UGA Class Explores Environmental Justice and Workers’
Rights Through Mexican Prints
by Nabiha Rahman, public relations intern
Dr. Pablo Lapegna’s University of Georgia class LACS (SOCI) 4211/6211 (“Environmental Justice in Latin America and the Caribbean”) is examining these questions in a display at the museum titled “Fiber, Food and Fuel: Mexican Environments, Labor and the Taller de Gráfica Popular,” on view through September 4. Lapegna, who is an associate professor of sociology and Latin American and Caribbean studies at the University of Georgia, shared that his class focuses on “ideas of environmental justice or the idea of the environmentalism of the poor, and the idea that people extract a livelihood from those environments, so they’re naturally environmentalists in a way. We also look at how people and governments react to those issues — how people organize collectively to address problems created with the use of resources, and how governments and international organizations also intervene.”
Is it possible to achieve environmental justice without justice for laborers in the Global South? Can we apply Western notions of environmentalism to Latin America? Why are workers’ lived experiences so often left out of conversations about resource extraction and allocation?
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