ABSTRACT: 

This session is for scholars of sexualities who are: a. first-time or novice users of digital mapping tools and GIS (Geographic Information Systems); b. former users who feel they have lost their confidence, skill and knowledge c. reading this now and thinking ‘Maybe I could give it a go…?’. With exceptions such as Gieseking (2017) and Brown and Knopp (2006), GIS and digital mapping tools are uncommonly used amongst scholars of sexualities, including geographers. Our focus has often been on subjective and embodied experience, and the consequent use of interpretative qualitative approaches. Many may be cautious of tools and methodologies often associated with uncritical positivisms. Opportunities for formal training are limited and expensive, and scholars’ increasingly limited time and capacity inhibits the learning of new technical skills. The topical focus of training can also make it challenging for sexualities scholars to imagine how our own research could be engaged. This session aims to provide a reason to experiment with these tools; to create a friendly and supportive space to present our experimentation; to boost our confidence; and to consider some possibilities of using these tools in future research. Absolutely no expertise is expected - simple, rudimentary use of these tools is very warmly welcomed. The session will operate as a casual ‘show and tell’. Participants will firstly introduce their research project, and secondly show some use of digital cartography or GIS tools to visualise, explore, or experiment with it. Such use might include:

• Mapping key sites, communities or populations;

• Visualising policy variations;

• Geolocating events or narratives from qualitative datasets;

• Heatmapping social media posts;

• Tracing mobilities, migrations and border crossings.

Abstracts should consist of 1. a brief introduction to the research project you will present about, and 2. indications of one or more potential ways through which you *might* use digital cartography tools or GIS to explore it, to be showcased in the presentation. Achieving more or less than the indications in your abstract are both okay. The session organiser is happy to be contacted to share some introductory guides for popular tools (e.g. ArcGIS, QGIS).

TYPE: Series of short presentations

SESSION ORGANISER: Nick McGlynn (University of Brighton, UK)

CONTACT: n.mcglynn2@brighton.ac.uk 

ABSTRACT: 

What does it mean to house sexualities? The housing context can shape intimate life in both material and regulatory ways, through rental contracts and mortgage systems, cohabitation norms, property regimes, spatial planning and neighbourhood formations. Who can live where, with whom, and under what conditions depends on the (mis)match with available housing provision, as well as on the possibilities and obstacles encountered when trying to access it. At the same time, sexual norms and politics structure access to housing, definitions of legitimate households, and the public-private boundaries. Across diverse contexts, people whose intimate lives, household forms or sexual labour fall outside heteronormative and respectability frameworks — including LGBTQ+ people and sex workers — continue to face discrimination by landlords and housing institutions, disproportionate exposure to homelessness, and moral regulation within residential space. Domestic and intimate violence — including within same-sex relationships or across generations — is often anchored in the home and may unfold as routinised, slow and difficult-to-recognise harm. High rents and housing shortages can compel forms of cohabitation that reshape intimate relations. Yet housing is also a site of resistance: from squatting and mutual aid to collective, queer and sexuality-specific housing initiatives.  This session invites geographical contributions that examine how housing and sexualities intersect across scales — from domestic space to property markets and urban governance — and asks what current scholarship in this area looks like, and where further attention is needed. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Sexuality-based discrimination in rental and ownership markets

• Disproportionate homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth and adults

• Moral regulation and residential displacement of sex work

• Overlaps of housing and workplaces of sex workers

• Domestic, same-sex and intergenerational violence in relation to home

• Slow, everyday or routinised harms unfolding through housing arrangements

• “forced” intimate cohabitation (due to housing crises, stigmatisation, high rents, …)

• Neighbourhood choice, concealment and spatial strategies

• Collective housing, squatting and activist housing struggles

• Sexuality-specific housing initiatives (e.g. elder housing, shelters, refugee accommodation)

• Material practices of intimacy, privacy and sexual life in domestic space

• Life course perspectives on youth, ageing, care, dependency and their relation to housing trajectories

TYPE: series of presented papers

SESSION ORGANISER: 

• Valerie De Craene, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) 

• Ana Dresler, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)

Please submit your 250-word abstract and short bio to Valerie.De.Craene@vub.be and ana.daniela.dresler@ulb.be. The session will most likely be held in English, but feel free to address us in one of the following languages should you feel more comfortable: Dutch – French – German – Spanish – Portuguese.

