low production-embeddedness positions, producing faster and more politically mediated shocks than those experienced by Japanese firms in China. The Japanese experience suggests that deeply embedded exposure generates path-dependent vulnerability, while Canada’s case highlights how trade concentration can create sudden systemic risk when core partners become unpredictable. The paper contributes to debates on geopolitical fragmentation and supply-chain resilience by reframing risk as spatially mediated and relationally structured. For middle powers such as Canada, the policy challenge is not simple diversification or decoupling, but strategic management of exposure across an increasingly multipolar and uncertain global economy.

Movie projection followed by a discussion with the filmmakers.