M. Murphy: With and Against Technoscience in the Aftermath

What relations can technoscience make with radical politics in the aftermaths of environmental violence, racial capitalism, heteronormativity, and settler colonialism? Can epistemologies and practices built out of violence ever be remade towards justice? Does technoscience have a role in remaking our worlds out of the long aftermath? Professor M. Murphy takes up a more than pessimistic and less than optimistic posture towards developing tactics for engaging the politics of technoscience. With Indigenous feminisms and queer leanings, Murphy draws out place-based tactics from environmental justice on Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territories to navigate towards an Indigenous feminist anti-colonial politics with and against technoscience for the F/ISTS Keynote and Silver Science Lecture, “With and Against Technoscience in the Aftermath.”

M Murphy is a Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, where they hold a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Science & Technology Studies and Environmental Data Justice at the University of Toronto. Their research is concerned with feminist, decolonial, and queer approaches to environmental justice, reproduction, Indigenous science and technology studies, transecologies, and data studies. They are Co-Director of the Technoscience Research Unit, as well as direct an Indigenous lab focused on environmental data justice. They are the author of The Economization of Life (2017), Seizing the Means of Reproduction (2012), and Sick Building Syndrome and the Politics of Uncertainty (2006), all with Duke University Press. Murphy’s current research concerns relationships between chemical pollution, colonialism, and technoscience on the lower Great Lakes, as well as the question of whether AI can be collaborated with towards Indigenous and anti-racist futures. They are Red River Métis from Winnipeg.

About F/ISTS
The inaugural Feminist/Intersectional Science and Technology Studies Conference (F/ISTS) homes in on the reciprocal relations between techno-scientific knowledge and practices, on the one hand, and gender, race, class, and other intersecting axes of power, on the other. The interplay among technical and social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine is central to addressing many of the most pressing problems of our times, such as climate justice and environmental racism, health disparities, digital surveillance, and the growing mistrust in “science” as a domain of authority.