CONTACT: 

• Valerie.De.Craene@vub.be 

• ana.daniela.dresler@ulb.be 

ABSTRACT: 

The global decline in ‘durable’ (Mattson, 2022) LGBTQ+ spaces has been linked with the rise of time-limited, ephemeral and episodic spaces – theorised as both cause and consequence. But sexualised communities have always created and used temporary spaces. Even dedicated physical sites have always been much less durable and permanent than is often imagined, have always been temporary and precarious, and have always existed in states of ongoing relational re/production. For many smaller and more marginalised sexualised communities, maintaining dedicated physical sites has never been a feasible or even a desirable option. This session invites scholars and researchers to discuss the temporary, ephemeral, episodic, and event-based spaces created and used by sexualised communities and groupings of all kinds. These need not be LGBTQ+ communities or groups but also cisgender heterosexuals, kink communities, sexual subcultures, as well as asexual / nonsexual groups. Submissions may address one or more (or none) of the following topics:

• ‘Parties with politics’ (and politics with parties);

• Economic and political pressures on spaces for sexualised communities;

• The production of safe/r spaces at time-limited events;

• Changing legacies of use of the same fixed space;

• Challenges and achievements in producing hyperspecific intersectional or niche spaces;

• House parties, street parties, raves and ‘unofficial’ spaces;

• Affective and aesthetic place-making practices at time-limited events;

• ‘Behind the scenes’ infrastructural and administrative aspects;

• Focused in-depth accounts of specific events;

• Temporary spaces’ peripheries and fluid boundaries

Presentations different from standard academic papers are welcomed, as are presentations in non-English languages. All presenters are expected to provide clear visual aids, to support engagement from an audience of different backgrounds and languages.

TYPE: series of presented papers

SESSION ORGANISER: Nick McGlynn (University of Brighton, UK)

CONTACT: n.mcglynn2@brighton.ac.uk 

ABSTRACT:

This panel invites contributions that explore how the inherent porosity and leakiness of bodies shape the regulation of queer and trans sexualities while also opening possibilities for resistance and alternative futures. In the contemporary political context, longstanding attempts to regulate and subjugate queer and trans bodies and sexualities are being reconfigured and intensified. Historically, these efforts relied on marginalisation through enclosure, using spatial segregation, criminalisation, and medical pathologisation to confine sexual and gendered difference to particular spaces and institutions. In this context, institutions of governance and social reproduction functioned as mechanisms of containment by regulating, stabilising, and sorting bodies, assigning sexual and gendered difference to designated locations, roles, and domains of legitimacy.

However, in the current political moment, governing non-normativity through exclusion has become ineffective as increasing legal recognition, digital media, and cultural diffusion have expanded the visibility and circulation of queer lives across schools, families, healthcare systems, and other community environments. This has prompted a shift in anti-LGBTQ+ politics, which now treats the very idea that bodies could be porous and open to relational flows as ontologically problematic, as it threatens broader projects of boundary-making that structure the sociospatial order. Because queer and trans bodies make this porosity especially visible by blurring boundaries between sexualities and genders, they become particular targets of these hostile politics, with queerness increasingly framed as leaky, contagious, excessive, or destabilising, thereby posing anxieties that children, communities, and institutions must be protected from.

This panel explores how queer and trans bodies and sexualities, in their specific forms of leakiness and porosity, become sites of political regulation in the contemporary moment, and how these concepts can be mobilised to analyse, respond to, and subvert these dynamics. We are particularly interested in how this regulation is often enacted through leaky, porous spaces, such as saunas, riversides, homes, digital platforms, and other sites of public intimacy, which become intensified sites of governance, contestation, and embodied negotiation precisely because institutional and social apparatuses rely on spaces to stabilise, sort, and regulate bodies. Drawing on queer and trans theories and critical geography, we welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological, and creative contributions that engage with the leakiness and porosity of queer bodies and sexualities, exploring how these qualities enable alternative imaginaries of care, safety, and co-presence, and support resistance to regulatory regimes through satire, counter-discourse, embodied refusal, or collective world-making.

