Embodied Social Justice: Water Filter Workshops as Public Pedagogy

World wide, water-related diseases cause more than 5 million deaths each year. For more than a decade, members of the non-profit organization, Potters for Peace, have traveled to numerous countries around the world showing community after community a technique for creating low-cost, point-of-use ceramic water filters, produced mainly from local materials (https://www. pottersforpeace.org). Inspired by this work and other similar endeavors by socially conscious artists and community activists, for the past two years, a small group of faculty and students at Texas AandM University have established a collaborative dedicated to working with communities toward the production, study, and distribution of ceramic water filters and the educational and economic opportunities they enable. The TAMU Water Project has based its approach on the work of Potters for Peace through the assistance of artists Manny Hernandez (Northern Illinois University) and Richard Wukich (Slippery Rock University) who have worked closely with Potters for Peace over the past several years. Central to the mission of the TAMU Water Project, like the work of Hernandez, Wukich, and Potters for Peace, is the development and implementation of appropriate technology to respond to real world living conditions.