This practical workshop aims to provide an educational and participatory experience of hydro-social cartography that promotes the exchange of knowledges on water justice. The workshop is based on the ‘Community Water Mapping’ methodology, developed since 2019 as part of the ‘Voices for Water’ campaign by the Venezuelan Observatory of Political Ecology, which has resulted in a handbook and more than six community workshops held in rural, peri-urban and urban areas of Venezuela. The work was inspired by the grassroots cartography of the Iconoclasistas collective and by emblematic water struggles in Latin America, against a backdrop of intense oil extraction.

The specific objectives of the workshop are: to share the methodology as a technical-political tool for participatory assessment and community defence of the commons; to carry out a mapping exercise of water sources, points of extractivist pressure, pollution and corporate dynamics; and to highlight water as a network of life and care, prioritising community practices to co-construct a horizon for eco-social action.

Methodologically, the workshop draws on participatory eco-social cartography from a feminist, community-based Latin American political ecology perspective. It is structured in three parts: (1) an affective and political-conceptual framework on water as Body-Territory, using the Venezuelan experience as a reference; (2) immersion in participants’ own territories and collective mapping group work; and (3) mapping the invisible care work surrounding water, identifying actors and movements, and concluding with a summary and agreements on action.

Liliana Buitrago Arévalo (Women, Bodies and Territories Collective, Venezuela) facilitates the workshop, which is aimed at collectives, social movements, the academic community, and researchers in the field of popular education.

Liliana Buitrago Arévalo is an ecofeminist, researcher and artivist with the ‘Mucyt - Mulheres, Corpos e Territórios‘ [Mucyt - Women, Bodies and Territories] collective in Venezuela; she is a member of the Southern Eco-Social and Intercultural Pact and the Post-Extractivist Futures collective. As a singer, she performs collective sound improvisations. She holds a Master’s degree in Linguistics, with an interest in critical discourse analysis, social movements and eco-social transformations. She has taken part in various collective initiatives in defence of seeds, climate justice, breastfeeding, care, solidarity economies and biodiversity in Venezuela, as well as in international coordination forums such as the Latin American and Caribbean Platform for Climate Justice and the World Assembly for the Amazon.

Event organised as part of the project EJMapping - Counter-mapping environmental justice conflicts on the European periphery: the case of Portugal, reference number 2023.17429.ICDT, funded by the ERDF and national funds, through the Foundation for Science and Technology. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54499/2023.17429.ICDT and the ECOSOC/CES working group - Ecology and Society Lab

_________________________

This activity will be provided through Zoom platform and does not require registration. Participation is limited to the number of places available > https://zoom.us/j/89162454747 | ID: 891 6245 4747 | Password:194509

Please keep the microphone on mute until the discussion is open. The host may remove disruptive participants.

Open activities in digital format, such as this one, do not grant a declaration of participation. Such document will only be guaranteed in events with prior registration and regulated access.