TYPE: Series of presented papers

SESSION ORGANISERS:

• Rieke Schröder, Institute for Political Science, University of Münster

• Jay Sinclair, Department of Geography, Durham University 

PRESENTERS:

Session 1: Histories and Strategies of Queer and Trans Containment 

• Marie Lunau, Roskilde University, Denmark (lunau@ruc.dk)

• Inxhi Brisku,  IEFEM, BAS, Sofia, Bulgaria (inxhi.brisku@iefem.bas.bg)

• Rieke Schröder, University of Münster, Germany (rieke.schroeder@uni-muenster.de)

• Gustavo Machad, University of Essex, UK (gustavo.machado@essex.ac.uk)

Session 2: Excesses. Queer and Trans Practices of Overflowing, Seeping & Leaking

• João Florêncio, Linköping University, Sweden (joao.florencio@liu.se)

• Samuel Stair, Ireland (samuel.stair@gcas.ie)

• Angeliki Balayannis, Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands

• Daniel Newton, University of Bristol, UK (d.newton.2023@bristol.ac.uk) 

CONTACT:

• rieke.schroeder@uni-muenster.de

• jay.sinclair@durham.ac.uk 

ABSTRACT: 

Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has long functioned as an epistemically ambivalent site in European debates on sexuality and space: it is routinely invoked as politically “problematic area” and framed as an empirical periphery measured against implicitly universalised Anglo-metropolitan trajectories, while remaining under-recognised as a producer of theory, methods, and empirically grounded critique within geographies of sexualities (Kulpa & Mizielińska, 2011; Pitoňák, 2019). Taking CEE seriously as a knowledge-making region, this session foregrounds the field’s institutional peripherality (e.g. via limited curricular embedding, precarious positions within geography departments, uneven research infrastructures, and frequent displacement into adjacent disciplines), hence, conditions that are further intensified by heightened political contestation, politicisation of gender and sexuality scholarship, and, at times, pressures on academic freedom (Ergas et al., 2022; Paternotte & Kuhar, 2018; Pitoňák & Klingorová, 2019). Yet precisely within these constraints, CEE has generated a vibrant transdisciplinary production of spatial knowledge spanning geography, sociology, gender studies, political science, cultural studies, and education, through analyses of transnational activism, scalar politics (local/national/EU), and the spatial imaginaries and infrastructures of solidarity that rework what counts as “central” evidence and theory in the field (Binnie & Klesse, 2011; Stella & Binnie, 2025). Building on de-centring interventions in sexuality studies and post-socialist critiques, we ask what becomes visible when CEE is approached not as an empirical “case” but as an epistemic vantage point for rethinking space, normativity, and power. Substantively, the session welcomes contributions across the geographies of sexualities in CEE, including (but not limited to):

• moral and political geographies of “anti-gender” mobilisation and institutional attacks on gender/sexuality scholarship (Graff & Korolczuk, 2022); (b)      Intimate citizenship, kinship, and family politics beyond metropolitan and Anglophone templates (Mizielińska & Stasińska, 2025; Stasińska & Mizielińska, 2024);

• urban, small-city, and ordinary-space sexual geographies (including nightlife, tourism, consumption, (in)visibility, safety, and infrastructures) (Szabó & Sümeghy, 2024; Šerý & Pitoňák, 2019);

• and methodological innovations that connect intersectionality, affect, and place (Rodó-de-Zárate, 2014).

In line with the conference’s invitation to “do queer periphery from the periphery itself,” hosting EGSC in Maribor—following the conference’s first major engagement with CEE at the 5th EGSC in Prague (2019)—offers a second, timely occasion to reflect on how conferences temporarily re-make disciplinary centres and to consider how CEE geographies of sexualities can reconfigure what counts as central theory, method, and evidence in the field.

