Schedule

Chair: Sharon LuK, Simon Fraser University Panelists: Sharon LuK, Simon Fraser University; May Farrales, Simon Fraser University; JP Catungal, University of British Columbia; Davina Bhandar and Katherine Acachoso, University of Victoria This round table stages a dialogue amongst faculty (at various stages of our careers) to reflect on current challenges to advancing women and queer of color geographies in our research, teaching/training, and social practices. How are "end times" crises and their particular manifestations in higher education and culture affecting our work? We hope to use this space to name our challenges and explore how we are finding or building support to move through them. It may also be possible to generalize certain experiences and develop approaches or networks to transform particular conditions of constraint, as they come up in our classrooms, hallways, offices, etc.

Chairs: Reuben Rose-Redwood, CindyAnn Rose-Redwood; University of Victoria This paper session examines the politics of place naming, monumentality, and infrastructure as world-making practices. The aim of the session is to showcase contemporary scholarship that makes both theoretical and empirical contributions to advance critical toponymies as well as monumentality and infrastructural studies as they intersect with critical human geography and related fields.

Chair: Jessica Dempsey, UBC Geography Amidst geopolitical insecurity, energy transitions, and data center booms, natural resources are firmly back on center stage in national imaginaries and budgets, with profound implications for how ecological and economic risks and benefits will be distributed. Governments justify this extraction as being in the national or public interest, but the economic benefits from extractive projects are at times overstated and, in some cases, declining. Simultaneously, the public costs from extraction and climate change-linked wildfires and floods continue to rise. This expanding resource extraction, which often infringes on Indigenous rights, is also estimated to be responsible for up to 90% of biodiversity loss on land. These high local and national costs indicate the resurgence of extractivism, a term referring to highly unequal distribution of benefits and costs from often export-oriented extraction. Meanwhile, environmental degradation and climate change have been pushed off of the political stage. The result is that structural political-economic transformations for a liveable and just planet have never seemed more necessary nor more out of reach. How might we understand the contemporary moment? How are states maintaining environmental and human/Indigenous rights legitimacy amongst this reasserted resource nationalism (or not)? Why have ecologically and socially-necessary alternatives to extractivism remained out of reach, and what might make these changes possible in the years ahead? The session welcomes papers engaging these questions. We anticipate being able to fill two full paper presentation sessions - for a total of 8 paper presentations, with a discussant for each, to lead to a special themed journal issue.

Chair: Katie Burles, College of the Rockies In an era defined by climate disruption, social fragmentation, and widening inequities, resilience depends not only on technical solutions but on our collective capacity to work across boundaries. Transdisciplinary knowledge co-production (TKC) offers a pathway for doing so—bringing together community partners, researchers, and practitioners to collaboratively define problems, generate knowledge, and co-create context-specific responses. Like many community-based research approaches, TKC encompasses a range of theoretical orientations and applied practices. Rather than viewing this diversity as a challenge, this session takes it as an opportunity: an invitation to share our unique experiences with TKC, exchange insights across projects, and reflect collectively on the challenges and possibilities these approaches open up. In doing so, we explore not only how TKC can strengthen social-environmental resilience, but also how it might cultivate resilience within academia—shaping practitioners of this approach as well as pedagogy. The session will include a set of themed presentations followed by a moderated panel discussion. Presenters will draw on ongoing TKC initiatives to illuminate how co-production unfolds in real-world settings, including community-university partnerships, place-based sustainability projects, and applied climate research. Topics will include: principles for TKC work; navigating power, process, and expectations; emerging collaborative methods; and the personal and institutional dimensions of working transdisciplinarily. Expected outcomes include: (1) a richer shared understanding of the breadth and potential of TKC; (2) practical, grounded insights for scholars and practitioners interested in integrating TKC into their work; and (3) generative discussion about future collaborations and directions for the field. Potential presenters include: Emily Smit (PhD student, University of Toronto, TKC projects Just Transitions in Action, Visionary Communities), Anne Gloger (Founder, Catalysts’ Circle; Visionary Communities project), and Connor McGookin (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Accelerating Community Energy Transformations, University of British Columbia).

