Schedule

Chairs: Kendra Strauss, Simon Fraser University and Norma Rantisi, Concordia Panelists: Hulya Arik, University of Toronto; Jamila Ewais, Concordia; Anna Zalik, York University; Mostafa Henaway, Concordia. This panel session explores geographers’ research, solidarity and activism in support of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. It grapples with the ways that institutional and political responses to the Palestine exception, anti-Palestinian racism, and the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) reflect the weaponization of civil discourse and antisemitism, posing serious yet highly selective challenges to academic freedom and political speech on campuses. These challenges align with the neoliberalization and corporatization of universities, the power of donors in an era of declining public funding, and the rootedness of our institutions in the logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism.

Chairs: Ryan Hilperts and Sabrina Guzman Skotnitsky Panelists: Ryan Hilperts, Sabrina Guzman-Skotnitsky, Sonia Furstenau, Undergraduate Students from the program It is becoming increasingly apparent that addressing the affective domain of changemaking and building community at local scales is needed to help students build personal and collective resilience while contributing to social and/or environmental causes. Learning from local leaders’ stories of navigating and overcoming barriers to action, and mobilizing their neighbours, peers and unlikely allies, can have a profound and empowering impact on young people’s sense of efficacy and motivation to engage in changemaking. Furthermore, building relationships with mentors and potential collaborators is essential to resilience - the missing element of connection that many students long for in their Environmental Studies and Geography education. Led and moderated by Assistant Teaching Professor Ryan Hilperts and Sabrina Guzman Skotnitsky, M.A. from UVic’s School of Environmental Studies, this panel will discuss the interdisciplinary Community-Engaged Learning course “Changemaking Skills for Thriving Communities”. This innovative new course offered in Spring 2026 through UVic’s School of Environmental Studies and Transformative Climate Action program supported students to develop skills, competencies and dispositions for changemaking and apply them by working with peers on a community-defined project. The course incorporated a Changemaker Summit, bringing local community leaders together for a day of co-learning and connection. The centrepiece of the course is the co-created Changemakers Library, an online resource of interviews with local changemakers across British Columbia. This panel will feature students, instructors and community members sharing key learnings from the course and their lived experiences navigating challenges and opportunities at the local scale. Participants will gain access to the Changemakers Library website, insight into pedagogical approaches to community-centred course design, and will walk away with frameworks to consider the affective domain of working for change and building resilience at the community scale in classroom and community settings.

Chairs: Lawrence Ignace / Miskomin, University of Victoria A range of interconnected economic, political, and social crises has besieged the world we live in. Within dominant settler cultures, this often appears as an impending “end of the world,” albeit with varying definitions. Yet when we foreground the viewpoints, scholarship, and lived practices of the subaltern—particularly Indigenous peoples—it becomes clear that what is ending is not “the world” itself, but rather a world built on bad relations to land and environment. This shift in perspective opens up space to think with more clarity about what might emerge in a “new world.” Indigenous communities have long articulated such possibilities, both through concrete actions to protect and promote good relations with the land and through the knowledge they generate in formal and informal contexts. Together, these practices shape our understandings of what desirable futures might look like from environmental and geographic lenses. This paper session, co-organized with members of the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory, will highlight transformative work being carried out in and with Indigenous communities and, we hope, spur vigorous, generative conversations about what Indigenous communities can teach us about the futures already being made.

Chairs: Kristen Zinger, Michael Buzzelli; Western University This session aims to bring together papers concerned with the local geographies of institutions. Local communities both shape and reflect resident institutions in a rich mix of relations, accountabilities, and impacts. Places of worship, government, and education, among others, create distinct types of community engagements, power relations and identities. Augmenting these relations is the non-local mission of many institutional types: a geographical mandate rendering these institutions virtually unaccountable to the ‘host’ communities that absorb the externalities they generate. The military base, for example, is a unique community presence that creates particular local influences and identities while its national defense mission is non-local. Similarly, the university or college’s educative mission is usually cast as a provincial mandate and is often layered with national and international aspirations. Without local accountability, tensions arise when universities reach into the community to deliver experiential learning placements. The same can be said of rising institutional enrolments and the housing market dislocations resulting from so-called neighbourhood ‘studentification’. In this broad context, we invite papers submitted to the CAG conference to create a special session (or more) on the place-based geographies of institutions. Case studies, alternative institutional types, interesting/new methods of inquiry, and policy research are all welcome. Please note we are happy to consider turning this into a panel discussion rather than a paper session should that suit the conference organisers.

