STS@OSU Conference Keynote

Chemicals, Data, and Decolonial Futures on the Great Lakes

Professor Michelle Murphy (University of Toronto)
Thursday, March 7, 2019, 4:15pm-5:45pm
River Den Room, Drake Performance and Event Center
1849 Cannon Drive, Columbus, Ohio 43210

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

What if our concepts for describing environmental violence are wrong, because they were made by the same systems that generate violence?  What concepts might we say no to, and thus make room for better ways of understanding the relationships between settler colonialism, data, and petrochemical-based economies of extraction and pollution? Focused on one of the oldest refineries in North America, which sits on Anishinaabe land and mirrors the history of Canadian settler colonialism, this talk explores decolonial feminist approaches to chemicals, data and environmental violence.

 

Michelle Murphy is a historian and feminist science and technology studies scholars whose research concerns decolonial STS, with a focus on environmental, reproductive, and data justice. She is a Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, where she is Director of the Technoscience Research Unit. She is 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.  She is co-organizer of the Toronto Technoscience Science Salon, a founding member of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, and a lead editor of  the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technocience. She runs an Indigenous STS Environmental Data Justice Lab, and is an urban Métis from Winnipeg living in Toronto, on the shores of Lake Ontario.

 

Sponsored by Science and Technology Studies Working Group and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies