Dr. Max Liboiron on building feminist and anticolonial technologies in compromised spaces

Dr. Max Liboiron on building feminist and anticolonial technologies in compromised spaces

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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

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