Dr. Max Liboiron on building feminist and anticolonial technologies in compromised spaces
thank you everyone for coming to the 51st event of disrupting disruptions the feminist and accessible publishing communications and technology speaker and workshop series this is the second event of season 4 in our second event of 2022 thank you to the 460 people who registered for today's event before we get started i just want to apologize that our captioner is not here we really emphasize the importance of having human captioners but unfortunately our captioner didn't show up so if they do show up part way through the meeting we will switch over to the human captioner i really want to apologize again for us accessibility is very very important and we apologize i'm Dr. Alex Ketchum and i'm a professor of feminist and social justice studies at McGill university and the organizer of this series the feminist and accessible publishing communications and technology speaker workshop series seeks to bring together scholars creators and people in industry working at the intersections of digital humanities computer science feminist studies disability studies communication science LGBTQ studies history and critical race theory we are hosting four virtual events this winter next week Mindy Sue is speaking and the following week Dr Alex Hannah will present you can find our full schedule as well as video recordings of past events at disruptingdisruptions.com so that's the redirect url disruptingdisruptions.com the other url is way too long to remember you can also find our list of sponsors including SSHRC milieux the sustainability projects fund mila and more this event is particularly co-sponsored by Dr Damon Matthews of Concordia university as part of the leadership in environmental and digital innovation for sustainability, so Dr Damon Matthews will say a couple words now and then i'll continue the introduction thank you Alex and yes welcome everyone it's a pleasure to participate in this in this exciting seminar series um so our our program is a graduate student training program based at Concordia university but in partnership with the four Montreal universities and also the Montreal office of future earth it's called LEADIS the leadership in environmental and digital innovation for sustainability funded by NSERC also by Concordia university and the goal of our program is really to is to train graduate students and and connect different communities of science and and the digital world uh develop skills and experience in sustainability science and digital innovation towards the goal of accelerating transformations to a more sustainable and equitable global society so it's i was really pleased when Alex contacted us about the idea of joining forces on this particular seminar i think there's a good intersection around ideas of digital uh innovation and how we can do that well and um contribute to a more equitable society rather than a less equitable one so thank you very much and i look forward very much to the seminar today thank you Damon uh so for everyone i want to let you know for this event recording is enabled so the event can be embedded on our website don't worry only the speakers will be shown in the video and we're not going to record the q a uh period today we also have a q a option available so throughout the event you can type your questions into the q a answer box it's at the bottom of your screen and there will be some time at the end for Dr Max Liboiron to answer them we can't guarantee that every question will be answered but we are very grateful for the discussion that you generate as we welcome you into our homes and our offices through zoom and you welcome us into ours let us be mindful of the space and place. Past series speakers Suzanne Kite and Jess Mclean have pointed to the physical and material impacts of the digital world while the events of the semester are virtual everything that we do is tied to the land and the space that we are on as our speaker for today Dr Max Liboiron writes in their book pollution and colonialism colonialism first foremost and always is about land we must always be mindful of the lands that the servers enabling our events are on furthermore as the series seeks to draw attention to power relations that have been invisibleized is important to acknowledge Canada's long colonial history and current political practices as you know perhaps the series is affiliated with the institute for gender sexuality and feminist studies of McGill university both McGill and Concordia one of our co-sponsors are currently located in Tiohtiá:ke Montreal on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory furthermore the ongoing organizing efforts by indigenous communities such as the Wet'suwet'en and people at the Unist’ot’en camp water protectors and people involved in land bath movements may clear the ever-present and ongoing colonial violence in Canada interwoven with this history of colonization is one of enslavement and racism this university's namesake James McGill enslaved black and indigenous peoples it was in part from the money he acquired through these violent acts that McGill university was founded these histories are here with us in this space and inform the conversations we have today as Dr Liboiron writes to change colonial land relations and enact other types of land relations requires specificity i encourage you to learn more about the lands that you are on nativeland.ca is a fantastic resource for beginning i'm honoured to welcome as our speaker today Dr Max Liboiron as an associate professor in geography and is formerly the associate vice president of indigenous research at Memorial university Liboiron is Métis/Michif (Woodman via Red River) who grew up in Lac la Biche, Treaty 6 territory. Dr Max Libroin is