Chairs: Alexandra Sbrocchi, McMaster University; Anastasia Soukhov, Western University Movement shapes how we experience and organize space. Transportation systems and mobility infrastructures compress distances, enable connections, and structure access to opportunities—with uneven geographic consequences. How does politics, the built and natural environment, human behaviour, and infrastructure shape individual and group mobilities? Who benefits from transportation systems, and who is left immobilized or displaced? What are the environmental, social, and spatial implications of how we move? As we face intersecting challenges (i.e., climate change, urbanization, economic inequalities, technological shifts), geographic perspectives on transportation and mobilities are essential for understanding our past and present while planning our futures. This inaugural session of Transportation and Mobilities invites research that examines transportation systems and associated mobilities from geographic perspectives. We welcome work exploring justice and equity, as well as environmental impacts, infrastructure politics, technological change, community responses, and the temporal/spatial dimensions of movement. We seek conceptual, empirical, and community-engaged scholarship across urban to rural contexts, using quantitative, qualitative, community-based or mixed methods.

Chairs: Rene Duplain, University of Ottawa; Francine Berish, Queen's University This session brings together map librarians, geospatial specialists, and researchers to explore how emerging technologies are transforming engagement with physical map collections. Presenters will showcase innovative approaches—such as AI-enhanced discovery, immersive visualization, and advanced digitization workflows—that bridge historical cartographic materials with contemporary research practices. Together, these talks highlight how libraries and archives can integrate the tactile strengths of legacy collections with cutting-edge tools, enabling richer analysis, improved access, and new opportunities for teaching and scholarship.

Chairs: Chris Hebda, Sophie Norris, Ian O'Connell; University of Victoria Advances in digital cartography, innovative spatial analysis approaches, and 3D technologies are reshaping how geographers represent, analyze, and communicate spatial information. This session explores innovative approaches that integrate traditional cartography, modern spatial analysis, and 3D printing to enhance research, teaching and learning. We welcome contributors who will showcase methods for transforming geospatial datasets into tangible maps and models, demonstrate how 3D visualizations deepen spatial reasoning, and/or discuss classroom strategies that bridge digital and physical representations of place. The session also invites scholars, educators, and practitioners to share insights, tools, and best practices for incorporating innovative workflows into curricula and geographic education.

Chairs: Andrew Crosby, David Hugill; Carleton University In 2017, the Government of Canada launched the National Housing Strategy (NHS) to ensure that “everyone in Canada” can secure housing “that meets their needs and that they can afford.” In the period since, federal officials have committed more than 115 B. to fund this effort. While the activities collapsed under the banner of the NHS are varied, they also add up to something relatively straightforward: a major public investment that will have lasting impacts on Canada’s housing system and built environments for decades to come. This session invites critical appraisals of the NHS and its various programs. It aims to collect a diverse set of papers from a range of perspectives that are committed to asking tough questions about this federal initiative.

Chairs: Scott Krayenhoff, University of Guelph; Jinhyung Lee, Peter Crank and James Voogt, Western University Urban areas are home to a large majority of Canadians and an increasing majority of the global population. These urban areas both modify the local climates to create a distinct urban climate and are important receptors of climate change impacts. They are thus sites of potential exposure for large portions of the population to climate-related hazards. Building resilience to climate change in urban areas requires both an understanding of the hazard and exposure and appropriate implementation of urban climate adaptation. In this context, we invite presentations from researchers with interests in the characterization of urban climates, the assessment of urban climate related hazards (heat, floods, severe weather, air pollution) and implementation and assessment of urban climate adaptation measures using any methodological approach. We also welcome interdisciplinary perspectives that examine the impacts of urban climate hazards on equity and environmental justice, human health and wellbeing, transportation and movement dynamics, and urban planning. We are particularly interested in work in Canadian settings that represent the breadth of urban geographies.

Chairs: Annie Booth and Zoë A. Meletis; University of Northern British Columbia In a time when the new normal is climate change, habitat destruction, social injustice, and political disinformation, it is vital to include gender and gender relations in discussions of climate change. As part of this, it is critical to recognize women’s assets, skills, and practices that contribute to resilience via activities such as connecting, adapting, recovering, and innovating. Please join us to present, share, and discuss research on gender, environment and sustainability. During the session, we’ll connect ideas, concepts, and lessons within papers, and consider implications across them. We’ll contemplate and contribute to ongoing conversations on gender and resilience in times of crisis.

