SS 01: Behind the Gender Gap. Economic and Social Costs of Inequality
Organisers: Marinela ISTRATE, Raluca Ioana HOREA ȘERBAN, Haralambie ATHES
In June 2026, Directive (EU) 2023/970 will come into force in Romania, a piece of legislation that addresses, among other things, pay transparency. It requires companies to ensure equal pay, publish pay criteria, and allow employees to compare salaries in order to eliminate discrimination. The main objective is to eliminate the gender pay gap between women and men performing work of equal value. The lack of pay transparency has been identified as one of the main obstacles to closing the gender pay gap, which remains at approximately 11%. This means that women earn, on average per hour, 11% less than men for the same work or for work of equal value (Eurostat data 2025), which has a long-term impact on women’s quality of life, their risk of poverty, and the persistent pension gap, which stands at approximately 25% in the EU.
It is undeniable that significant progress has been made in recent decades regarding gender equality. However, Romania still has a long way to go. Progress has been uneven; Romanian society has faced numerous challenges, and in some areas has taken a step backward, highlighting just how deeply rooted the issue of gender inequality is in both public and private life. Although the National Strategy on Promoting Equal Opportunities and Treatment Between Women and Men for the period 2022–2027 was adopted three years ago—aligning Romania with European and international policies and enabling it to access European funds for projects in this area—results have been slow to materialize. We can say that, at the pace at which Romanian society is advancing in eliminating gender gaps, women in Romania will continue to face numerous aspects of inequality in the future.
The special session aims to examine some of the most pressing challenges in this field, from local, regional, national, and European perspectives. We will have the opportunity to engage in debates and discussions about wage disparities in the labor market, about women’s presence in Romania’s political, academic, and cultural life, and about poverty, which disproportionately affects women; we will approach familiar topics from new perspectives, sharing our own experiences and contributing to advancing the conversation on gender equality.
SS 02: Hazard, vulnerability și disaster risk at the intersection of Physical and Human Geography
Organisers: Cosmina ALBULESCU, Adrian GROZAVU, Ionuț MINEA, Marinela ISTRATE
Natural and anthropogenic risks are gaining traction across the scientific community, the media, and civil society alike. This prominence is not incidental: the frequency and impact of hazardous events have increased considerably over recent decades, adversely affecting human communities, infrastructure, and ecosystems. Risk arises from the interaction of three fundamental components: hazard, vulnerability, and exposure. Understanding this conceptual triad requires a transdisciplinary approach, integrating analytical perspectives from both Physical Geography and Human Geography.
Disaster Risk Reduction has emerged as a scientific and operational field at the interface of Physical Geography and Human Geography, drawing on the conceptual and methodological complementarity of these two research traditions. In risk research, the analysis of physical processes and factors influencing hazard occurrence is inherently complementary to the analysis of the physical, socio-economic, cultural, and institutional dimensions of vulnerability. This convergence reflects a genuine epistemological necessity: disaster risk cannot be understood, quantified, or addressed in the absence of an integrated analytical framework that encompasses both the physical and social dimensions of exposed systems.
This special session aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from Geography and related disciplines to explore, discuss, and advance this disciplinary interface. The session will be conducted in Romanian, English, and French. Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following thematic areas:
- Dynamics and characteristics of natural or anthropogenic hazards
- Multi-hazard investigations with a focus on hazard interactions
- The multidimensionality of vulnerability
- Vulnerability dynamics in single-hazard and multi-hazard contexts
- Risk analyses
- Multi-risk investigations
- The impact of natural or anthropogenic hazards
- Forensic analyses of past disasters
- Disaster scenarios and prospective modelling tools
SS 03: Les transitions énergétique et numérique peuvent-elles sauver les territoires non métropolitains ou périphériques ?