leader in both developing and promoting anti-colonial research methods into a wide array of disciplines and spaces as founder of clear and interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory these methods foreground humility and deadline relations Liboiron has influenced national policy on both plastics and indigenous research invented technologies and protocols for community monitoring of plastics and led the development of the interdisciplinary field of discard studies if you haven't checked it out yet Liboiron's book Pollution is Colonialism is amazing you have to read it it's so good it bridges science and technology studies indigenous studies and discarded studies while providing a framework for understanding all research methods as practices that align with or against colonialism focusing on plastic pollution the text models and anti-colonial scientific practice associated with Métis concepts of land ethics and relations and demonstrates that anti-colonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced i'm so inspired by Dr Max Libroin's work and writings and i'm so happy to be here today and so please join me in welcoming Dr Max Libroin thank you so much for being here thank you for that introduction um i am nervous about this talk in a way that i am never nervous about talks uh on twitter where i spend now almost all of my social time there were some oh my god tweets and some be there be square tweets but folks as you all know it is impossible to be intelligent and articulate and to think on the spot when you're in survival mode which a lot of us are right now i'd say most of us are right now all my creativity and energy goes to getting groceries with as little risk as possible and of course my university announced in-person teaching starting next week uh even though we have some of the highest rates of we do have the highest rates of hospitalization uh and death in the province since covet began so also haven't slept a little bit stressed out which means that this talk will be different and not good in the same way as many of my other talks i think that's fine um but it's what we're in for so thank you for joining me on that um one of the exciting things about this though is that when i and i think most people are in survival mode i don't have new ideas there's lots of rehashing and getting into trenches uh with your ideas and writing this talk um got me to stretch out a few in a few not new directions but like eek out of the ruts of the things that i've been speaking and writing about for some time and so that was exciting and so my dearest dream is that we think some things together today and at some point someone says oh huh and that uh is my hope and dream so thank you very much i'm going to start or continue uh with a land acknowledgment uh another land acknowledgement i should say i'm speaking to you from Saint John's which is the capital city of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador they're the homelands of the Beothuk the wider province are also the homelands of the Miꞌkmaq the Inu and the Inuit none of which are my people i come from much farther away so i still do land acknowledgments even though they are heavily and rightfully critiqued uh i don't think erasure is better than tokenism which i hope isn't a radical statement uh and also it's a statement that i think fits with the themes that i'll be talking about today including this idea of compromise which i'll talk about in a little while one of the core critiques of land acknowledgments is also very germane to this talk and the critique is something like land acknowledgments don't scale they don't change land relations and in fact they can even ingrain colonial land relations because as techniques they get subsumed into a larger infrastructure of settler access to indigenous land because it looks like something's being done about it it looks like someone's on the right side so we're good to go right so um that sort of problem and the needing to change infrastructure and not just exist in it is is something i'll be talking about today so all of the courses that i teach uh mostly undergraduate although not exclusively courses on science and technology studies and feminist technologies are all about switching from thinking about technologies to infrastructure and from science to knowledge systems and this talk comes at me being like oh i think i'm starting to understand that better now so uh this is what we are in for you and i in our near future together i'm going to talk about theories of infrastructure um for a little while and what i mean by using this word all the time i'm going to talk a bit about compromise i shouldn't have worn black horrible other person decision which fits inside of theories of change relating to infrastructure i'm going to use examples from administrative activism to talk about these things and then if you don't have a university to be a case study i'm going to talk about partnership and collaboration in uh in research but it i think it uh works in other like NGO and finance and other places too and that what's called an ethic of incommensurability and then i will conclude throughout there are these uh slightly dark and moody pieces of art they're all mine i used to be professional artists and i almost never use that art anymore but i've pulled it out for some reason so uh luckily i've been thinking about a lot of these things uh perhaps intuitively for a really long time and so this this sort of uh dark and moody art uh where where these figures are are changing and and working over and over through many seasons but never completely transforming but also never being um separate uh i think is is dreaming to the talk so there'll be there'll be some art you can ignore it or not you can listen to this like radio if you're all zoomed out so let us start with some ideas of infrastructure