TYPE:  series of presented papers

SESSION ORGANISER: Michal Pitoňák, Department of Applied Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Prague, Czechia 

CONFIRMED PRESENTERS: 

• Balázs Attila Szabó (Independent Researcher; szabo0228@gmail.com);

• Ondřej Šerý (Department of Geography, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University; ondrej.sery@mail.muni.cz);

• Andrea Salánki (PhD student, Department of Sociology, University of Vienna; andrea.salanki@univie.ac.at);

• Michal Pitoňák (Department of Applied Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University & Queer Geography; Michal.pitonak@fhs.cuni.cz)

CONTACT: michal.pitonak@fhs.cuni.cz 

ABSTRACT: 

Queer subjectivity is often grounded in encounters with other queer identities, ideally through everyday lived experience. When access to such networks is limited or absent due to various forms of physical isolation, this process is increasingly mediated by communication technologies. Beyond dating applications, which offer possibilities for extended outward connections, queer visual representations and narratives portrayed on streaming platforms, social media, and television become crucial to articulating queer identity on the periphery. These immersive entertainment media are especially significant for individuals whose everyday lives are constrained by hinterland socio-political conditions or discriminatory national contexts that restrict open queer expression, due to which media escapism becomes heightened. In this sense, the queer peripheral condition can be interpreted as a sense of longing while inhabiting two parallel physicalities: one constituted through mediated queerness and the other through contrasting, often suppressive, realities. Under such circumstances, the domestic sphere of the queer audience becomes a contested site: the house functions simultaneously as a shelter from the outside world and as a space of constraint that exceeds the conventional notion of the home as a safe space.

This panel session is interested in the discrepancies that arise between media representations of queerness and the roles they play for audiences who cannot experience the same desired lifestyles. In particular, it seeks to understand how articulations of collectively desired queer domesticity and aspirations for belonging originate elsewhere, while individuals remain distant on the periphery in a shifting sense of what home is. The hypothesis here is that the proliferation of queer-oriented media content (e.g., trendy formats centered on domestic exposure such as home renovation, makeovers, and decoration) is generating large queer and female audiences and is directly influencing ways of inhabiting immediate spaces. Within this nexus of mediated domesticity, gender, and sexuality, we find dense entanglements of spatial transformation, power relations, politics of care, and housing precarity, all of which are inextricably linked to queerness and its conflicts with socio-political contexts. This panel investigates these entanglements of performed queerness, often embedded within neoliberal regimes, and their extended effects on the built environment, spatial imaginaries, housing desires, and embodied subjects. Here, the periphery is conceptualized as a spatial imaginary constituted through isolated queer experiences, yet co-produced through aspirational references and affective longings for belonging.

TYPE:  Papers Presentation or a Panel Discussion

SESSION ORGANISER: Veljko Marković, Technical University Berlin – Institute for Architecture

CONTACT: veljko.markovic@tu-berlin.de 

ABSTRACT: 

This panel session invites conversations about the tensions surrounding the teaching of queer geographies within volatile socio-political contexts. In this panel we consider the impacts of increasingly hostile state positions on queer and trans knowledge production, pedagogical cultures and experiences within the discipline of geography. What queer and trans normativities may be (re)centered or (re)peripheralised within geographical education, particularly as higher education institutions succumb to, or challenge, pressure from queer/transphobic politics? What is at risk as we face increased institutional constraints that disproportionately impact our ability to teach about queer and trans subjects? Equally, what is at risk in attempts to re-centre LGBTQ+ subjects within institutions, schools, departments, and disciplines more broadly? What additional racialised, colonial, ableist, nationalist and/or misogynist discourses may be incorporated into attempts or initiatives to re-centre queer and trans scholarship as a form of resistance against measures of austerity and queer/transphobia within higher education institutions? This panel seeks contributions from those who are interested in speaking to:  - The centrality and/or peripherality of queer knowledge to disciplinary understandings of geography and geographical education across different contexts; - Authoritarian intrusions in higher education and their impacts on the teaching and learning of queer geographies; - Queer pedagogies and their application in geography programmes/courses; - Activities and initiatives to address homo/bi/queer/transphobia in higher education institutions and disciplinary communities; - Challenges faced by LGBTQ+ students and staff in and across geography departments and programmes; - Communities of resistance and solidarity created by LGBTQ+ staff and students in higher education institutions, and solidarities with other groups whose knowledges are marginalised in higher education 

