Conferences & Talks

From 29 June to 4 July, three Wealth & Space researchers took part in POLLEN2026, the political ecology conference, at the Universitat de Barcelona. Claudia Alonso (Universidad de Chile) presented "Vertical political ecologies of the desert," on how the energy transition disputes ground, infrastructure, and sky in the Atacama desert. Manuel Bayon (El Colegio de Mexico) examined the persecution of socio-environmental organisations in Ecuador amid expanding megamining. Francisco Montano (KIT) discussed the labour conflict between the avocado industry and the autonomous community of Cherán, Michoacan. Three different scales, one shared question: who decides over territories.

On 3 June 2026, a seminar was held in Seville focusing on tourism issues through the lens of Henri Lefebvre’s thinking on topics such as alienation, everyday life, centrality and the right to the city. Manuel Bayón, from El Colegio de México, offered a comparative perspective between the Yucatán Peninsula and the Ecuadorian Amazon, to situate tourism within the context of planetary urbanisation.

From 17 to 18 March 2026, the symposium "Perspectives on Wealth 2026" brought together Wealth & Space and 14 more projects funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung. At Schloss Herrenhausen, Hannover, we presented preliminary research findings from Chile, Brazil and Mexico.

Sérgio Sauer of the University of Brasília presented “The Contemporary Eco-Agrarian Question in the Context of Green Land Grabbing in Brazil” at the international conference “Land, Life, and Society” organized by the Institute for Poverty, Land, and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town.

IfR

Michael Lukas and David Kornbluth presented “Grupos económicos y poder de clase en el capitalismo dependiente – Una propuesta analítica sobre capital monopólico y concentración de riqueza en Chile” (“Economic Groups and Class Power in Dependent Capitalism – An Analytical Proposal on Monopoly Capital and Wealth Concentration in Chile”) at the international COES Conference, held from 22 to 24 October 2025 in Santiago de Chile. The conference brought together international researchers to discuss social inequalities, class power, economic concentration, and political transformations in Latin America, with a particular focus on contemporary forms of capitalism and elite power relations in the region.

IfR

Our Team member Sérgio Sauer participated at the conference "Agroecologia e questão agrária em tempos de (neo)extrativismo" in ocotber 2025.

 It was part of the 13 Congresso Brasileiro de Agroecologia (13º Congreso Brasileño de Agroecología).

Sérgio Sauer of the University of Brasília presented “Ruralidades em tempos de emergências climáticas” (“Ruralities in Times of Climate Emergencies”) at the XI National Meeting of the Rural Studies Network in Vitória da Conquista, Bahia, Brazil, in September 2025. The conference focused on social injustice, rural development, and climate emergencies.

Sérgio Sauer of the University of Brasília presented “Relações sociais no Antropoceno: terra, bens comuns e reforma agrária” (“Social Relations in the Anthropocene: Land, Commons, and Agrarian Reform”) at the PLANETA.DOC Conference “Commons and the Biocentric Turn” at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil, in September 2025. 

Paper presentation titled “Financial Geography and Wealth Reproduction in Latin America: Exploring the Nexus Approach” at the 7th Global Conference on Economic Geography, in the session “Navigating Economic Geography: Inequalities and Challenges in Latin America’s Diverse Territories,” hosted by Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States, from 4 to 8 June 2025.

SLAS

Francisco Montano Cruz participated at the Conference of the Society of Latin American Studies (SLAS).

RC 21

We present first results at the conference RC21 “The politics and spaces of encounters: advancing dialogues between and within the Global North and the Global South”.

Daniel Lengies

The symposium "Perspectives on social inequality and wealth" was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.