WATER, SANITATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE AMERICAS: CLIMATE CRISIS, TERRITORIAL INEQUALITIES AND MEMORIES OF RESISTANCE
This symposium calls for papers that analyze, from a critical, interdisciplinary perspective situated in the Americas, the links between water, sanitation, human rights, the climate crisis and territorial inequalities. It starts from the recognition that the human rights to water and sanitation, although affirmed at the international normative level, remain deeply violated in territories marked by environmental racism, poverty, infrastructural precarity, water pollution, unequal urbanization, extractivism, droughts, floods and state omissions.
We are interested in bringing together research examining how historical inequalities in access to safe water and adequate sanitation produce effects on health, dignity, everyday life, and the permanence of communities in their territories. Contributions on public policy, sanitation planning, water governance, environmental justice, climate adaptation, ecological-distributive conflicts, collective health, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, rural populations, urban peripheries and other territorially vulnerabilized groups will be received.
The symposium also seeks to value memories, knowledges, resistances and forms of community organization that contest the reduction of water and sanitation to merely technical, commercial or administrative objects. In this sense, it proposes to articulate denunciation, historical analysis and the construction of alternatives, evidencing both the mechanisms that reproduce rights violations and the collective practices that sustain horizons of water, sanitary, climate and socio-environmental justice in the Americas.