Chair: Avet Khachatryan, University of Toronto Canadian communities are contested spaces affected by capitalism, colonial legacies, climate and demographic changes, and other issues. From Indigenous land and water defenders, to climate and transportation justice networks, to housing coalitions, citizens across Canada are mobilizing to address inequalities, participate in policymaking, and reclaim space. The proposed session explores various aspects of citizen-led initiatives for social and environmental justice, including their formation, evolution, resources, impacts, and other aspects. The session seeks to: · Highlight citizen-led initiatives that help shape geographic research and practice; · Deepen the theoretical and empirical foundations of the diverse geographies of citizen-led initiatives; · Maintain and advance research dialogue on the methodology and methods of community-related research; · Foster collaboration between researchers and citizen-led initiatives; · Formulate ideas for municipal, provincial, and federal policies.

Chairs: Bronwyn Bragg, University of Lethbridge; Jennifer Hyndman, York University Reversing decades of pro-immigration public opinion, in 2024 nearly 60 percent of Canadians believe that the country accepts too many immigrants (Neuman 2024). Canadian immigration numbers rose dramatically over the past five years, with the federal government now pulling back and trimming most streams, promising, in the words of the Prime Minister, to “[get] immigration under control” (Robertson 2025). The most drastic cuts are to temporary migration, including temporary foreign workers and international students. This has happened as part of a more hostile posture toward immigration in Canada, with greater emphasis on enforcement at the US-Canada border and new limits on the rights of asylum seekers. These politics of immigration and temporary migration signal that newcomers may be “needed” but are not necessarily “wanted.” Employers, especially in rural and smaller communities, have opposed these changes, citing labour shortages. Others have critiqued these business groups arguing that it is a shortage of wages, not labour, that is the problem. These changes have generated a contradictory politics making the situation on the ground for migrants fraught and uncertain.

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: Jamila Ewais, Concordia University; Angela McIntyre, University of the Fraser Valley; Vasanthi Venkatesh, University of Windsor; Stephanie Eccles, Toronto Metropolitan University Across the globe, from Turtle Island to Palestine, food systems are reshaped by intersecting but distinct forces: extractive capitalism, the logics of settler-colonialism, and the imperative of securitization. These forces converge with corporate and national emission-reduction targets that deploy agri-technologies such as carbon markets, novel alternative proteins and advanced automation. While the Just Transition has emerged as a powerful framework for imagining a worker-driven transition, its application to global food systems reveals structural capture. With agri-food corporations like Nestlé adopting the language of the JT in transnational supply chains, we see “decent work” narratives retooled to stabilize extractive regimes, entrenching the very eco-social injustices they claim to redress. This raises a question for internationalist solidarity: how do we reconcile the structural violence of the settler state and the survival struggles of migrants and other precarious workers? For migrant labourers, the nature of the agricultural industry in the global North creates a vicious feedback loop as they find themselves doubly displaced, facing droughts and inundations in their home countries, then heatwaves and fires at worksites. This session confronts the geographical, political and conceptual ‘borders’ of the Just Transition as currently mobilized by asking: What does an Internationalist Just Transition look like that secures livelihoods for workers without legitimizing the settler-colonial state? We invite contributors to prepare a 10-minute presentation and engage in a panel discussion facilitated by the organizers.

Chair: Isabelle Gapp, University of Aberdeen Understanding sea ice change around the Arctic, and its environmental and social implications, requires working across and beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. While the physical science of sea ice often receives most of the attention, human geographers, social scientists, arts and humanities scholars have long examined the spatial, cultural, and political dimensions of ice: from the current and historic role of sea ice for northern and Indigenous livelihoods, to the geopolitical and economic implications of its loss, to investigations into how sea ice is depicted and experienced by Indigenous and non-Indigenous makers and within visual, material, and literary cultures. Prioritising Indigenous knowledge, creativity, and relationships to land and sea ice further disrupts disciplinary silos and draws attention to the localised, place-based encounters through which environmental change and continuity is lived. This session invites proposals that examine the environmental, social, cultural, and spatial geographies of sea ice; consider how humans have encountered, travelled, represented, and lived with ice; or highlight how sea ice dynamics are locally situated yet globally interconnected. We especially welcome work that bridges disciplines within and beyond geography, centres Indigenous perspectives, or demonstrates how interdisciplinary and community-based approaches can enrich geographic understandings of Arctic sea ice.

