#AusSTS2021

Please join us for the #AusSTS2021 keynote seminar with Prof Michelle Murphy, chaired by Dr Timothy Neale.
This free event is part of AusSTS 2021: Situated Practice - A multi-sited workshop. All are welcome to attend.

Title:

Pollution, Colonialism, and Re-imagining Chemicals

Abstract:

In communities and in universities, environmental justice projects often must mobilize scientific understandings of what chemical pollutants are and do. Yet, the technical information about what pollutants are and do is so often created by the very corporate and state actors who are most culpable for creating pollution. Based on industry produced data collected by government agencies, the ways that substances are rendered and informated fail to prevent pollution, but instead oversee a permission-to-pollute regulatory system. More than this, for Indigenous communities facing disproportionate environmental violence, pollution is an active form of settler colonialism and an expression of racial capitalism. This talk considers how we might rethink what chemical pollution is and does through epistemologies and responsibilities that better support decolonial land protection and start with the specific place-thought of the lower Great Lakes. What might a desire-based understanding of chemical pollutants look like? What core categories and concerns of environmental justice’s engagements with technoscience need to be rethought? Building from Indigenous feminisms as well as land defense around the lower Great Lakes, and with a focus on petrochemical pollution, this talk will consider how chemicals can be re-imagined with and against technoscience towards decolonial futures.

About the speaker:

Michelle Murphy is a Professor in History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, where they are an STS scholar whose research concerns decolonial and feminist approaches to environmental, reproductive, and data justice. They are tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Science & Technology Studies and Environmental Data Justice, as well as Co-Director of the Technoscience Research Unit, which hosts an Indigenous-led Environmental Data Justice lab and is home for social justice approaches to Science and Technology Studies. She is the author of three books: Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty, Seizing the Means of Reproduction, The Economization of Life, all published by Duke University Press. She is Métis from Winnipeg from a Métis and French Canadian family.