Swiss Geoscience Meeting

Swiss Geoscience Meeting SGM

The ASG coordinates the human geography presence at the annual Swiss Geoscience Meeting.

Every year, we feature a Swiss Human Geographies Keynote Lecture, alongside parallel, one-day symposia dedicated to human geography. Human geographers, and those with an affinity for the discipline, are invited to contribute.

SGM 2026 in Fribourg

In 2026, the SGM takes place in Fribourg, 20-21 November.

There are eight Human Geography symposia:

27. Housing systems under pressure

Hannah Widmer, Deniz Ay, Jessica Verheij, Luisa Gehriger

Swiss Association for Geography (ASG)

Housing systems are under pressure around the world. Low-income and marginalized populations in particular face growing difficulties accessing affordable and quality housing. Housing systems are the combination of a supply system and a tenure policy system, highlighting the complex interplay of fragmented housing markets, property regimes, government subsidies, and legal frameworks that determine availability of and access to housing. In this light, housing emerges simultaneously as a basic need, an investment asset, an urban resource, and a policy target, situated at the intersection of regulatory frameworks and market dynamics. Multiple structural pressures increasingly affect housing systems. As highlighted in both public and scholarly debates, these include demographic changes, touristification, financialization, densification, and climate change.

In this symposium, we invite contributions that engage with one or more aspects of this multitude of pressures by developing new theoretical, analytical, and empirical perspectives. While we are interested in research on empirical realities of housing systems in Switzerland, we particularly welcome contributions focusing on other national contexts, including but not limited to Switzerland’s neighbouring regions. We furthermore welcome research drawing comparisons between Switzerland and other housing systems.

We seek to bring together researchers working on housing to discuss potential policy directions that could mitigate these pressures. We furthermore seek to explore and discuss innovative methodologies that could advance housing research. Finally, the symposium aims to explore ways of bridging the epistemological gaps between housing research, policy, and activism.

28. Political Geography in an Age of War, Uncertainty, and Digital Transformation

Devran Koray Öcal, Shona Loong

Swiss Association for Geography (ASG)

This symposium invites contributions that critically engage with the shifting terrains of political geography in a time marked by intensifying conflict, geopolitical fragmentation, and socio-technical transformation. From wars and militarization to the resurgence of right-wing politics, from bordering practices to the digitalization of warfare, contemporary political geographies are being reshaped through

overlapping forms of violence, governance, and resistance.
We welcome papers that examine these dynamics across multiple scales and sites, including but not limited to:

• war and conflict
• borders and migration regimes
• AI and algorithmic warfare
• the rise of authoritarian and right-wing politics
• resources, frontiers, and critical minerals
• feminist geopolitical approaches to power, violence, and state practices
• embodied and affective analyses of colonial violence, racism, and state power
• new and evolving forms of colonialism

The session also opens space for reflections on the conditions of knowledge production within political geography itself, including questions of academic freedom, censorship, and the politics of research in sensitive or authoritarian contexts. We also welcome contributions that seek to understand global transformations from vantage points outside of Europe and the West.

By bringing together diverse theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives, this symposium aims to foster dialogue on how political geography can meaningfully respond to and theorize contemporary global transformations.

29. Urban living and everyday infrastructures as resources for mental health

Aurora Ruggeri, Marc Winz

Swiss Association for Geography (ASG)

Urban environments are increasingly recognized as shaping trajectories of mental health and recovery. While cities are often framed through harm and risk factors, more recent research highlights the potential of urban environments as spaces of support, care, and transformation.

This symposium invites contributions that examine how mental health is produced, negotiated, and sustained within urban contexts, with particular attention to the spatial, social, and material conditions that enable or hinder wellbeing and recovery in daily life. We seek to bring together perspectives from human geography – and allied fields – to explore emplaced approaches to urban mental health, understood as relational, situated, and embedded in everyday environments.