Pick up your lunch from a selection of food trucks, browse new geography publications at the Library, visit the art installations or simply enjoy the sun with colleagues during this extended lunch. Karla Point, Cedar bark weaver from the Hesquiaht First Nation, will also be offering a workshop titled "Hii nulth tsa kaa - On the Beach Welcoming” in the Library.

Chair: Killian McCormack, University of Toronto

Chairs: Mantha Katsikana and Amanda De Lisio; York University Panelist: Martha Paynter, University of New Brunswick; Clare Heggie, University of New Brunswick; Emily Mills, Brock University; Amanda De Lisio, York University; Mantha Katsikana, York University Description: Amid the global rise of far-right and conservative politics, abortion has become a central focus of public debate, disproportionately affecting those who do not conform to white, cisheteropatriarchal norms of motherhood (Beutin, 2023; Ross & Solinger, 2017). Within geography, a growing field of abortion geographies has emerged, particularly following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States (Mills & DeLaet, 2024; Calkin et al., 2022; Thomsen et al., 2022) and in response to legislative reforms and grassroots mobilizations around the world (Freeman & Rodríguez, 2024; Suárez-Baquero et al., 2024; Fischer, 2019, 2020). Despite this expansion, the field remains heavily U.S.-centric. In Canada, where abortion has been decriminalized, provincially regulated, and publicly funded since 1988, geographical research has focused mainly on rural-urban disparities in provision and the mobilities of abortion seekers (Sethna & Doull, 2013). Non-geographical literature has highlighted barriers to access, and the ongoing impacts of colonial medical and obstetric violence (Jones et al., 2024; Paynter & Heggie, 2024; Shaheen-Hussain et al., 2023; McKenzie et al., 2022), yet questions of space, place, and spatial justice remain underexplored.This panel addresses these gaps by examining the geographies of abortion through embodied, affective, and lived dimensions of abortion-related care and organizing. It adopts feminist geographical approaches that foreground spatial (in)justice and emphasize the urban, suburban, rural, and cross-border spatialities that shape abortion access, experience, and resistance. The session aims to broaden geographical understandings of abortion beyond U.S.-centric frameworks, to centre spatialities of care, collective organizing, and transnational solidarity, and to illuminate spatial strategies that confront far-right sensibilities and restrictive governmentalities. It further aims to generate interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars, practitioners, and community organizers. Potential presenters may include feminist geographers, reproductive health practitioners, legal advocates, community-based abortion rights organizers, and others engaged in scholarship or activism related to abortion access and care.

Chairs: Evan Cleave, Toronto Metropolitan University Organized by the Urban Geography Study Group, this session brings together the diverse field of urban research. Urban areas vary in their form, structure, morphology, land use patterns, and historical processes of evolution. But they are also driven by a series of interrelated processes of change - including economic, political, cultural, demographic, technological, environmental, social, and locally-contingent forces. The goal of this session is to present research that explores this diverse range of processes and their impact in Canada and abroad. Any research relevant to urban geography is welcome. It can be empirical (qualitative or quantitative) or theoretical, early-stage or near completion, and can be presented in English or French.