TYPE: Panel discussion

SESSION ORGANISER: Tilen Kolar, University of Leeds

CONFIRMED PANELISTS:

• Dr. Rae Rosenberg, University of Edinburgh, Rae.Rosenberg@ed.ac.uk (co-organiser);

• Dr. Ale Boussalem, University of St. Andrews, ab563@st-andrews.ac.uk (co-organiser)

CONTACT: T.Kolar@leeds.ac.uk 

ABSTRACT: 

How did the growing transnational circulation of gay erotica and porn magazines in postwar Europe contribute to the development of a shared identity and sense of belonging among European gay men? How did this form of erotic citizenship echo or complicate narratives of cosmopolitanism, human rights, equality, social justice and pluralism that were being deployed in the parallel project of European political integration and citizenship? What were the geographies of desire that sustained postwar “gay Europe” and how did centre and peripheries co-constitute themselves through homosexual desire? This panel will present preliminary results from the international research project “The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000,” a collaboration between Linköping University (Sweden), Birmingham City University (UK) and the University of Exeter (UK), funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. With presentations focusing both on national homosexual imaginaries and transnational networks, the panel will explore how the homosexual imaginaries created and sustained by gay print porn media catalysed new and, at times, conflicting ways in which gay men across Europe imagined both one another and their non-European others, calling into question the coherence and limits of “Europe” itself.      At a time when nationalisms and euro-scepticism have both gained political momentum across the continent, the panel will offer important vantage points from where to think “Europe” in new ways through unveiling how it was imagined and erotically iterated by a minoritized population that would eventually be embraced by European institutions themselves as a sign of “Europe” exceptionality vis-à-vis its others. 

TYPE: series of presented papers

SESSION ORGANISER: João Florêncio, Linköping University, Sweden (joao.florencio@liu.se)

PRESENTERS:

• João Florêncio, Professor of Gender Studies, Linköping University (joao.florencio@liu.se)

• John Mercer, Professor of Gender and Sexuality, Birmingham City University (john.mercer@bcu.ac.uk)

• Isabell Dahms, Postdoctoral researcher, University of Exeter (I.Dahms@exeter.ac.uk)

• Piotr Maron, Postdoctoral researcher (P.Maron@exeter.ac.uk)

ABSTRACT:

This roundtable is organised in connection with the forthcoming special issue “Being LGBTQI+ outside urban centres”, to be published in June 2026 in the French journal Genre, sexualité & société. Its aim is to bring together six scholars who contributed to the dossier (or to closely related publications) to discuss a simple but still under-explored question in France: what does it mean to study LGBTQI+ lives when we start from places other than major city centres? For a long time, French research has largely taken metropolitan centralities as the main sites where LGBTQI+ experiences become visible, collective and politically meaningful. By contrast, rural areas and peripheral spaces have often been approached through a deficit lens, associated with isolation, silence, or hostility. While a few pioneering studies began to open up this question in the early 2010s, the field has expanded much more noticeably over the past decade, driven in particular by a new generation of researchers who take seriously the diversity of places, trajectories and social positions shaping sexual and gender minority lives. Rather than treating “the centre” as the natural horizon of LGBTQI+ life, this roundtable draws on new (post)doctoral empirical research to ask what becomes visible when we shift our gaze towards banlieues and working-class neighbourhoods, rural settings, peri-urban areas, and overseas French territories (including the French Antilles). Across these contexts, participants will examine how LGBTQI+ people make room for themselves in everyday life—without presuming that the city-centre is the only horizon of belonging, resources, or political possibility—through discreet arrangements and local ties, strategic mobilities towards urban centres, and forms of resistance, collective organising, and political mobilisation that take shape from (and with) these places. The presentations will draw, among other materials, on case studies of queer mobilisations in Brittany, the Parisian banlieues and the Ardennes (a large département in eastern France), as well as on research into gay mobilities from La Réunion. The discussion will also provide a space to compare methods and fieldwork challenges: how to capture everyday forms of discretion and visibility, how to document mobility patterns between places, and how to avoid letting metropolitan assumptions silently organise our research questions. In this context, the roundtable challenges any tendency to treat “France” as a uniform national setting. It aims to highlight territorial contrasts that shape LGBTQI+ lives in distinct ways and to clarify what decentralising LGBTQI+ studies brings to our understanding of intimacy, community, and activism. 