Contributions might explore how urban infrastructures – such as public transport, libraries, and cultural institutions, third-places – intersect with trajectories of becoming ill or well. They could assess the role of public, green, and blue spaces in either hindering or fostering wellbeing, or analyze participatory, community-driven initiatives Additionally, submissions may also examine how structural social inequalities – in housing and access to employment for example – impact these dynamics.

By foregrounding the city not only as a site of risk but also as a resource, this session aims to advance conceptual and empirical debates on urban mental health, and to foster dialogue between geographers and the wider geosciences community. It also seeks to open pathways for place-sensitive, and practice-oriented approaches to mental health in urban policy and planning that extend both beyond academia and traditional settings of care.

We particularly welcome qualitative, participatory, and interdisciplinary approaches, as well as work engaging with lived experience.
The symposium is open to contributions in English, French, Italian and German.

30. Economic Geography: Quo Vadis Switzerland?

Ellena Brandner, Sebastian Fastenrath, Micaela Lois, Heike Mayer, Sinje Grenzdörffer

Swiss Association for Geography (ASG)

Grand societal challenges, including climate change, environmental degradation, natural hazards, geopolitical tensions, and growing social inequalities are reshaping economic processes and shifting the debates in economic geography. This session invites a dialogue on Economic Geography and related disciplines in Switzerland. Economic Geography is characterized as a pluralistic field with diverse ontological, epistemological, theoretical, and methodological dimensions (Henning & Carvalho, 2024). Communities within the field utilize evolutionary, relational, institutional, and radical approaches to analyzing the location and spatial distribution of economic activities and their drivers across different scales (Hassink & Gong, 2017, p. 17).

This session aims to map the pluralism of Economic Geography in Switzerland. We welcome submissions from economic geography and related disciplines that engage in questions on how regional economies navigate environmental change and broader societal challenges, and that critically engage with the institutions, actors, and power dynamics that shape these processes.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Climate change adaptation and regional economic restructuring
• Natural hazards, risk governance, and regional economies
• Regional innovation systems and transformative innovation
• Sustainability transitions and green regional development
• Degrowth, postgrowth, and alternative economic approaches
• Economic development of peripheral and mountain regions
• Entrepreneurship and (unequal) entrepreneurial ecosystems
• Informal, alternative, and community economies
• Economic inequalities and uneven development

We invite contributions from across economic geography, and beyond, so that we may explore avenues for research and collaborative exchanges that take this dialogue further.

31. Capital, time and the politics of and in urban megaprojects

David Gogishvili, Quentin Rihoux, Suzanne Harris-Brandts

Swiss Association for Geography (ASG)

Urban megaprojects are shaped by heterogeneous financing structures and are funded through various channels, including foreign direct investment involving a mixture of sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and state-backed capital, or private financialised developers. While existing research demonstrates that such projects accelerate capital accumulation and reshape local governance, there is a pressing need to interrogate how these diverse investment configurations—capitalist and statist—and, crucially, their novel combinations and timing impact the political processes of urban development.

This symposium invites contributions that engage with the complexity of funding origins and investment channels in urban megaprojects. We are interested in how different investment configurations redistribute authority, enable regulatory flexibility, and reconfigure relations between public and private actors. We welcome comparative analyses or case studies on the assembly and coordination of multiple sources of capital, alongside their spatial implications.

A central focus of this panel is temporality and the strategic timing of decision-making: What are the key temporalities of investment flows? How are these governed? How do we see an uneven capacity for actors to align with, negotiate, or resist project timelines? The panel seeks to move beyond debates about megaprojects being rushed or slow, foregrounding how a nuanced range of temporal dynamics unfolds across different funding sources while reshaping relations of power and forms of contestation. The panel aims to advance a plural understanding of how investment configurations shape the political and temporal dynamics of contemporary urban megaprojects.

32. Caring Geographies? Perspectives on thinking about care in Geography

Christina Mittmasser, Christiane Meyer-Habighorst, Karine Duplan, Rosa Philipp, Leandra Choffat

Swiss Association for Geography (ASG)

“Do you care?” — Under this slogan, the feminist strike collective in Zürich is mobilising for a nationwide strike of care work on June 14, 2027, thereby collectively advocating for better conditions in care work and greater visibility of care workers. We take this as a starting point to engage with ongoing debates on care in geographical research and beyond.