so i often use when i talk about infrastructure i often use this quote from Anne Murphy's book the economization of life which is really good and it's about colonialism and the concept of population and it's linked to um control of the colonized and they talk about infrastructure in terms of the way that material supports come to exist not just in terms of buildings and roads and pipes but also bureaucracies and forms and the way funding flows and norms and affect uh and this is what power relations live in and through these material supports so the premise of this talk is infrastructural meaning that um whenever you're trying to change a system you're working in it you're working within it there is no outside of these systems it has existing norms and ways of seeing what it can and cannot discern what it can and cannot imagine what it what makes easy and what flows and what doesn't flow and this is infrastructure right another way to talk about it and always has uh material terms and that's always reproduced in material terms and that means two things number one even when um infrastructures and power relations are dominant they are uneven and have raggedy parts that never quite work properly you know this because you've all met infrastructure before lived in it so there's actually an acute possibility for change so this is in a nutshell my infrastructural theory of change second of all um this idea that infrastructure is is one of the ways power works uh through material forms is that even when you are doing this change because dominant systems are infrastructural you will also be reproducing parts of that infrastructure that shore up those same power relations you're trying to change and this is what i mean by compromise reproducing parts of the system that you don't think are great and are trying to change so what's key to this first part this idea that even when infrastructures are dominant they're also raggedy is that it doesn't support a theory of change or sorry a concept of power where power is a smooth monolith a slick wall that all you can do is throw your soft body against it that would be a bad theory of change right instead uh i follow folks like uh Wayne Yang or sorry la piper son in the third university this is a quote about uh about universities in his book about decolonizing universities and i don't mean here as a university let us decolonize it i mean this janky thing called the university decolonizes which are two very different things so he says instead of even though universities are fundamentally colonial and are very much part of the civilizing mission um and the one right way to know and all these sorts of things because it is an assemblage because it is uh infrastructural it's not monolithic and it's and it's got a lot of machinery always moving around and those bits can always be subverted and are always being subverted to other purposes so we need this because we need a theory of action and a theory of change that accounts for the permeabilities of apparatuses of power right and that even the most colonial institutions can inadvertently not automatically but can uh support decolonizing agendas and i'll talk about this more in a bit but when i was a administrator an executive administrator for a university this was the most helpful theory for helping me think about trying to change power relations when you were in positions of power and privilege extreme positions of power privilege which is why i bring it up a lot so you can make change in places in the infrastructure where it not just where it fails although it does that but also where it has to refresh all the time if you think of like Judith Butler's performativity of gender or um ways that are infrastructure the working and the maintenance and the renewing and the churning those are those are points um for change this is not the theory of change it's not a universal everyone should subscribe to it theory of change but it is a theory of change and it's one i've discovered is very helpful can you guys hear my dog snoring he's over here no we can't hear all good and really fast that our human captioner is back so thank you perfect good it's a very cute snore maybe he'll get louder all right so uh i'm going to talk a bit about compromise now so there is no action without infrastructure and so because of that you will reproduce some parts of the system you are trying to change you must that's how infrastructure works there's no outside of the the infrastructure there's no outside of the system it's collaboration with the ground you stand on and that comes out of Charles Hale's work and Wayne Yang's work and what's nice about thinking about compromise in terms in these terms is that it's against purity politics against the idea of doing action on a clean slate one of the very ubiquitous and significant issues i have usually with students but also with popular and sometimes academic discourses around action and activism whether it's in science in academia or outside is that there's this idea sometimes that you have to have an intention to action pipeline or a relationship between intention action and the deliverable that is devoid of compromise devoid of contamination and that is a very colonial way to think about action because it depends on this idea of terra nullis. so to imagine a clean slate from which to start your action whether it's anti-colonial science or something else is to subscribe to Taryn Dallas the colonizer's dream this is Rowan Colonel's connell's um words it's a sinister proposition for social science for activism for natural science every time you talk about building up something from scratch in a blank space the building blocks of something new right um you're into terra nullis you're into erasure automatically and so the idea of compromise helps us get away um from that