TYPE: roundtable discussions

PANEL ORGANISERS:

• Maria Kherbouche, Doctoral Candidate, University of Geneva and EHESS, Switzerland - France

• Axel Ravier, Postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

PANELISTS: 

• Joao Cartry, Doctoral Candidate, EHESS-Institut national d'études démographiques, joao.cartry@sciencespo.fr

• César Taillefer, Doctoral Candidate, Gustave Eiffel University, cesar.taillefer@univ-eiffel.fr

• Joséphine Deneux, Doctoral Candidate, University of Rennes, josephine.deneux53@gmail.com

• Milan Bonté, Senior lecturer, University of Lille, milan.bonte@univ-lille.fr 

CONTACT:

• maria.kherbouche@unige.ch 

• axel.ravier@unil.ch 

ABSTRACT:

Where are the rural queers these days?  The field of rural gender and sexuality studies - albeit with some exceptions - has been relatively inactive for the past 10 years (Gray, Johnston and Gilley, 2016). Additionally, rural queer/trans/LGBTQ+ lives have been overwhelmingly documented in North American contexts and to a lesser extent Australian ones. Alongside calls for greater attention to be paid to LGBTQ+ communities living in ‘ordinary’ contexts, as well as in the Global South, it unfortunately remains the case that the geographies of rural gender and sexuality across the whole of Europe have been chronically overlooked. This panel connects sexualities-, queer-, and trans geographers working in disparate rural areas across the continent of Europe. It also hosts historians, sociologists and anthropologists concerned with the intersections of sexuality and space in rural Europe to participate. In doing so, it asks:

• How are LGBTQ+ experiences of rural life shaped by location, and what difference does geographically-attuned research make to understanding these?

• What can be learnt about the complementarity and contradiction of ‘queer’ and ‘rural’ when multiple queer rurals are brought into conversation?

• Consequently, in what ways are rural LGBT+, queer and trans people navigating and responding to the current political conjuncture in Europe?

On the one hand, we seek to ‘fill the void’ that has been left behind in geographies of gender and sexuality, as once prominent rural-queer scholars have moved to different fields over the past 25 years (e.g. Gray, 2009; Little, 2002; Bell, Shuttleton and Watt, 2000). On the other, we recognise that the contemporary moment presents rural areas, incompletely, as increasingly accessible to queer and trans people, for example through a proliferation of Pride organisations at the level of the province. We seek to bring into discussion the many ways in which LGBTQ+ people endure, embrace or agitate rural life.  The cultural and linguistic diversity of Europe is in turn overlooked by the dominant, Anglophone works in our shared field of enquiry. It is therefore urgent that a return to rural-and-queer geographies here in Europe consolidates its diversity of spatial forms and social worlds, whether Scandinavian or Iberian, Baltic or Balkan, island or highland... In this rich geography, queerness thrives.

TYPE: 3 panels, each with a series of presented papers

1. Queer Rural Europe 1: qualitatively researching LGBTQ+ lives and spaces

1. Queer rural lives beyond the centre: negotiating belonging, constraint and agency in rural Catalonia

Laura Soler Rodríguez, Departament de Geografia, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

2. Negotiating Peripheralisation at the Margins of Gender and Sexuality: A Diversity of LGBTI Trajectories In, From, and Towards the French Ardennes

Milan Bonté, Laboratoire Territoires, Villes, Environnement & Société, Université de Lille

3. Bound by Water and Space: Analysing Queer Insular Experiences

Joana Brilhante, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra

4. Beyond eventfulness: desiring infrastructures with regular rhythms in the queer periphery

Tilen Kolar, School of Geography, University of Leeds.

Peter Kumer, Department of Geography, Univerza v Mariboru.