Feminist and critical geographies have foregrounded care as a central lens for rethinking space, power, and knowledge production. Scholars examining unpaid and paid care work from a spatial perspective also continue feminist efforts to enhance recognition of this still highly feminised, migrantised, and racialised form of reproductive labour. This is all the more crucial in times of intersecting (poly-)crises.

We invite contributions that engage about care as an empirical field, through care as a theoretical lens, and/or with care as a methodological and ethical stance within human geography. Inspired by recent calls for a “caring geography”, we are particularly interested in approaches that conceptualise care as both an everyday practice and a political demand, foregrounding interdependencies, solidarities, and responsibilities across difference.

We welcome contributions addressing questions such as:

• Who performs care, in which spaces, and under what conditions?
• How can caring research practices challenge extractive and hierarchical forms of knowledge production?
• What does it mean to cultivate care in research and teaching, and to build “caring universities”?
• What are the potentials and limits of care as a conceptual, methodological, and ethical framework?

33. Exploring Creative and Multisensory Methods

Yvonne Riaño, Andrea Mathez

Swiss Association for Geography (ASG)

Geographers have long engaged with creative methods that reflect the discipline’s close relationship with the humanities and the arts. This engagement represents not a departure from tradition, but a return to more imaginative approaches that expand how we study and understand the world. Creative research methods are part of a broader shift away from positivism, allowing scholars to address ethical concerns, reflect on positionality, adopt non-extractive practices, and reduce hierarchies within research. In doing so, they enable more holistic and nuanced research insights.

These methods are especially valuable for exploring subjective and affective dimensions of lived spaces that are difficult to capture through conventional verbal approaches. Environments are not only seen but also heard, smelled, tasted, and felt, prompting researchers to adopt arts-based and participatory methods that engage with these multisensory, embodied experiences. Creative approaches also make it possible to examine abstract concepts, sensitive topics, and emotional landscapes, while being inclusive of diverse participants and ways of knowing.

Creative methodologies may include, amongst others, photography, film, collage, digital media, poetry, sculpture, dance, music and theatre, alongside participatory practices such as ‘Minga’ workshops, social and sensory mapping, and co-creation. Together, these approaches foster deeper engagement, richer insights, and more reflexive research and teaching.

We welcome work using participatory and arts-based approaches to rethink knowledge production in geography. The panel invites empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions while addressing creative approaches and their challenges in understanding how knowledge, power, and lived environments are produced, communicated, embodied, and contested.

34. Critical Resource Geographies

Rony Emmenegger, Muriel Côte

Swiss Association for Geography (ASG)

Human development is fundamentally entangled with natural resources, raising key questions for the social sciences about how earthly materials become recognized as resources, how they are appropriated and governed, and how such regimes are contested across places and scales. This symposium addresses the politics of subterranean resource-making by examining the socio-material processes through which materials are transformed into valued goods for human societies.

Building on and extending debates in resource geography, political ecology and political geology, the symposium challenges the notion of natural resources as passive, geophysical backdrops. Instead, it highlights how resources are actively produced through the interplay of social, economic, and political processes. Contributions engage with critical questions such as: Who defines what counts as a resource? Whose interests are advanced, and whose are marginalized? Who benefits, and who bears the costs?

At the same time, the symposium attends to the material dimensions of resources, exploring how their physical properties shape possibilities for appropriation, governance, and contestation. By connecting empirical and theoretical work, participants analyze how power, knowledge, imaginaries, discourses, technologies, human and non-human labor, institutions, infrastructures, and histories co-produce resource regimes across multiple sites and scales. Methodologically, the symposium foregrounds qualitative approaches, including ethnography, interviews, and discourse analysis.

Overall, the symposium seeks to advance critical understandings of human–environment relations and their socio-political implications.

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For further information, contact Nora Komposch (nora.komposch@geo.uzh.ch), Vice-President ASG.