Chair: Noémie Boulanger-Lapointe, University of Victoria

Chair: Sarah Wolfe, Stephanie Cote, Lauren Smith Panelists: Lauren Smith, Stephanie Cote, Yinuo Lu, Aspen Murray, Tariq Harney Since the early 2000’s, much has been written about emotion’s role in space and place, including the co-beneficial perspectives of geographies of affect and emotional geographies. The works of Bondi, O’Grady, Sultana, Pile — along with many others — provide a robust foundation to explore the intent and outcomes of emotions in relation to human interactions with their landscapes, resources, and behaviours. With the inequitable and unjust impacts of climate change increasingly realized, understanding emotional drivers of climate responses and resource use is a mission critical task. By understanding how emotions influence and are influenced by climate behaviours, we can better conceptualize strategies toward planetary resilience. This panel and workshop session will connect scholars who work with emotions and the climate, nature, landscapes, or resources, in any combination. Whether focused on fear, joy, empathy, love, hate, awe, or other emotions, and whether investigating affective experiences of climate change, motivational possibilities from specific emotions, or emotional attachment to space and place (for just a few examples), the work ahead is vast and potential interconnections are endless. We invite you to submit an abstract to briefly present on a collaborative panel and engage in a workshop session that will highlight emerging scholars and novel research towards identifying emotions’ roles along pathways to climate resilience. We aspire, with participant interest, that these breakout groups could lead to a manuscript published in Canadian Geographies. Breakout groups: 1. How can affective and emotional geographies resolve environmental and climate problems and build societal resilience?2. What connections does geography have, or need, to other disciplines for conceptual and methodological insights?3. How would we define a conceptually and methodologically expansive and applied research agenda for affective and emotional geographies? Stephanie Cote. Royal Roads University Yuck! Gross! and Ewwww! Applying interdisciplinary insights to design communication strategies for effectively addressing negative responses to water reuse practices Tariq Harney University of British Columbia Affect and Emotions in Mobilizing Youth-led Climate Justice Yinuo Lu. Royal Roads University Emotional Pathways to Climate Action: How Identity Shapes Responses to Awe and Fear. Glen MacDonald University of California, Los Angeles Affective and Emotional Climate Resilience - Setting the Course for More Effective Climate Science Aspen Murray Concordia University Homesick from Climate Change: How Can Climate Adaptation Address Solastalgia in Interior British Columbia, Canada? Lauren Smith. Royal Roads University Emotions and gender equity in planetary care: How emotions influence paid and unpaid climate activities across genders

Chairs: Lawrence Ignace / Miskomin, University of Victoria A range of interconnected economic, political, and social crises has besieged the world we live in. Within dominant settler cultures, this often appears as an impending “end of the world,” albeit with varying definitions. Yet when we foreground the viewpoints, scholarship, and lived practices of the subaltern—particularly Indigenous peoples—it becomes clear that what is ending is not “the world” itself, but rather a world built on bad relations to land and environment. This shift in perspective opens up space to think with more clarity about what might emerge in a “new world.” Indigenous communities have long articulated such possibilities, both through concrete actions to protect and promote good relations with the land and through the knowledge they generate in formal and informal contexts. Together, these practices shape our understandings of what desirable futures might look like from environmental and geographic lenses. This paper session, co-organized with members of the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory, will highlight transformative work being carried out in and with Indigenous communities and, we hope, spur vigorous, generative conversations about what Indigenous communities can teach us about the futures already being made.

Chairs: Alexandra Sbrocchi, McMaster University; Anastasia Soukhov, Western University Movement shapes how we experience and organize space. Transportation systems and mobility infrastructures compress distances, enable connections, and structure access to opportunities—with uneven geographic consequences. How does politics, the built and natural environment, human behaviour, and infrastructure shape individual and group mobilities? Who benefits from transportation systems, and who is left immobilized or displaced? What are the environmental, social, and spatial implications of how we move? As we face intersecting challenges (i.e., climate change, urbanization, economic inequalities, technological shifts), geographic perspectives on transportation and mobilities are essential for understanding our past and present while planning our futures. This inaugural session of Transportation and Mobilities invites research that examines transportation systems and associated mobilities from geographic perspectives. We welcome work exploring justice and equity, as well as environmental impacts, infrastructure politics, technological change, community responses, and the temporal/spatial dimensions of movement. We seek conceptual, empirical, and community-engaged scholarship across urban to rural contexts, using quantitative, qualitative, community-based or mixed methods.

