Short Abstract

This panel addresses collective care and repair as political responses to environmental racism in Latin America and the Caribbean, exploring how communities sustain life, defend territories, and rebuild social and ecological relations amid extraction, dispossession, and institutional neglect.

Long Abstract

At a time when threats to individual and collective existence are no longer exceptional, this panel approaches collective care and repair as urgent political practices forged within racialized environments. By racialized environments, we refer to landscapes, territories, infrastructures and material worlds shaped by the unequal distribution of extraction, pollution, dispossession and ecological degradation. In these contexts, collective care is not a merely ethical response to harm; it is a material practice through which communities sustain life, defend territory and assert forms of re-existence against the forces that render them disposable. Repair, in turn, names the contested work of reassembling damaged social, ecological and political relations without treating restoration as a return to an innocent past. From this perspective, repair is never neutral: it emerges where environmental harm has been historically produced, unequally distributed, and normalized through colonial violence, capitalist extraction, racialized dispossession, and state or corporate abandonment. This panel asks how communities, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, confront the cumulative effects of environmental racism; who assumes responsibility for repair when states and corporations withdraw, fail, or refuse to act? Finally, how do practices of collective care, maintenance, ecological restoration, territorial defense, mutual aid, and political mobilization challenge—or risk reproducing—the inequalities they address? We invite ethnographic, theoretical, and collaborative contributions that analyze the material, affective, and political dimensions of collective care and environmental repair across Latin America and the Caribbean.