2. Queer Rural Europe 2: queer rural spacetimes – history, theory and the arts

1. Towards a Materialist Genealogy of Queer Lives in the Rural in Germany

Jana-Christina Zentgraf, Fulda Graduate Centre of Social Sciences, Hochschule Fulda

2. Neither a hen nor a rooster: vištgaidis and queer imaginary in rural Lithuania

Rasa Kamarauskaitė, ARTES, University of Amsterdam

3. Picturing queer rurals through Finnish photographic archives

Joe Jukes, Unit of Social Research, Tampere University

4. Queer Worlding: Exploring Practices of Co-creation in Queer and Trans Eco-Communities in Rural Spain and

Portugal.

Rae Teitelbaum, School of Global Change, Goldsmith’s University of London

3. Queer Rural Europe 3: queering land, agricultures and commons

1. Agrocuir real utopias in Galicia and Portugal

António Pedro Fidalgo, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra

2. Farming masculinities: queer perspective from Swiss-based farms

Prisca Pfammatter, Critical Sustainability Unit, Geography Institute, University Bern

3. Queer commoning in French countryside: community work at the edge of domestic and public space

Hugo Soucaze, Architecture, Urbanism & Gender Studies, EHESS and UCLouvain

PANEL ORGANISER: Joe Jukes, Tampere University

Presenters:

• Laura Soler Rodríguez, Departament de Geografia, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. laura.soler@uab.ca t

• Milan Bonté, Laboratoire Territoires, Villes, Environnement & Société, Université de Lille. milan.bonte@univ-lille.fr

• Joana Brilhante, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. joanabrilhante@ces.uc.pt 

• Tilen Kolar, School of Geography, University of Leeds. t.kolar@leeds.ac.uk 

• Peter Kumer, Department of Geography, University of Maribor. peter.kumer@um.si 

• Jana-Christina Zentgraf, Fulda Graduate Centre of Social Sciences, Hochschule Fulda. jana-christina.zentgraf@sk.hs-fulda.de 

• Rasa Kamarauskaitė, ARTES, University of Amsterdam. asa.kamarauskaite.15@alumni.ucl.ac.uk 

• Joe Jukes, Unit of Social Research, Tampere University. joseph.jukes@tuni.fi 

• Rae Teitelbaum, School of Global Change, Goldsmith’s University of London. rae.teitelbaum.work@gmail.com 

• António Pedro Fidalgo, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. pedrofidalgo@ces.uc.pt 

• Prisca Pfammatter, Critical Sustainability Unit, Geography Institute, University Bern. prisca.pfammatter@unibe.ch 

• Hugo Soucaze, Architecture, Urbanism & Gender Studies, EHESS and UCLouvain. hugo.soucaze@ehess.fr 

CONTACT: joseph.jukes@tuni.fi 

ABSTRACT: 

In many transitional democracies—until recently including Georgia—state policies toward marginalized groups have rarely been grounded in genuine political will for inclusion or re-humanization. Combined with persistent negative public attitudes toward LGBTQI communities, this has created fertile ground for rapid democratic backsliding and anti-gender mobilization. Georgia is currently facing one of the most critical moments in its 35 years of independence. For the first time, the country’s declared path toward modernization, democratization, and Western integration appears openly suspended—or even reversed. The recognition of queer existence, struggles for LGBTQI rights, and the production of knowledge about queer lived realities have long been embedded within this broader political trajectory – often framed as ‘modernization’ and now increasingly called into question. For this very reason, queer existence has long been, and is now more than ever, a subject of political instrumentalization and manipulation shaping queer existence with hypervisibility or even hyperreality. Yet this hyperreality is simply the other side of the same coin whose reverse denies queer reality altogether. In this context, any attempts to engage in sincere and critical dialogue with queer realities becomes particularly fragile and simultaneously all the more valuable.  The proposed session brings together several research projects that explore different aspects of queer existence and queer politics in Georgia. Framing the session around a shared geographic focus is not merely an attempt to holistically examine a specific regional context; it also enables reflection on the ways various dimensions of queer existence interact with and shape one another.  The session will feature the following presentations:

1. „The (Geo)Politics of Gender: Conditionality, Sovereignty, and Specters of Europe“, Tamar Tskhadadze, Lia Jalaghania;

2. „Fragments of Public Pain: Feminist Perspectives on Addiction“, Mariam Chanchaleishvili;

3. „Transformed Parenthood - Voices of Parents of Queer Persons: Collective Sorrow and Power“, Giga Karapetiani;

4. „’Becoming Like a Stone’ - Trauma and Resilience in the Queer Community in Georgia“, Salome Shiukashvili.  