Chairs: Hulya Arik, University of Toronto Conversations on decolonizing geography, particularly geographies of religion, critique the Western and colonial frameworks that persistently frame Islam and Muslims as the “other” empirically and epistemically (Gokariksel and Mills 2014, Jazeel 2019, Sidaway 2022). Building on these debates, this session seeks to contribute to the project of decolonizing Muslim geographies. It aims to bridge emerging conversations across sub-fields to move beyond the entrenched East/West and secular/religious divides, interrogating how the very boundaries of the "Muslim" and the "Islamic" are constructed, policed, and contested, both conceptually and empirically. It invites conversations that go beyond Muslim-minority vs Muslim-majority divide to question the dominant research paradigms that govern Muslim geographic imaginaries. The session welcomes research grounded in geography-including geographies of religion, feminist geopolitics, urban studies, and political and cultural geography - as well as interdisciplinary work drawing from decolonial and postcolonial studies, feminist theory, political science, sociology, anthropology, and humanities.

Chairs: Jennifer Silver, University of Guelph; Paul Foley, Memorial University What is the field of ‘Critical Ocean Studies’ and how do geographers contribute to it? This session will delve into that question by bringing geographers and other interested scholars together to present pieces of critical ocean-oriented research and by introducing a forthcoming volume, the Routledge Handbook of Critical Ocean Studies , co-edited by the session co-organizers. It is intended to showcase work from colleagues who contributed chapters to the book, junior scholars, and draw attention to the edited volume overall. The broadest intended outcome is to celebrate and draw attention to the key role that geography and geographers play in studies of the ocean and the growing field known as Critical Ocean Studies.

Chair: Jessica Dempsey, UBC Geography Amidst geopolitical insecurity, energy transitions, and data center booms, natural resources are firmly back on center stage in national imaginaries and budgets, with profound implications for how ecological and economic risks and benefits will be distributed. Governments justify this extraction as being in the national or public interest, but the economic benefits from extractive projects are at times overstated and, in some cases, declining. Simultaneously, the public costs from extraction and climate change-linked wildfires and floods continue to rise. This expanding resource extraction, which often infringes on Indigenous rights, is also estimated to be responsible for up to 90% of biodiversity loss on land. These high local and national costs indicate the resurgence of extractivism, a term referring to highly unequal distribution of benefits and costs from often export-oriented extraction. Meanwhile, environmental degradation and climate change have been pushed off of the political stage. The result is that structural political-economic transformations for a liveable and just planet have never seemed more necessary nor more out of reach. How might we understand the contemporary moment? How are states maintaining environmental and human/Indigenous rights legitimacy amongst this reasserted resource nationalism (or not)? Why have ecologically and socially-necessary alternatives to extractivism remained out of reach, and what might make these changes possible in the years ahead? The session welcomes papers engaging these questions.

Chairs: Caroline Desbiens & Justine Gagnon, Department of geography, Université Laval Cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove (1984) has outlined how landscape is a ‘way of seeing’ that is deeply rooted in Western cultures, and where a desire for control and possession is enacted through the aestheticization of place. Following this premise, Augustin Berque (1995) argues that many societies do not engage their geographies as ‘landscapes’ but, rather, as places of practice and relationship - a view that clearly aligns with Indigenous ontologies. This themed session explores the point of contact between landscape, heritage and indigeneity to outline the ways in which Indigenous peoples are redirecting these categories, notably in conservation, tourism and heritage projects -- many of which rely on participatory mapping (Thom, 2009). Rather than a way of seeing, landscape here actualizes, in the present, ways of being, knowing and relating to ancestors and community members on the land. From that standpoint, heritage designations of land-based cultural elements also represent a concrete way of naming and promoting indigenous territorial values (Pawłowska-Mainville, 2023). Participants will present various case studies in order to compare and enrich indigenous strategies to foreground their own heritage, and ultimately reframe settler cultural landscapes.

