LABTALK
BIOPOLITICS OF SCIENCE RESEARCH NETWORK
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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.
MONTH:
August
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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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@USyd_BoS
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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