sort of position it also helps us understand that you don't get to choose the ground you stand on especially on stolen land indigenous territories if they're not yours those are shitty relations that you've inherited uh and that's where you start from you don't get to start from somewhere else there isn't somewhere else this is the place and that's the basis of your collaboration in the world so it's really important in those terms to understand that when i'm talking about compromise and reproducing parts of the system you're trying to change that's not a bad thing that's the condition of doing the thing right it's not about being caught with your pants down it's not failure before you start it's not selling out it's you know it's the condition for making change here's the direct quote so uh i am going to give some examples of feminist and anti-colonial infrastructural change uh in an example that i don't usually give and that's uh administration my little administrative horses trying to make change out of their little boxes so usually when i give talks like this i usually talk about scientific technologies i've invented scientific protocols i've invented um except that even though i still do those things that's not really where i live anymore in terms of of the way i'm thinking it's not where i park my ethics or my efforts sorry so part of the reason is that when i became an administrator most of the models and strategies and ethics that i had used as a feminist technician or as an anti-colonial scientist didn't work uh into the set of problems that i was dealing with as an administrator and i yeah even when those techniques worked the way they were supposed to so even when sort of uh equality was like kind of on the table and kind of working it didn't address the issues uh even when there were we had rerouted funding to the things that needed to be funding it wasn't addressing relations and it wasn't changing relations right so um that's why i've started to think more infrastructurally so i'm going to talk about my work when i was the associate vice president of research for memorial university a few years ago for a couple of years i was seconded sucked up the pipe from being a professor into being an executive administrator which if you don't know the parlance of executive administration it means when people talk about the university usually in forms of complaint which is legitimate they're talking about my job and other people other executive administrators so i was the man capital t capital m uh for a while and as the associate vice president of research i was basically s second uh i was going to say in command but command is not second in accountability uh to the entire research ecosystem of the university so animal ethics grant services research contracts the policy on research center's which i rewrote so many times intellectual property the technical services uh and staff that make the machines for research labs work um all that sort of stuff so you might wonder okay why did you choose administration as the chosen example of infrastructure and compromise and it's because one of the things i found useful in research is finding extreme but quintessential examples so examples that fit the general gist of things but are so extreme that you can really see what's going on and there are three things that makes administration extreme but quintessential examples of infrastructure in compromise and ethics the first is that when things go wrong they can go very very wrong or when they go right they can go very very right so the stakes are clear and the stakes include thousands and thousands of people right so you have no right to be wrong and that's a very real thing the second thing is that the problems that you encounter in executive administration are mind-fucking when you are working in a large hierarchical institution uh [ __ ] rolls uphill that's a direct quote from Barack Obama actually so there are lots of smart people at a university by the time a problem gets to executive administration anyone below in the hierarchy would have solved solvable problems so you only get unsolvable intractable problems to which there is no good or bad right or wrong solution only slightly better or slightly worse and it can take weeks to eat something to 51 good and 49 crap right so that's where they're like oh okay [ __ ] now what comes in from my revised title like oh that's a problem oh [ __ ] now right these these impossible problems third autonomy is scarce and not really desirable or ethical so very different from being a professor or being a researcher or principal investigator or even from being a graduate student in my experience or postdoc because as executive administrator you represent others and you work for what is best for them including when they are raging jerks including when you disagree with it um and you do work at their behest so because of those three things the maturation and the nuancing of my politics was immense and i don't think even if i had lived three lifetimes as a researcher i think two years in executive administration taught me more and nuanced my politics more so um one of the things you learn boxed heart courses is that you do not have unlimited strategies but the system also offers unanticipated strategies via its structure so this goes again towards the like universities not monolith there's lots of jankety parts the university is also not this like smooth body it's full of janky parts and so i'm going to give you a couple of examples so one of the things that we did is put in place north America's first indigenous data sovereignty contract at the university level what that means is when you're a researcher and you go to work with an indigenous group or an industry group or a community group or even another university there's something in the university's machinery that makes you sign a thing that's called a data transfer agreement it is a contract uh that has to do with intellectual property and this is very very important in universities and it very much is happening regardless of whether you notice it or not because it's our bread and butter so usually what happens is uh if i'm a researcher and i create data regardless of how i created it is mine indigenous sovereign data sovereignty is about how indigenous groups actually need to own control access at all times and possess data that is about them and so what we did is we put inside a contract that said even if you're a researcher actually who's studying indigenous groups or studying with indigenous groups actually the indigenous groups own the data that sounds radical but it really really isn't because that is actually what an industry contract is pretty much all universities have some researchers working with industry at memorial university we're one of the universities in canada that does this the most by percentage and it's usually with oil so it was not unprecedented and precedent is very important in uh i think infrastructural change like like this it's not unprecedented to say actually someone else owns your own data and even if you want to publish you have to check with them first and they have to give it the green light um so that was surprisingly easy infrastructural change so universities usually have three contracts a very industry one a very like researchers have their own um data one and a service one this our university now has four standard contracts and the fourth one is the indigenous data sovereignty contract now there is definitely compromise there so first of all it is a contract that is full of legal legal jargon uh which is not super accessible to everyone but i would say that the real compromise comes in because of conflict uh because of conflicting goods so because we're a university even our industry contract has a loophole for graduate students and so does our indigenous documentary contract this thing happens more often than you think and i only realized this when i was admin that uh advisors often withhold data from their graduate students like often uh and it and it causes obvious problems for graduation and career progression and this sort of stuff so universities have things in place to make sure graduate students can always access their data whether those exercise or not is another conversation but legally almost every university has this anyone that i've worked with and so there's a loophole in the indigenous data sovereignty contract that you can drive a graduate student through which is that even if the indigenous group withholds their information graduate students can still publish their theses or dissertation that is good because graduate students are another group to which universities are beholden and they are a vulnerable group but it is not indigenous data sovereignty and so this is where compromise comes in where we have two conflicting goods um because of the reproduction of different and conflicting parts of the system i'm going to give you a second example and then we'll get off administration second example is one of the things we did was put in what is called the rig policy the research impacting indigenous groups policies so many acronyms which i found horrible at first and then fun by the middle of my time so the this policy uh is basically if you are going to propose not do but propose research with indigenous groups they have to collectively consent to it before you apply for funding or let the ink dry on your proposal that means you can't show up with an indigenous group with funding being like hey we're going to study this thing for a million dollars and the indigenous group is like well we don't really care about that but i guess you have a million dollars so and that happens more often than you think it does so you can at our university and this is unique as are the complaints about it you cannot apply for funding to study an indigenous group or on behalf of indigenous group before you have their collective consent to do so now again this was this is precedented in many ways we have human research ethics which which talks about individual consent so even though collective consent was difficult for folks to wrap their head around and still often is at least the concept of consent is is and robust consent is is common uh in research the second thing is that in Canada if you're in the Canadian research ecosystem we have tcps 2 chapter nine uh which is basically the chapter in the national uh human ethics code that is just for indigenous people it's in there shoehorned like a weird thing it does not fit but there was nowhere else to put it that's my reading um and so it sort of dangles there but there's no infrastructure around it there's no way that the that it gets enforced um there's no way it's checked on there's no way it's part of daily infrastructure daily university research infrastructure and so that's what we did with this rig policy now the compromise is one of them one of the ones that i think is the most significant is that the form of collective consent is uh if you're gonna do research on an indigenous land claim area or covered by an indigenous treaty um or on a reserve um the collective consent has to come from the governing body of that not individual groups or individuals collections of individuals within that but the governing body and that is sovereignty that is a sovereign indigenous sovereignty model right indigenous people governing their own land right and it's the university's recognition of that but the issue is the compromise is and that is good that is unquestionably good but at the same time uh there is always a gap between a governance body indigenous or otherwise and the people that