Chairs: Jonathan Peyton, University of Manitoba; Matthew Evenden, University of British Columbia This session addresses the cultural contexts of resources, their consumption and movement, and the infrastructures which have been critical to their development, exploitation, transportation and use. The words resource and infrastructure are both relatively recent adoptions from French; the former being absorbed into its modern English meaning in the late eighteenth century as a substance or material to be exploited, the latter only in common usage in the late twentieth century to mean large technological systems. Drawing together a series of papers on discrete resource issues and problems, the session seeks to advance an historical perspective on resource geographies from several different regions and periods, both in Canada and beyond. Uniting the papers is a concern for both the cultural and material dimensions of resource histories and the changing ways in which resources and infrastructures have been understood. Resources are not found but constructed culturally and fashioned materially. Exploitation is made possible through technologies of discovery, development and distribution—what has come to be called infrastructure. How, we ask, have past practices created meaning around these concepts, mobilized them to facilitate material development, and created in the process new entities, understood to hold certain properties and functions. Addressing diverse resource and infrastructure questions from the modern development of oil in the Canadian west to the re-conception of sand and gravels as ships’ ballast in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, this session works to clarify our understandings of taken-for-granted concepts while introducing and exploring important historical processes.

Chairs: Grant McKenzie, McGill University; Victoria Fast, University of Calgary; Jed Long, Western University Our Mobility Data Science themed session brings together geographers, data scientists, planners, and practitioners who explore the dynamics of movement across scales. Domains range from human and animal mobility to freight logistics and accessibility. As cities, technologies, and ecosystems become increasingly data-rich, mobility data have emerged as an important lens for understanding how people, goods, and species move through and interact with space. Our proposed session aims to showcase innovative, quantitative, and data-driven approaches to studying mobility and encourage dialogue across disciplinary and methodological boundaries. The session will adopt a lightning talk format to support a range of voices and open discussion. Each presenter will have five minutes (hard limit) to share insights from ongoing or completed projects, novel data sources, analytical methods, or conceptual frameworks related to mobility data. Topics may include (but are not limited to): active mobility, mobility impairments and accessibility, animal movement, transportation and logistics modeling, spatiotemporal analytics, and applications of AI and big data in mobility research.

Chairs: Nick Revington, Institut national de la recherche scientifique; Jakub Zasina, University of Lodz Recent decades have been marked by profound restructuring within higher education systems in Canada and beyond. Deindustrialisation; the rise of the knowledge and creative economies; neoliberal policymaking; and the internationalisation, massification, and spatial expansion of universities and colleges have all reshaped higher education and its geographies. More recent phenomena - including the COVID-19 pandemic, changing migration regimes, and digitalisation of education - have added further nuances. These transformations have had significant consequences for towns and cities, where universities and colleges have become key players with influence on housing and labour markets. The clustering of sizeable student populations has driven multifaceted changes to established neighbourhoods. Equally important are the shifting geographies of students themselves. Consequently, this themed session interrogates the nexus of student mobility, housing, leisure, and urban change, situating students as both catalysts for such a change and subjects of vulnerability across diverse contexts. The research featured in the session covers phenomena such as studentification, urban dormitory, urban commons, and urban vitality. It also spans a broad geographical range, including cases from Canada, Asia and Europe.

Session chair: Alejandra Mora-Soto, University of Victoria

Chair: Evan Cleave, Toronto Metropolitan University Organized by the Urban Geography Study Group, this session brings together the diverse field of urban research. Urban areas vary in their form, structure, morphology, land use patterns, and historical processes of evolution. But they are also driven by a series of interrelated processes of change - including economic, political, cultural, demographic, technological, environmental, social, and locally-contingent forces. The goal of this session is to present research that explores this diverse range of processes and their impact in Canada and abroad. Any research relevant to urban geography is welcome. It can be empirical (qualitative or quantitative) or theoretical, early-stage or near completion, and can be presented in English or French.

