Livingmaps Network Conference 2026

Shared Earth, Unequal Burdens: Living Maps for Environmental Justice

June 25-26, 2026

Senate House, Malet Street (Hybrid event in central London and online)

Keynote speakers: david Cross and Daksha Patel

We are pleased to open our invitation for contributions to the Livingmaps Network 2026 conference.

The conference theme is provoked by a year marked by almost daily news headlines of climate change; wildfires, floods, storms and drought and inspired by the resilience of activists rising up in protest to protect the well-being and lifeworlds of their communities. In the UK, climate activists have been given custodial prison sentences and in Brazil, Indigenous campaigners stormed into the COP30 UN Climate Conference in Belém to insist their voices were heard on the fate of the Amazon, highlighting how environmental decision-making often excludes marginalised communities, who bear the disproportionate impacts of climate change and environmental degradation both at home and around the world.

Mapping, broadly understood as any visual, narrative or embodied expression of place or space, has become a powerful tool for revealing these inequities. Hugh Brody’s The Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project, carried out across the Canadian Arctic between 1974-7 in which we see ‘how Indian dreams and white dreams, Indians maps and white maps, collide’ (Brody 1981) is a landmark example in the history of environmental justice mapping. More recently, the Cancer Alley map of a densely industrialised ~85-mile stretch along Louisiana's Mississippi River shows toxic pollution impacting predominantly African American and low-income communities, leading to elevated cancer risks and environmental justice issues. In Latin America different forms of cuerpo-territorio, which include maps drawn on bodies or using body outlines, have been employed as a feminist practice to contest, for example, extractive industry on occupied Indigenous land. Environmental injustice is also produced through war, occupation, and the deliberate destruction of land and infrastructure. From Gaza to Kyiv and Khartoum, conflict generates toxic landscapes, polluted water systems, and ecologies of rubble, dust, and displacement.

Environmental justice mapping has evolved into diverse forms of knowledge production, generating empirical evidence for environmental action; drawing attention to experiential and embodied human–environment relationships through Black, feminist, LGBTQ+ and Queer geographies, and by decolonising and challenging dominant power relations. As an activist practice, map-making becomes a tool of resistance, enabling grassroots and collective engagement in struggles for climate, racial and social justice, while decentring top-down environmental expertise and destabilising conventional boundaries of knowledge production - reclaiming mapping as a practice through which more just and sustainable worlds are imagined and contested,

We invite scholars, practitioners, artists, activists and community partners to contribute papers, workshops, guided walks and creative work addressing how mapping practices can illuminate, contest and transform environmental injustices across landscapes of climate collapse, racial capitalism, extractivism, settler colonialism, and conflict.

Suggested Themes and Topics

Submissions may address (but are not limited to):

  • Participatory, community-engaged, and counter-mapping methodologies

  • Indigenous, decolonial, feminist, and intersectional approaches to mapping

  • Story maps, data visualisation, and narrative cartographies

  • Artistic, speculative, and experimental mapping practices

  • Mapping environmental racism, inequality, and uneven exposure to environmental hazards

  • Historical, archival, and longitudinal mapping of environmental injustice

  • Climate justice, vulnerability, and resilience mapping

  • The role of mapping in policy, governance, and environmental decision-making

  • GIS, remote sensing, and spatial analysis for environmental justice research

  • Mapping climate vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience

  • Disability and environmental justice mapping

  • Historical and archival mapping of environmental injustice

  • Citizen science, grassroots data collection, and collaborative mapping

Submission Guidelines

We invite 250-word proposals under the following four categories, from anyone working with, or interested in, mapping for environmental justice to:

  • Present their work

  • Give guided walks / set walking activities

  • Run workshop sessions

  • Submit work for the conference exhibition

Please include:

  • Name of proposed contribution

  • An outline of what you would like to do and whether you will be presenting in-person or online

  • What materials/resources you will be using

  • The maximum number of participants you can work with (if running a walk/workshop)

Please send your proposals to info@livingmaps.org.uk by the end of March 2026.

Inclusivity Statement

Livingmaps Network is committed to creating an inclusive, interdisciplinary, and accessible forum. We particularly encourage submissions from scholars and practitioners from marginalised communities, the Global South, and outside traditional academic settings.

Accepted contributors will not need to purchase conference tickets (maximum of one free pass per contribution).