are being governed right and that gap can be very very real and can sometimes be the reason for research so it it isn't there are many models of indigenous sovereignty and national is one of several and that's the one the policy went with so again it's both very very good and also a potential issue at the same time so what these examples taught me in terms of compromise is this concept of incommensurability an ethic of inconvenience not just incommensurability which like in science and and quant it means like things that don't share a measure and can't be compared but uh taken yang and decolonization is not a metaphor and tuck also talks about this in her place and research book with Mackenzie they talk about an ethic of incommensurability about recognizing things that are distinct right conflicting goods and cannot be joined and cannot be conflated and cannot be brought to bear on one another and it brings them into conversation without smooshing them but also without making false dichotomies right the opposite of indigenous sovereignty is not bodily sovereignty or i don't know the opposite of good for graduate students is not bad for indigenous folks right so so these aren't actually dichotomies or opposites or hard lines or you know these sorts of things so it's actually very tricky and hanging out in that ethic can be very tricky but it is i think um this is the ethic that you deal with if you're dealing with infrastructural change so what if you don't have a university if you're like okay fine but i actually could do infrastructural change because i could influence the policy of an entire university what if you don't have that that is fine so i want to talk about uh partnership and collaboration across difference so research partnerships community partnerships with researchers NGOD even industry i suppose so um one of the ways this really came home for me is that i do have i do mostly partnership research mostly community-based research and one of my biggest research projects ongoing and will be for the rest of my career is that i work within the government on plastic monitoring uh of nunatsiavut in a map of it which is the ocean part of nunastiabu which is a the northern inuit land claim in newfoundland and labrador and i have an inuk which is singular for inuit uh partner co-researcher and we are true co-researchers uh we co-design things together we you know all that sort of stuff however one of the things that has become very obvious is that my in a co co-researcher doesn't write academic things or anything although she does make very good tick tocks but so she does do research dissemination but not in not in the written form so no matter how much we talk or direct message or talk on facebook messenger we will never be on the same page nor can we maintain inward are not the same academics and community based learners are not the same but i'm the writer which means no matter what for all written materials it's always going to be my version and there's not a way around that so even in the best versions of partnerships and i think my research with with this person in the group is an excellent partnership it will always be an even and always that even evenness will power will still accrue to the more powerful conventional group which is me and so the question about how to bring folks to the table or on board or that sort of stuff when it's my table and it's my onboard has not actually served me and that research well and it doesn't uh address this sort of compromise issue where where you're reproducing shitty parts of the system in these excellent partnerships so there is this amazing paper that i have found so very useful for this so first of all i want to introduce you to like two dogged virgins approaching this you know horny um as sort of a fetishistic desire to unite i thought it was very fun um so Jones with Jenkins and not not jones and Jenkins but jones with Jenkins which is sort of a a way for their author order and position to to talk about this unevenness talks about how uh the the dominant colonial research ideal of the mutuality of indigenous um and non-indigenous researchers tends to hyphen or tends to soften the differences between them they call it the hyphen in the interest of mutuality stuff gets collapsed together that should be incommensurability so in this progress towards the the social idea of equality or uh radical inclusion the structural power differences as well as other fundamental differences in perspective history knowledge power etc get downplayed in the attempt to have a shared perspective we will not have a shared perspective um that is yeah so this this injunction to listen to the other can turn out very often this is another quote from them quote to be accessed for dominant groups to the thoughts cultures and lives of others i read about this in my book about how a lot of like efforts to do good around indigenous groups often grant non-indigenous people access to indigenous land for non-indigenous goals which is the root of colonialism so again sort of like land relations being subsumed into the infrastructure of colonial land relations so too can partnerships that are very much intending to be the opposite of that this is all about like uh compromising the ground you stand on and that it's already pretty rife so the question is given that dominant infrastructures will keep this unevenness alive even if parts of it change and you will reproduce some of those power dynamics because there is no outside of the system what are some of the ethics of incommensurability that are available for those sorts of relationships so i'm going to give you a few models uh all of which i've been involved with in one way or another so a sovereignty model for a research collaboration with indigenous groups can be that the indigenous group decides the priorities