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THEME: Knowing, Enacting, and Imagining Amidst Crisis

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25 March 

Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships

By Brian Earp & Julian Savulescu (2020)

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30 April 

Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory

by Juan Salazar et al. (2020)

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27 May 

The War Against Animals*

by Dinesh Wadiwel (2015)

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25 June 

An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation

by Micha Rahder (2020)

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26 August 

Pollution is Colonialism*

by Max Liboiron (2021)

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30 September 

Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above 

by Caren Kaplan (2018)

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28 October 

Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence

by Joseph Pugliese (2020)

 

25 November 

Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima 

by Aya Kimura (2017)

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* Asterisk indicates that the text will be read in its entirety (May & August). All other months will have specific chapters assigned. 

Reading List
Chapter Download

MONTH:

August

Book of the Month

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Pollution is Colonialism

By Max Liboiron

TITLE:

LABTALK

ABOUT:

 

Towards ​a communal laboratory, a hopeful method:

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Run by the Biopolitics of Science Research Network, LABTALK is a reading group dedicated to extending the laboratory into a wider landscape of inter-, and intra-, action.

 

Each month, multiple worlds will rub alongside each-other, with the group exploring issues of biological engineering; the cultural work of commensuration; patterns of techno-scientific exclusion; as well as various conceptual snapping points. The group is open to cross-disciplinary scholars, students and members of the public. 

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Held on the land of the Gadigal People, of the Eora Nation. Sovereignty has never been ceded.

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DATE: 26 August 2021 

TIME: 9:30AM AEDT/GMT+10

VENUE: All upcoming meetings

will occur online, via Zoom

 

Please email ziha2281@uni.sydney.edu.au

if you'd like to join/for further instructions

 

"How do I, as a scientist, make alterlives and good Land relations integral to dominant scientific practice?" (p. 20)

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In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations.

 

Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron's creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.

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Max Liboiron is Associate Professor of Geography at Memorial University.

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