Spatializing Urban Vulnerability in Times of Crisis: Energy Poverty, Housing Deprivation, Homelessness, and Displacement

This study examines the extent to which geography curricula (2021) enable spatial reasoning that engages with polycrisis, understood as the entanglement of environmental, economic, political, and social disruptions whose effects are reinforcing, distributed, and historically produced (Tooze, 2022). Framed within a critical geography education perspective, the study explores how curricular knowledge shapes students’ understanding of, and capacity interrogation with polycrisis complexity. It analyses primary and secondary education curricula through content analysis, guided by an interpretive framework attending to epistemic framing, generative logics, temporal sedimentation, differential exposure, and crisis representation (Huckle, 2023, 2024; León, 2024; Morgan, 2024; Moore et al., 2025). Findings reveal curricula that are structured yet uneven in their capacity to support spatial reasoning aligned with critical geography. Across educational levels, epistemic framing predominates, with geography enacted through representation, description, and classification. While supporting geoliteracy, this orientation positions knowledge as stable, constraining engagement with it as situated, contested, and socially produced. A partial shift toward process-oriented reasoning emerges in secondary education, where generative logics appear through environmental systems, production processes, and spatial networks. However, these remain descriptive and weakly connected to socio-political relations. Temporal sedimentation is constrained, limiting understanding of how present spatial configurations emerge through layered historical processes. Differential exposure to crises is acknowledged, but remains under-theorized, often detached from questions of power, inequality, and responsibility. Crisis representation appears fragmented, limiting opportunities to grasp the interconnected nature of polycrisis. Overall, the curriculum moves beyond descriptive geography, but only partially supports relational, historical, and systemic reasoning central to critical geography education. The study advances the notion of the critical geoliterate student as an educational aim, a learner who interprets spatial representations while critically interrogating how space is historically produced, politically contested, and unevenly experienced. It calls for epistemic reorientation toward fostering learners capable of engaging with a polycrisis world.

This paper presents the research framework of GEOCIVIS, a Swiss–Italian project examining how geography education can support primary teachers in engaging socially acute questions (SAQs) through disciplinary geographical inquiry that frames contemporary social issues as spatially structured problems. Although democratic citizenship features prominently in many contemporary curricula, guidance on how socially contested questions can be approached through geographical reasoning remains limited. In classroom practice these issues frequently appear as themes for discussion, while the spatial processes through which they emerge and unfold receive far less systematic attention. GEOCIVIS explores how teachers can mobilise pupils’ spatial experiences as entry points for geographical inquiry that connects lived environments with wider socio-spatial processes, with particular attention given to the pedagogical conditions under which teachers can transform socially acute questions into objects of geographical investigation within the primary classroom. The research combines literature review, institutional policy analysis, and classroom-based case studies with primary teachers in Switzerland and Italy in order to examine how curricular expectations surrounding democratic citizenship are interpreted in teacher education and translated into teaching practice. Through the development of pedagogical guidelines and practical teaching tools, GEOCIVIS contributes to ongoing debates on how geography education can support teachers in fostering democratic engagement and critical spatial thinking from the earliest stages of schooling.

Identities and otherness in Europe have been central topics in contemporary research, particularly following the recent migration and humanitarian crises. Critical approaches to European identities are essential for addressing social inequalities in increasingly multicultural societies. Education plays a key role in shaping individuals’ representations of European identities. Consequently, examining the representations of future teachers, who will, in turn, influence and co-construct their students’ perceptions, is of particular importance. This study aims to: (1) investigate how pre-service primary school teachers in Greece construct, through discourse, representations of the Self/in-group in relation to the ‘European Other’/out-group; (2) identify potential barriers that reinforce the reproduction of dominant power relations and hinder their critical contestation; and (3) propose ways to overcome these barriers towards social well-being. Thirty-three students from the Department of Primary Education at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens participated in the study. Data collection was conducted through a Serious Game, a questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews. Participants’ discourse was analyzed across three levels using Critical Discourse Analysis, as proposed by Fairclough, in combination with Systemic Functional Grammar. The analysis revealed two themes: (1) the Self/in-group represented as possessing more positive characteristics compared to the ‘European Other’ (e.g., ‘we’ as more open-minded and considerate, versus ‘others’ as passive, aggressive or fanatical), and (2) the construction of equal and reciprocal relationships between the Self and the ‘European Other’. The findings highlight barriers that facilitate the reproduction of power relations and hinder their contestation, including representations drawing on ethnocentric and racist discourse, racial essentialism, and discourses of intra-regional homogeneity alongside the emphasis on inter-regional heterogeneity. Finally, the study proposes ways to address these barriers, contributing to ongoing discussions on socio-spatial inequalities and spatial justice, and the role of geography education in fostering more inclusive and critical understandings of European identities.

This paper presents a content analysis of the curricula of four countries – Greece, Cyprus, the United Kingdom, and Australia – examining the integration of Climate Change (CC) as a cross-curricular theme in primary and secondary education. The study focuses primarily on the newly enacted Greek curricula (2023), situating them within a broader international context through systematic comparison with three representative foreign educational systems selected for their geographic, cultural, and curricular diversity. Key CC-related terms were systematically identified within curriculum texts across all four countries, and both their frequency and contextual usage were recorded and analyzed. The analysis explores how CC is addressed horizontally across educational levels and vertically within individual subjects, following a spiral curriculum approach – that is, examining whether and how CC concepts are revisited and deepened as students progress through their schooling. To enable meaningful comparisons across subjects taught for varying numbers of years, a normalized frequency index (f) was introduced. This index is defined as the number of CC-related terms identified in a given subject's curriculum divided by the number of years that subject is taught, thereby providing a more objective and comparable measure of CC integration across disciplines and educational systems. As expected, environmentally oriented subjects emerged as the primary carriers of CC content across all countries examined. Notably, however, several non-environmental subjects (eg. Home Economics, History) showed a surprisingly high frequency of CC-related terms in certain national curricula, suggesting broader and more interdisciplinary approaches to CC education in those contexts. These findings point to meaningful differences in how countries conceptualize the role of CC across the school curriculum, beyond the boundaries of the natural sciences. The findings highlight both the strengths and gaps in the Greek curriculum's treatment of CC, offering insights and practical implications for future curriculum design and reform.