Water, Health and Social Justice: More Rhetoric than Right

By Shawn H.E. Harmon, Janice Graham, Emma FitzGerald, Tanya Davis

The Arts and Ethics Research Group (AERG) at the University of Edinburgh is an international interdisciplinary research group funded by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Through the collaborative working of individuals from the arts, humanities and sciences, it seeks to encourage new insights and public debate around ethical, legal, and social aspects of the practice and governance of medicine, healthcare, and technologies.[1] While one of its overarching inquiries is about the transformative potential of the arts, its constituent creative teams are exploring three broad themes, one of which is innovation and global justice (i.e., values, interests, and power dynamics in designing and delivering healthcare locally and internationally). In pursuit of this, AERG Creative Team 3 (AERG-3), which consists of a lawyer, anthropologist, visual artist, and poet, has begun an exploration of water, which implicates health, cultural practices, and social justice and wellbeing.