Place, Polyphony and Community Histories: Biographical Approaches to Landscapes, Agency and Social Change

In an era of climate crisis, rapid urbanization, socio-economic uncertainty, environmental degradation, and political instability, landscapes are undergoing profound transformations that reshape collective futures and everyday lives. This session invites contributions exploring how individuals and communities experience, interpret, and narrate spatial, environmental, and social change in what the ISA conference frames as “turbulent times.”

Aligned with RC38, the session connects biographical experiences and personal narratives with broader structural transformations, including urban expansion, land degradation, ecological transition, displacement, housing pressures, infrastructure development, environmental restoration policies, and changing forms of governance. It is especially interested in how grassroots networks, community initiatives, activist groups, and informal solidarities emerge in response to turbulent conditions, developing forms of collective agency that challenge dominant development trajectories and influence institutional or policy change.

The session welcomes qualitative, narrative, and biographical approaches that illuminate the relationship between lived experience and wider historical and institutional processes. Contributions may examine how individuals and communities negotiate contested landscapes and shifting socio-ecological realities; how memories, identities, and attachments to place are transformed under crisis and transition; how environmental and urban policies are experienced in everyday life; and how grassroots actors build alternative visions, participatory practices, and collective strategies contributing to environmental justice and more democratic governance.

Bringing together sociology, spatial planning, environmental humanities, political ecology, geography, and related fields, the session aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on the human dimensions of socio-environmental transformation and to understand how biographies, narratives, and everyday practices shape responses to turbulence, uncertainty, and ecological transition.