HUMAN RIGHTS AND ECOSOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE AMERICAS: SOUTHERN EPISTEMOLOGIES AND THE CHALLENGES OF LEGAL COLONIALITY IN THE FACE OF TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CHALLENGES
This symposium is proposed as a space for critical, interdisciplinary debate around the triad of Human Rights, Ecosocial Justice and Southern Epistemologies, analyzed through the lens of the structural asymmetries that define the experience of vulnerabilized populations in Latin America. In the face of advancing “legal coloniality,” climate crises, and the emergence of new “technologies of power,” the symposium is structured as follows. First, under the line “Territories, regeneration and climate change,” the symposium addresses the environmental crisis not only as a biological phenomenon but as a legal and political conflict. It investigates how the unsustainable exploitation of resources has altered Latin American ecosystems, deepening inequality and the precarity of rural and urban communities. Here, environmental technology is confronted with ancestral and local knowledges, understood not as relics of the past but as “southern epistemologies” capable of offering more equitable and resilient models of regeneration and territorial governance in the face of climate change. Through the Human Rights axis, it is recognized that contemporary vulnerability is an unfolding of the colonial legacy. Historical memory and struggles for identity are integrated into twenty-first-century legal discourse as tools of resistance. The symposium holds that the protection of human rights in the Americas depends on a hermeneutics that recognizes the persistence of social differences and the weight of histories of exclusion in present-day decision-making. Thus, the symposium seeks to promote reflection on various topics and a theoretical synthesis that links Human Rights, environmental crises, and technological modernization with the protection of human and non-human life, defending a gender-inclusive constitutionalism and an environmental justice that prioritizes historically invisibilized groups from Southern epistemologies. Main axes: Human Rights; Environmental and Ecosocial Justice; Technologies of Power and Gender; Vulnerabilized Populations; Legal Coloniality.
