Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde (IfL), Leipzig

19/20. November 2026

Religion is present in current social controversies in multiple ways: as a resource for collective meaning-making, as a practice of spatial ordering, as an object of political regulation, as a medium of social mobilisation, but also as a field of conflict, exclusion and resistance. At the same time, „the religious“ is being renegotiated in many contexts through practices of responsibility, care and social reproduction. Negotiations of religion/non-religion shape everyday life, institutions, publics and spatial arrangements – in cities and rural areas, at borders, in infrastructures, in digital spaces, in cultures of memory and in geopolitical constellations.

Against this background, the 2026 annual conference of the DGfG Working Group on Geographies of Religion is devoted to critical geographies of religion(s) between domination, power and resistance. It starts from the observation that religion can be understood neither as a merely private residue nor as a clearly delimited societal subfield. Religion is embedded in asymmetries of power and can stabilise, undermine or transform them. At the same time, it enables, structures or limits private and collective everyday practices and spatialisations of agency.

With the conference theme, we invite contributions that ask about the spatial constellations, practices, constructions and imaginaries in which religion is negotiated – in the past, present and future. We are interested in both classic and newer object domains of geographies of religion. Theoretical, conceptual, methodological and empirical contributions from geography and from all disciplines dealing with questions of religion – power – space are welcome.

The thematic framework is deliberately open. The annual conference aims to provide an opportunity to present diverse case studies, regional contexts, scales and research approaches. Possible thematic fields include:

Spatial dimensions of religious claims to rule and order
Religion, governmentality and forms of regulation
Power, authority and legitimation in religious spaces and networks
Religious infrastructures, territorialisations and boundary-making
Sacralisation, desacralisation and the contestedness of places
Religion and resistance, protest, dissent or refusal
Religion, practices of care, care infrastructures and forms of provision
Religion, vulnerability, uneven development, precarity and social reproduction
Religion, agency, violence and space
Postcolonial, decolonial and power-critical spatial research on religion
Religion-related practices and war, migration, displacement, diaspora
Intersections of religion with social class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or „race“
Affective, embodied and material dimensions of religious spatial productions
Methodological and research-practical reflections
Digital geographies of (non-)religion

Explicitly invited are also conceptual contributions that think about concepts of space, power and religion not only through institutions, but more broadly through spiritualities, infrastructures, hybrid practices, border zones and negotiations of religion-related and non-religion-related orders. We welcome proposals for presentations from scholars at different career stages.

Please send your contribution as an abstract of 250-300 words by 31 July 2026 by e-mail to f_meyer@leibniz-ifl.de. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 1 September 2026.

Further information on the conference programme will be made available shortly at ak-religionsgeographie.de.

We look forward to discussing current debates in geographies of religion together in Leipzig!
The spokesperson team of the DGfG Working Group on Geographies of Religion

Information on accommodation in Leipzig:

Galerie Hotel Leipzig Hof, https://leipziger-hof.de/ (€)
Motel One, https://www.motel-one.com/de/hotels/leipzig (€€)
H4 Hotel Leipzig, https://h4-hotel-leipzig.bookstaygo.com/ (€€€)