Challenging the Impact of Polycrises on Gender Equality: Pathways of Resilience and Resistance

The growing interconnectedness of global crises—including climate change, armed conflict, economic instability, democratic backsliding, pandemics, and forced migration—calls for a fresh understanding of how gender inequalities are produced, experienced, and challenged. Rather than unfolding separately, these crises overlap and reinforce one another, creating cascading effects that disproportionately affect women and girls through existing social, economic, and political inequalities. An intersectional perspective is essential for capturing how gender interacts with class, race, ethnicity, age, disability, migration status, and other social positions to shape experiences of polycrisis across the micro, meso, and macro levels.

At the same time, focusing only on unequal impacts tells only part of the story. Across different contexts, women are not simply responding to crises—they are actively reshaping them. Through community solidarity, informal care networks, grassroots activism, local leadership, and collective mobilisation, they challenge unequal power relations while fostering resilience, democratic participation, and social innovation. These experiences highlight women's agency and their capacity to drive transformative change

This session invites contributions that examine both the structural processes that reproduce gender inequalities and the diverse ways women build resilience, exercise agency, and promote social and institutional change. We welcome papers combining theoretical and empirical perspectives and encourage mixed-methods, quantitative, and qualitative research. Comparative, transnational, Global South, participatory, decolonial, and feminist approaches are particularly encouraged. We especially invite case studies that show how gendered power relations are negotiated, contested, and transformed in contexts of polycrisis, offering new insights for gender-transformative policies, inclusive governance, and more just and sustainable futures.