Organizatori / Organisers / Organisateurs: Jean-Paul CARRIÈRE, Mario CARRIER, Abdelillah HAMDOUCH, Corneliu IATU
Sous l’effet combiné de la concurrence mondialisée depuis les années 1970, dans de nombreuses régions en Europe comme en Amérique du Nord et ailleurs, les territoires non métropolitains ou périphériques ont subi des vagues continues de désindustrialisation et d’effritement des bases de leur développement économique, voire de leur capacité à continuer de « faire territoire ». Alors que cette dynamique de déclin semblait, il y a quelques années encore, inéluctable, de nouvelles perspectives de redynamisation potentielle apparaissent désormais de plus en plus tangibles, notamment à la faveur des opportunités de réindustrialisation ouvertes par les transitions énergétique et numérique en cours. Elles offrent en effet à ces territoires des voies de « nouveau départ » via une diversification de leurs activités économiques se démarquant de leurs spécialisations initiales (diversification au moins en partie non liée). Que ce soit sous l’impulsion de politiques nationales ou régionales ciblées sur ces territoires, de l’action d’acteurs privés de ces secteurs souhaitant reconfigurer la localisation de leurs activités, ou plus vraisemblable d’une conjugaison de ces deux dynamiques, il semblerait qu’un mouvement plus favorable aux territoires périphériques ou d’échelle non métropolitaine se dessine aujourd’hui de plus en plus clairement dans certaines régions. L’une des explications pourrait être liée à la capacité de ces territoires à offrir des avantages de localisation basés sur des facteurs relativement traditionnels tels que la disponibilité de foncier en quantité et peu onéreux, malgré les exigences de sobriété foncière qui s’expriment à travers des restrictions réglementaires ou législatives ; ou encore la présence de maind’oeuvre qualifiée ou de ressources minières ou naturelles spécifiques, recherchées par les industries numériques et énergétiques.
Les communications attendues pour cette session spéciale pourraient autant contribuer à mieux conceptualiser ces dynamiques de diversification non liée qu’à illustrer par des cas empiriques des trajectoires territoriales permettant de mieux documenter ces processus de réindustrialisation « par le haut ».
SS 04: Onomastics, Historical Geography and Political Geography
Organiser: Ionel BOAMFĂ
The session includes papers related to the analysis of the geographical significance of place names (toponyms) and person names (anthroponyms). It also addresses a varied theme, regarding historical geography (tracing the succession of different “geographies of the past”), in close relation to political-geographical phenomena (including those related to the geography of voting). The included topics address not only elements, processes and/or phenomena of this kind in the Romanian space, but also at the international level (continental/European and/or global).
SS 05: Explaining Uneven Local Development: the Role of Accessibility, Local Agency, and Collaboration Networks
Organizatori: Mihail EVA, Alexandra CEHAN, Ema CORODESCU-ROȘCA
Rural and urban areas in Central-Eastern Europe have undergone extensive transformations over the last decades, triggered both by private investments, including foreign direct investments, and by public programs aimed at building new infrastructure, improving accessibility to services of general interest, and strengthening administrative capacity. Consequently, a new geography of local development is emerging, with new centralities and lagging areas, and accompanied by changing patterns of inequality. At the same time, the meaning of development has gradually changed, undergoing a gradual shift from a predominantly material and economic understanding to a multidimensional one, that integrates inequality, quality of life and well-being.
On the other hand, the gradual implementation of neoliberal policies, EU integration, and the accelerating technological transformations are considerably changing the relative importance of factors of development. Traditional top-down interventions have been gradually complemented by an increasing importance of bottom-up approaches. National and EU stakeholders that decide investment priorities are still highly important in shaping the geography of local development, but the role of local stakeholders and collaboration networks has become critical in competing for funding, seizing development opportunities and adapting to new threats and external shosks. These transformations, among others, call for a constant rethinking of investment programmes and local development interventions.
This session welcomes contributions aimed at enriching the debates around drivers of local development, including, but not limited to the role of geography and accessibility, the role of agency and collaboration networks, and the impact of external shocks such as economic crisis, health crisis, or climate change. Theoretical, methodological and empirical papers are equally welcome around the following research questions:
- How are local development trajectories and spatial inequality changing? How do these trajectories differ across dimensions of development? Which are the new emerging and the new lagging areas?
- Which drivers of local development are losing importance and which ones are gaining traction? How do explanatory patterns vary from one territorial context to another?
- Which are the main stakeholders shaping development trajectories at local level?
- How are local governance networks structured and how do they vary from one type of community to another?
- How do stakeholders adapt to new opportunities and emerging threats?
* This session is organized as part of the research project “Advancing knowledge on spatial inequality and local development determinants: Theory vs Empirical evidence vs Public Stakeholders’ perception”, financed by the Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS—UEFISCDI, Project number: PN-IV-P2-2.1-TE-2023-2070.
