[News] Reminder CfP RGS26 - Geographies of Justice: mapping legal, carceral and civil societal notions of an elusive concept

[Anna Schliehe]

**with apologies for x-posting**

Dear colleagues,

please consider submitting an abstract for this session entitled "Geographies of Justice: mapping legal, carceral and civil societal notions of an elusive concept"' at this year’s RGS-IBG Annual Conference in London, scheduled for 1-4 Sep 2026. If you interested in joining the session, please send a short abstract (up to 250 words) along with your name, email address, and affiliation by this Friday 20th February 2026 to anna.schliehe at uni-bonn.de. Please contact me if you have any questions!

Many thanks and all the best,
Anna 


CfP: Geographies of Justice: mapping legal, carceral and civil societal notions of an elusive concept

Session Organiser: Anna Schliehe (University of Bonn, Germany)
Key words: Justice, carceral geography, legal geography, civil society, solidarity

Justice is inextricably linked to all our lives. It is an undercurrent that affects our experiences in myriad of ways from personal interactions to our understanding of legal systems as well as global politics. At the same time today's interconnected world is increasingly affected by multiple crises: an interplay of intertwined and mutually reinforcing challenges – including climate change, economic uncertainty, war, displacement and the erosion of democratic institutions. This is accompanied by a changing understanding of justice and a close interconnection and centralisation of these crises in the field of justice. At the heart of these matters lies a philosophical question of how justice is interpreted, including whether justice is a universal human condition or instead a more localised form of solidarity (Jeffrey 2013). In relation to a moral geography on how we ought to or want to live, what constraints we experience and how these are negotiated (Smith 1998, 2000; Proctor 1998), justice sits alongside other conceptual ideas like trust and confidence. 

One such area in which questions of justice converge is the legal domain (Blomley 1994; Delaney 2010): in court many people are confronted with justice in particularly personal but also wider institutional ways in the sense that they are seeking justice, delivering justice or find themselves at the receiving end (Schliehe & Jeffrey 2023). For the ones who are convicted and find themselves in the justice system, be it in prison or on probation often see themselves confronted not only with their own emotional geography of justice but with a changing sense of trust in the justice system, questioning the legitimacy of institutions and one’s own sense of trust in the world at large. It is at this intersection of legal and carceral geographies, that justice often takes a sharper form (Schliehe & Jeffrey 2023). These questions in turn also affect society at large and our sense of (mis-)trust in the state or level of confidence in its institutions. 

The panel welcomes geographical, interdisciplinary, artistic and novel contributions addressing questions and concerns in the fields of:

    -Geographies of moral philosophy and its bearing on our understandings of justice

    -Emotional geographies of justice

    -Legal geographies and its connections to understandings of justice

   - Mechanisms used to address injustice and resolve conflict

    -Materialities of justice

    -Criminal justice and carceral connections to justice

Submissions could cover overarching questions on justice and moral philosophy as well as more specifically themes of a legal and carceral nature – with a particular focus on where those areas of inquiry meet. If interested in joining the session, please send a short (up to 250 words) abstract along with your name, email address, and affiliation by 20th February 2026 to anna.schliehe at uni-bonn.de. 

As the panel at the RGS shall enable further communication about justice geographies, I therefore welcome abstracts for active participation at the RGS, as well as any expressions of interest for establishing a wider network around these themes.