Chair: Jessica Dempsey, UBC Geography Amidst geopolitical insecurity, energy transitions, and data center booms, natural resources are firmly back on center stage in national imaginaries and budgets, with profound implications for how ecological and economic risks and benefits will be distributed. Governments justify this extraction as being in the national or public interest, but the economic benefits from extractive projects are at times overstated and, in some cases, declining. Simultaneously, the public costs from extraction and climate change-linked wildfires and floods continue to rise. This expanding resource extraction, which often infringes on Indigenous rights, is also estimated to be responsible for up to 90% of biodiversity loss on land. These high local and national costs indicate the resurgence of extractivism, a term referring to highly unequal distribution of benefits and costs from often export-oriented extraction. Meanwhile, environmental degradation and climate change have been pushed off of the political stage. The result is that structural political-economic transformations for a liveable and just planet have never seemed more necessary nor more out of reach. How might we understand the contemporary moment? How are states maintaining environmental and human/Indigenous rights legitimacy amongst this reasserted resource nationalism (or not)? Why have ecologically and socially-necessary alternatives to extractivism remained out of reach, and what might make these changes possible in the years ahead? The session welcomes papers engaging these questions. We anticipate being able to fill two full paper presentation sessions - for a total of 8 paper presentations, with a discussant for each, to lead to a special themed journal issue.

Chairs: Jue Wang, Michael Widener, Chunjiang Li, University of Toronto As a powerful framework with robust conceptual and notational systems, time-geography has been widely applied in space-time behaviour research. This session will bring together scholars interested in studying space-time behaviour research from various fields, including but not limited to transportation, health geography, and human mobility. Presentations will focus on emerging frontiers in this field, particularly within the Canadian context. We welcome theoretical studies that deepen the understanding of space-time behaviour in an era of rapid transformation driven by AI and digital technologies; methodological studies that introduce novel analytical approaches or leverage new mobility datasets; and empirical studies that examine the dynamics of daily activities among Canadians or populations in other regions.

Chairs: Jonathan Peyton, University of Manitoba; Matthew Evenden, University of British Columbia This session addresses the cultural contexts of resources, their consumption and movement, and the infrastructures which have been critical to their development, exploitation, transportation and use. The words resource and infrastructure are both relatively recent adoptions from French; the former being absorbed into its modern English meaning in the late eighteenth century as a substance or material to be exploited, the latter only in common usage in the late twentieth century to mean large technological systems. Drawing together a series of papers on discrete resource issues and problems, the session seeks to advance an historical perspective on resource geographies from several different regions and periods, both in Canada and beyond. Uniting the papers is a concern for both the cultural and material dimensions of resource histories and the changing ways in which resources and infrastructures have been understood. Resources are not found but constructed culturally and fashioned materially. Exploitation is made possible through technologies of discovery, development and distribution—what has come to be called infrastructure. How, we ask, have past practices created meaning around these concepts, mobilized them to facilitate material development, and created in the process new entities, understood to hold certain properties and functions. Addressing diverse resource and infrastructure questions from the modern development of oil in the Canadian west to the re-conception of sand and gravels as ships’ ballast in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, this session works to clarify our understandings of taken-for-granted concepts while introducing and exploring important historical processes.

Chairs: Liam Fox, University of Toronto; Trevor Wideman, Vancouver Island University; Samantha Thompson, University of British Columbia Across Canada, municipal, provincial, and federal governments have intensified efforts to address intersecting crises of housing, health, and climate. While claiming to offer solutions, these responses increasingly rely on coercive, authoritarian governance techniques to manage and police crises. States often portray social, health, and ecological policies introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic as failed experiments, despite tangible contributions to public well-being. For example, in British Columbia, beneficial rent control measures, drug decriminalization, and carbon pricing policies have been rolled back. Paradoxically, by framing these policies as failures, state actors legitimize punitive interventions that deepen existing crises and exacerbate state violence against marginalized groups. This authoritarian turn is not unprecedented. Indigenous, Black, feminist, queer, and critical theorists have long demonstrated that state violence operates as an unexceptional form of power in racialized and marginalized communities, and that crises reveals the colonial capitalist state’s always present disciplinary, authoritarian capacities in the maintenance of the social order (Estes, 2019; Gilmore, 2007; Hall et al., 1978; Simpson, 2016). On the other hand, place-based community organizing can subvert these tendencies by building mutual aid and care infrastructures, challenging authoritarian state legitimacy. State interventions and community organizing against carceral authoritarianism help us consider the relationality of crises and the role of place-based relations in resistance efforts. This themed session brings together papers that critically engage with state and community responses to housing, health, and climate crises, as well as intersections of housing, health, and climate justice.