the overarching ethics and goals of the research but then i as the researcher [ __ ] off and do the work and then i bring it back what they asked for and deliberate if it's not what they wanted i you know do this a couple of times um and that's because the work of talking to me all the time and trying to get me on the same page is exhausting and not very fun for them also not necessary if i'm just gonna get some research done for them that they need i do need to turn up regularly in very real ways but i also need to [ __ ] off in very real ways uh and that is yeah that's the recognition of unevenness and sort of owning your place uh in in the reaper and the uneven infrastructural stuff see this is where my brain gets a little mushy another model that i'm engaged in right now is that i'm an administrator for a group so i went and got the grants i parcel out the money but i don't know what they're doing with the money um i'm at home doing or i'm at work also at home doing the chores to make sure that the funds flow and that means reproducing a lot of the colonial administrative university systems um metrics that i have huge problems with but i'm just gathering them and putting them in big piles and narratives that are sometimes fetishistic but they flow through funders like greased lightning and i do that reproduction of the system that i have a problem with i do that kind of compromise so that the greatest good can happen which is that settler government money is flowing to water stewardship in this particular case so that's a very specific form of compromise uh and then if the partners really do have to inform the work because there's no way to do good work without that i turn to infrastructure right this idea of of getting things right into the wheel so that so that the way the infrastructure reproduces itself is more aligned with what i want so that means hiring them many of them so that they can outnumber the other types of researchers so that they can steer the project without having to ask or even have a conversation with me because they're doing the project they make up the project and that involves money to pay them uh so what and these are only some of the models these are not the only models these are just um me coming to understand and maturing into this idea that one of the very often uh promoted forms of indigenous partnership which is this actually does not serve folks well uh and does not have an ethic of incommensurability but these other modes do instead of leaving us with paralysis we're back to jones with Jenkins it suggests hard work not the hard work of chatting it out and getting on the same page um but the work of owning the ground you stand on including your place on stolen land including my place as a diasporic indigenous person accepting the differences and taking on very often the politics of disappointment and ambivalence and what i am calling compromise um so yeah uh and those and those are forms of goodness right and that again is outside the purity model of that goodness is like a pure white shining light no i have some muddy cocktail my metaphor has died but so this is my concluding slide actually my bibliography is my concluding slide so this is how i started uh and this is actually how the title of this talk started because i reached for something handy based on talk that talks i've already given before but uh and i still do uh open science based on on sort of these different techniques of openness and equity and accessibility and environmentally friendly materials but while these solve some of the technical problems that we have in the lab for doing research uh on pollution and indigenous lands they do not solve they do not change land relations and they don't solve any of the more tangly problems they don't scale up into infrastructure and they don't always have a very good ethic of commensurability and so this there we go this set this side this set of this list is basically from la paperson's characteristics of a decolonizing university um and this is much more sort of where i've ended up and using this kind of list as an as an inspiration for thinking about styles of compromise infrastructural change and ethic of incommensability and that is this already exists you do not wait for the decolonial horizon to appear or the feminist horizon to appear to start changing things within those social movements um its mission is decolonization it is strategic it is not theoretical it is boots on the ground strategic making the moves to make things happen um it is vocational i'm going to skip some it's vocational meaning it's based on skills and getting the stuff done and showing people how to get it done so they too can get it done it is unromantic mostly because it is highly problematic so his model and my model was a university super screwed up spaces as most of us are experiencing but still are able to get the work done because it is less this model of a decolonizing university or whatever you want to use in terms of in instead of the university it's not that yang doesn't want to like have a university and then decolonize it like decolonize the noun he's talking about a very problematic noun called the university that is decolonizing right doing the action it is fundamental it is fundamentally productive even though it is also deeply problematic uh and so these sort of politics and this sort of nuance has been serving some of these other projects better um than yeah these other ones again i'm not saying don't do these ones i still do this stuff i still make i'm right now i'm making a an open science ice core uh because we need one uh but i'm trying to find ways to put it into this service on this side instead of staying at this level so that was it that was the last side here's my bibliography um and thank you for your time
2022-01-31 23:30