Chair: Tamara Krawchenko, University of Victoria Community engagement in the Northern Regional Energy Dialogues project identified a range of crucial knowledge gaps and capacity constraints that are impeding energy transitions in northern BC, including a lack of systematic energy-economy modelling or regional-scale planning processes to address challenges such as decision-making, misaligned policy frameworks, limited professional skills and training programs, and community-scale tensions arising from political polarization and mis/disinformation campaigns. This panel will present the project’s methodological approach and initial initiatives addressing these gaps. These include a typology of community energy conditions across northern BC, linking common challenges with corresponding policy, planning, and capacity-building responses; a survey developed using a participatory approach to generate inclusive and actionable insights relating to northern identity, environmental experiences and attitudes, and energy futures; and a case study of community activation amidst polarization in Williams Lake (T'Exelc/ Yucwt') and the Cariboo Regional District.

Chair: Josie Wittmer, Memorial University The ‘problems’ posed by the persistent materiality of waste are often addressed through the spatial separation and/or containment of polluting materials. Detritus is sent away to concentrate and accumulate “elsewhere”— often to rural and remote locales that are made invisible to those producing waste (Butt, 2023: 7). Ubiquitous consumer and industrial goods also travel to rural and remote communities for consumption. However, the enduring under-resourcing of rural and remote infrastructures stymies the capacity of communities to manage their waste and sewage to meet federal regulations. Instead, communities often rely on localized strategies like sending untreated sewage into local water systems and dumping or burning garbage, responses often viewed as ‘mismanagement’ (Liborion, 2018). Yet, the separation of waste from its elsewheres is never complete. Elsewheres are produced through policy and infrastructural mismatches where centralized regulations can be disconnected from the realities of rural and remote life. Critical anticolonial scholarship highlights how dominant polluting practices are sustained by racial capitalist and colonial frameworks that justify the continual “alteration” of specific lands and bodies (Murphy, 2017: 497) and the production of disposable peripheries, or “sacrifice zones” (Klein, 2015: 169).

Chairs: Andrew Crosby, David Hugill; Carleton University In 2017, the Government of Canada launched the National Housing Strategy (NHS) to ensure that “everyone in Canada” can secure housing “that meets their needs and that they can afford.” In the period since, federal officials have committed more than 115 B. to fund this effort. While the activities collapsed under the banner of the NHS are varied, they also add up to something relatively straightforward: a major public investment that will have lasting impacts on Canada’s housing system and built environments for decades to come. This session invites critical appraisals of the NHS and its various programs. It aims to collect a diverse set of papers from a range of perspectives that are committed to asking tough questions about this federal initiative.

Chairs: Rachel Brydolf-Horwitz, University of British Columbia; Juliane Collard, Vancouver Island University Across domains as varied as assisted reproduction, infant care, aging, prisons, pandemics, and climate change, technological solutions are presented as pragmatic, efficient, and even inevitable responses to complex social and ecological issues. Yet, to paraphrase STS scholar Stephanie Dick (forthcoming), part of solving a problem with technology is reimagining and remaking the problem into something technologies can address. In the realm of health, reproduction, and aging for example, technological interventions such as fertility apps and ‘smart’ baby monitors render bodies and social relations legible as measurable data (Brydolf-Horwitz, forthcoming). In the face of accelerating climate crises, economy-wide electrification (Gerson 2022) and individualized emissions tracking apps reduce climate change to a question of carbon. To address anti-black racism in the carceral system, prisons implement machine learning tools that promise to “objectively” assess criminals’ risk of recidivating (Salman 2024). In pandemic monitoring, flows of sewage are reconfigured as reservoirs of bioinformation (Arefin & Prouse 2024). Linking these and many other cases is a technological smoke screen that flattens, depoliticizes, and conceals the structural drivers of crises. Here, technofixes do much more and less than they promise, rarely “solving” the problems they were designed to address, while at the same time reconfiguring bodies, environments, and futures in unexpected and troubling ways.