RESEARCH QUESTIONS:

The studies ask: what does chronic structural hostility do to queer bodies, psyches, relationships, and intimate networks over time; what forms of care, solidarity, and resilience emerge precisely where institutional support is absent; and what does it mean to produce feminist and queer knowledge, to remain a scholar of gender and sexuality, under an authoritarian regime that has made that very knowledge a political target?

TYPE:  series of presented papers

SESSION ORGANISERS:

• Eka Tsereteli, Director of Women’s Initiatives Supporting Group (CSO)

• Tamar Tskhadadze, Ilia State University. Tbilisi, Georgia

CONFIRMED PRESENTERS:

• Tamar Tskhadadze, Ilia State University. Tbilisi, Georgia. tamar.tskhadadze.1@iliauni.edu.ge 

• Lia Jalaghania, Ilia State University. Tbilisi, Georgia. likajalagania@gmail.com 

• Mariam Chanchaleishvili, sociologist, gender studies specialist. Tbilisi, Georgia.Mariam.tchan@proton.me 

• Giga Karapetiani, Ilia State University. Tbilisi, Georgia. giga.karapetiani@gmail.com 

• Salome Shiukashvili, Clinical psychologist (MS). Tbilisi, Georgia. salomeshiukashvili@gmail.com 

CONTACT: 

• eka.tsereteli@wisg.org;

• tamar.tskhadadze.1@iliauni.edu.ge 

ABSTRACT:

LGBTQ+ Centers and Organizations: Spaces of Sexual Politics, Activism, and Social Relations offers the first comprehensive spatial analysis of LGBTQ+ centers and organizations as crucial sites of contemporary queer life, activism, and politics with a focus on the Israeli case study. Drawing on two decades of research in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and emerging peripheral centers, the book examines how different types of LGBTQ+ centers and organizations shape urban belonging, community formation, and political possibility. By foregrounding issues of planning, spatial justice, homonationalism, intergenerational dynamics, and affective politics, the book positions LGBTQ+ centers and organizations as dynamic infrastructures through which queer communities negotiate safety, visibility, inequality, and hope, together with the demand for urban space. This round table brings together leading scholars in the European geographies of sexualities  meeting to reflect on the book’s intellectual and political contributions. Their responses will open a conversation about how LGBTQ+ centers and organizations operate as laboratories of social change, how spatial activism emerges through tensions between institutions and communities, and how local Israeli trajectories complicate Global North understandings of sexuality, citizenship and space. The event not only celebrates the publication of this collaborative work by Chen Misgav and Gilly Hartal, but also invites broader reflection on future directions of geographies of sexualities and on the role LGBTQ+ centers and organizations play amid shifting global climates of neo conservatism, rising LGBTQ+ hostility, and renewed forms of queer resilience.

TYPE: Round table celebration for a new book 

SESSION ORGANISER:

• Chen Misgav, School of Architecture, Tel-Aviv University, Israel;

• Gilly Hartal, The Gender Studies Program, Bar-Ilan University

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:

• Alison Bain, Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change, York University, Toronto, Canada (abain@yorku.ca)

• Andrew McCartan, UCC Department of Geography, Ireland (amccartan@ucc.ie)  

• Julie Podmore, John Abbott College, Concordia University, Canada (jpodmore@johnabbott.qc.ca)

• Michal Pitoňák, Charles University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Applied Social Sciences, Czechia  (michal.pitonak@fhs.cuni.cz)

• Tilen Kolar, School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK  (T.Kolar@leeds.ac.uk)

RESPONDING:

• Chen Misgav, School of Architecture, Tel-Aviv  University, Tel-Aviv, Israel (Chenmisg@tuex.tau.ac.il)

• Gilly Hartal, The Gender Studies Program, Bar-Ilan University, Israel (Gilly.hartal@biu.ac.il)

CONTACT:

• chenmisg@tauex.tau.ac.il 

• Gilly.hartal@biu.ac.il