A geographic approach highlights how inequalities take shape and become embedded in space. Sacred places, devotional geographies, urban boundaries, territorialization, and religious mobility reveal how religions influence access to resources, social visibility, belonging, and recognition. These inequalities emerge in concrete spaces shaped by historical, political, and symbolic forces. Contemporary geography conceives space as a social construction produced through practices, representations, and power relations. Territories appear as dynamic fields marked by conflicts, appropriations, rituals, and memories. Sacred places act as nodes of aggregation, regulation, or exclusion, while festivals, processions, and pilgrimages temporarily reconfigure urban and rural landscapes, generating shifting centralities and marginalities. A key contribution is the notion of liminal space—thresholds, margins, and interstices—where identities and relations are renegotiated. Shrines at urban edges, ritual routes, and pilgrimage paths exemplify transitional spaces. Territorialization and religious mobility further show how groups shape and contest places, illuminating how religions structure access, visibility, and belonging across territories.
Research questions: How do sacred places, shrines, and ritual spaces act as mechanisms that produce social visibility or invisibility? In what ways do religious mobilities such as pilgrimages, migrations, and processions renegotiate territorial power dynamics? How do urban boundaries and devotional geographies shape belonging, recognition, and access to symbolic capital?
Potential areas of investigation: Shrines and places of worship situated in marginal or central areas; pilgrimage networks and ritual mobilities; the territorial distribution of religious minorities within cities; processes that shape the elevation or suppression of religious symbols within urban settings.