Chairs: Scott Krayenhoff, University of Guelph; Jinhyung Lee, Peter Crank and James Voogt, Western University Urban areas are home to a large majority of Canadians and an increasing majority of the global population. These urban areas both modify the local climates to create a distinct urban climate and are important receptors of climate change impacts. They are thus sites of potential exposure for large portions of the population to climate-related hazards. Building resilience to climate change in urban areas requires both an understanding of the hazard and exposure and appropriate implementation of urban climate adaptation. In this context, we invite presentations from researchers with interests in the characterization of urban climates, the assessment of urban climate related hazards (heat, floods, severe weather, air pollution) and implementation and assessment of urban climate adaptation measures using any methodological approach. We also welcome interdisciplinary perspectives that examine the impacts of urban climate hazards on equity and environmental justice, human health and wellbeing, transportation and movement dynamics, and urban planning. We are particularly interested in work in Canadian settings that represent the breadth of urban geographies.

Chair: Roberta Hawkins, University of Guelph Are you using some interesting methods that you want to share with other qualitative researchers? Do you engage creativity in your work, such as storytelling, art, design, or speculation? Do you use technologies like social media, mapping software, online journaling, etc. to collect data, engage with participants or share results? Have you woven critical methodologies (like feminist, queer, disability studies or critical race theory) into your practices as a researcher? If so, please join this session. This session invites papers from researchers at any career stage who want to share the methods and methodologies that they have engaged with recently in their research. The spirit of this session will be reflection, sharing, learning from one another and collaboration.

Chair: Will Niver, Simon Fraser University

Chair: Benjamin Owens, University of Toronto The so-called ‘post’-COVID era has entailed a profound social and spatial upheaval in the geographies of homelessness and precarious housing. Responding to the proliferation of encampments during the pandemic, houseless persons have been violently displaced from public spaces by police and private security forces as crises of affordability mount. Provincial governments have quietly retrenched and shuttered harm reduction programs and facilities, heralding a return of involuntary institutionalization in some jurisdictions. An increasingly violent and dehumanizing conservative movement has further signalled a resurgence of revanchism and punitive urban governance. Despite these persistent attempts at, and overtures to, ‘annihilation,’ networks and assemblages of life among houseless and precariously housed people persist, across complex geographies that include (but are certainly not limited to) shelters, transitional housing arrangements, couches, encampments, and the myriad ‘interstices’ of urban life. This themed session aims to bring together papers that consider, broadly, questions of precarious housing and homelessness from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Thinking with the conference theme of resilience, this session encourages presenters to consider, in particular, the dynamic and place-based strategies of living and resistance among the houseless and precariously housed. How do people make life within and beyond the institutional settings and urban interstices associated with mere survival that dominate representations of these populations? What lessons can be generated from grounded human and post-human accounts that parse through the messiness of life and problematize normative conceptions of habitability against which homelessness and alternative living arrangements are positioned? In adopting this perspective, we can attend to the life (and particularly life-beyond-survival) of the houseless and precariously housed and, without romanticizing conditions marked by ongoing structural violence, recognize, following AbdouMaliq Simone, “such urban life as generative difference” as we pursue and prefigure more just urban futures.

Chairs: Alexandra Sbrocchi, McMaster University; Anastasia Soukhov, Western University Movement shapes how we experience and organize space. Transportation systems and mobility infrastructures compress distances, enable connections, and structure access to opportunities—with uneven geographic consequences. How does politics, the built and natural environment, human behaviour, and infrastructure shape individual and group mobilities? Who benefits from transportation systems, and who is left immobilized or displaced? What are the environmental, social, and spatial implications of how we move? As we face intersecting challenges (i.e., climate change, urbanization, economic inequalities, technological shifts), geographic perspectives on transportation and mobilities are essential for understanding our past and present while planning our futures. This inaugural session of Transportation and Mobilities invites research that examines transportation systems and associated mobilities from geographic perspectives. We welcome work exploring justice and equity, as well as environmental impacts, infrastructure politics, technological change, community responses, and the temporal/spatial dimensions of movement. We seek conceptual, empirical, and community-engaged scholarship across urban to rural contexts, using quantitative, qualitative, community-based or mixed methods.