Chairs: Eryn Maloney, Maya Campo and Benjamin Owens, University of Toronto This themed session will explore alternative discourses of labour resilience in practice by inviting papers that explore working people's agency, resistance, and collective mobilization. Understanding alternative resiliency is especially relevant during this time of economic uncertainty (rising precarity, low wages, lack of stable employment) and geopolitical crisis exacerbated by neoliberal conditions, ascendent fascisms, and climate crisis. The conjunction of increased labour precarity amid offshoring of industrial and manufacturing labour, the rise of the creative class, and the exponential growth in platform gig work, alongside an affordability crisis has resulted in new forms of labour inequality and with it a renewed focus on labour resilience and alternative methods of support for marginalized workers. This session seeks to explore alternative discourses surrounding resiliency and thus contribute to shared understandings of resilience from across both Turtle Island and the broader world. Following the conference’s theme of resilience, and the notion that connection is resilience, this session seeks to build connections between researchers to explore labour marginalization/inequality and the mechanisms of labour resilience that are unfolding in our society. By sharing current research, we seek to contribute to ongoing national conversations about labour during a period of both economic uncertainty and a period of major investments on behalf of government into specific areas of the economy.

Chairs: Nick Revington, Institut national de la recherche scientifique; Jakub Zasina, University of Lodz Recent decades have been marked by profound restructuring within higher education systems in Canada and beyond. Deindustrialisation; the rise of the knowledge and creative economies; neoliberal policymaking; and the internationalisation, massification, and spatial expansion of universities and colleges have all reshaped higher education and its geographies. More recent phenomena - including the COVID-19 pandemic, changing migration regimes, and digitalisation of education - have added further nuances. However, contemporary higher education institutions face further challenges, such as socio-economic and cultural differences among students, worsening of their mental health, and climate change. All of that requires universities and colleges to find new ways to shape enrollment and pedagogical policies, organise curricula and teaching practices, personalise the educational experience, engage with local communities, and contribute to the global sustainability agenda. Consequently, this thematic session maps these geographies of transformative response taking place within higher education. In particular, the contributions offer insights from experiments inspired by concepts such as reconciliation pedagogy, pedagogical wellness, empathy measurement, autoethnography, service design, and user-centred design.

Enjoy catered appetizers while networking at the licensed Grad House Restaurant! The UVic Graduate Students' Society, Geography Graduate Students' Society, and CAG invite student attendees to a social event on Wednesday, June 3, from 5-7 pm at the Grad House Restaurant. Please RSVP your attendance as space is limited. We look forward to seeing you

Chairs: Alison Mountz, University of Toronto Scarborough; Nadine Schuurman, Simon Fraser University; Robert McLeman McLeman, Wilfrid Laurier University Professor Margaret Walton-Roberts died at the age of 57 on August 11, 2025. This session will provide time and space to remember and celebrate her life and work. Margaret was a phenomenal scholar, instructor, and administrator, and a beloved colleague, advisor, and friend to many people around the globe. Her networks spread far and wide, from her undergraduate days in the United Kingdom, to graduate school at the University of British Columbia, to field work in South Asia, to her 23 years of service on faculty in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies and at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. Margaret was a prolific economic, cultural, and feminist geographer and scholar of international migration. She researched and wrote about transnational networks and economic circuits forged between the Punjab and British Columbia, the gendering of care and the global migration of health care professionals, and local immigration partnerships and settlement services in Ontario. A few colleagues will open this session with brief remarks, followed by an “open mic” where all are invited to share stories and reflections on Margaret’s life and her many important contributions as a scholar. This session accompanies a special forum published early in 2026 in Canadian Geographies.

CARTO members are invited to celebrate the accomplishments of their members at Swans Pub (1601 Store street).