Chairs: Emma Woodward, Australian Government Science Organization; Jaimy Fischer and Heather Castleden, University of Victoria We invite scholars, practitioners, community researchers, and knowledge holders to contribute to a themed session exploring how place-based approaches shape prevention, preparedness, response, recovery, and resilience in the context of climate disasters and displacement in Canada and beyond. As climate-related events intensify—wildfires, floods, extreme heat, coastal erosion, severe storms—there is a growing need to understand how people, communities, and ecosystems experience and enact resilience across diverse geographies. This session aims to foreground human and other-than-human relationships with place, recognizing that resilience is not solely an infrastructural project, but an ecological one embedded in the relations among peoples, lands, waters, species, and material environments. We especially welcome submissions that examine the lived and spatial dimensions of climate disasters; Indigenous and community-led resilience practices; multispecies and ecological approaches to displacement; governance and policy challenges; and methodological or theoretical innovations in studying place-based climate responses. Contributions may address acute events or slow-onset changes, urban or rural or remote contexts, and comparative or transnational perspectives, all from a lens of planetary health equity. By convening contributors from a wide variety of relevant geographic subfields (e.g., health geography, mobility geographies, disaster geographies, animal geographies) and interdisciplinary and intersectional voices, this session seeks to advance scholarship that is attentive to justice, relationality, and the complex spatialities of climate displacement. We encourage abstracts that articulate the contribution, methods, and empirical or conceptual basis of the proposed paper. Submissions from early-career researchers, community geographers, and those with lived experience of climate displacement are strongly encouraged and welcomed. A key outcome of this session will be the collaborative development of an academic article and/or a special issue proposal to a relevant journal in geography, environmental studies, disaster studies, or related fields. We invite authors interested in co-creating publishable outputs to indicate their willingness to participate in post-session writing activities.

Chair: Leanne Trimble, University of Toronto This session will include several individual presentations, providing updates about initiatives around improving access to geospatial data in Canada. Attendees will learn about new collections and improvements in data discovery which may benefit their research or reference work. They will also gain an understanding of recent explorations leveraging AI in collections projects aiming to improve access to digitized maps and geospatial data.

Chairs: Rachel Brydolf-Horwitz, University of British Columbia; Juliane Collard, Vancouver Island University Across domains as varied as assisted reproduction, infant care, aging, prisons, pandemics, and climate change, technological solutions are presented as pragmatic, efficient, and even inevitable responses to complex social and ecological issues. Yet, to paraphrase STS scholar Stephanie Dick (forthcoming), part of solving a problem with technology is reimagining and remaking the problem into something technologies can address. In the realm of health, reproduction, and aging for example, technological interventions such as fertility apps and ‘smart’ baby monitors render bodies and social relations legible as measurable data (Brydolf-Horwitz, forthcoming). In the face of accelerating climate crises, economy-wide electrification (Gerson 2022) and individualized emissions tracking apps reduce climate change to a question of carbon. To address anti-black racism in the carceral system, prisons implement machine learning tools that promise to “objectively” assess criminals’ risk of recidivating (Salman 2024). In pandemic monitoring, flows of sewage are reconfigured as reservoirs of bioinformation (Arefin & Prouse 2024). Linking these and many other cases is a technological smoke screen that flattens, depoliticizes, and conceals the structural drivers of crises. Here, technofixes do much more and less than they promise, rarely “solving” the problems they were designed to address, while at the same time reconfiguring bodies, environments, and futures in unexpected and troubling ways. This session invites papers that interrogate how technologies redefine or recompose the problems they purport to fix; the varied consequences that arise from these recompositions; and how we might resist (and are already resisting). We seek to cast a wide net and would love to include submissions that engage with a range of topics where technofixes have been proposed or implemented, with an eye to thinking across them. We welcome theoretical, methodological, and empirical work, as well as papers grounded in activism, collaboration, or community-based research.

Chair: Fabiola Melchior, University of British Columbia What are the politics of fire? We wish to use this session to open a dialogue with scholars interested in the socio-legal, and political geographies of fire. Settler colonial, Indigenous, and/or critical geographic approaches to fire offer unique vantage points from which to examine the relationship between people, legal orders, politics, land, and fire. Fire ecologists, environmental historians, Indigenous communities, and geographers have all highlighted the role of colonial land management in exacerbating the wildfire threat posed by the climate crisis (e.g., Copes-Gerbitz et al., 2022; Hoffman et al., 2022; S. J. Pyne, 2021; Verhaeghe et al., 2019). We hope to deepen such work by examining, for instance, how racialized property regimes, technocratic governance, and capital accumulation are shaped, resisted, and transformed in and through relations to fire/wildfire. We are interested in how fire is used to dominate, subordinate, and control, but also as resistance, resurgence, transformation, governance, and liberation. As Immerwahr (2023, p. 473) notes on criminalized abolitionists-arsonists in the antebellum south: “some things cannot be fixed; they must be burned”. Our session hopes to recast geographic understandings of fire by hearing how fire simultaneously creates and connects an array of milieus through sets of situated practices, imaginaries, relations, legalities, and affects. We encourage critical, Indigenous, anti-colonial, decolonial, critical race, and/or queer perspectives on socio-legal and political geographies of fire. Our emphasis here signals our desire to move beyond current debates, which generally tend to conclude that ‘improved’ settler colonial land management and governance as a solution to build fire resilience along well-trodden structures that prop up racial capitalism, Indigenous dispossession, and patriarchy. To this end, we wonder if a socio-legal and political geographies of fire may offer tools for shifting perspectives, approaches, and relations with our current moment?

Chairs: Scott Krayenhoff, University of Guelph; Jinhyung Lee, Peter Crank and James Voogt, Western University Urban areas are home to a large majority of Canadians and an increasing majority of the global population. These urban areas both modify the local climates to create a distinct urban climate and are important receptors of climate change impacts. They are thus sites of potential exposure for large portions of the population to climate-related hazards. Building resilience to climate change in urban areas requires both an understanding of the hazard and exposure and appropriate implementation of urban climate adaptation. In this context, we invite presentations from researchers with interests in the characterization of urban climates, the assessment of urban climate related hazards (heat, floods, severe weather, air pollution) and implementation and assessment of urban climate adaptation measures using any methodological approach. We also welcome interdisciplinary perspectives that examine the impacts of urban climate hazards on equity and environmental justice, human health and wellbeing, transportation and movement dynamics, and urban planning. We are particularly interested in work in Canadian settings that represent the breadth of urban geographies.

Chair: Roberta Hawkins, University of Guelph Are you using some interesting methods that you want to share with other qualitative researchers? Do you engage creativity in your work, such as storytelling, art, design, or speculation? Do you use technologies like social media, mapping software, online journaling, etc. to collect data, engage with participants or share results? Have you woven critical methodologies (like feminist, queer, disability studies or critical race theory) into your practices as a researcher? If so, please join this session. This session invites papers from researchers at any career stage who want to share the methods and methodologies that they have engaged with recently in their research. The spirit of this session will be reflection, sharing, learning from one another and collaboration.

Meeting in front of the Cove! Facilitators: Robin Westland, Jennifer Mateer, Adrienne Johnson This participatory walking session invites delegates to “walk otherwise” by exploring feminist and participatory walking methods in Victoria. Drawing inspiration from the Participatory Geographies Research Group's walking workshops in Birmingham and from the work of Morag Rose, Aled Singleton, and Stephanie Springgay & Sarah Truman, this session uses the city as a living laboratory for thinking-and-moving through place. Participants will experiment with walking as a mode of inquiry: sensing power, memory, accessibility, and belonging in urban space. The workshop foregrounds feminist, decolonial, queer, crip, and more-than-human perspectives to challenge assumptions about that everyone moves or experiences the city in the same way. The session includes an opening orientation, guided walks in small thematic groups, and a collective reflection in a nearby public space where participants will have the opportunity to co-create and contribute to a Zine. Zines are DIY pamphlets or booklets that contain colourful text and dramatic images. They have roots in the informal, underground scenes of science fiction, and the social and political activism movements of feminist punk and homocore. Our vision is to have all conference participants contribute to a ‘living’ zine throughout the CAG conference through which we will capture and archive special conference moments and experiences. In practical terms, we propose to have a table set up in a central conference location that will host the zine and FIGS / SOGS volunteers. The station will be equipped with craft materials such as paper, magazines, glue, markers, and stickers. Workshop and conference participants will be invited to stop by and contribute to the zine such in the form of drawing, poetry, text, etc. At the end of the conference, we will print the zine and distribute it to conference participants.

Making Waste Visible is an immersive research, arts, and technology initiative spearheaded by the Community-Based Research Lab at UVic. Centered around the work of Dr. Jutta Gutberlet and circular economy advocates, It provides opportunities for students, faculty, and the general public to explore Community-Based Research (CBR) and its intersections with pressing issues such as plastic waste, climate change, and various Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This exhibition showcases photographs and infographics captured and created by various students and scholars affiliated with the Community-Based Research Lab (CBRL), presenting their unique perspectives and insights on the issue of waste.