"Synching Justice" by Dr. Max Liboiron

The public keynote for the "Ecologies of Justice: Wasteland, Wastewater, and Human Disposability" symposium. This talk draws on case studies from plastic pollution research and activism that use muddy concepts of justice to show three things: a range of concepts of justice at work in activism and science; how the conflation or combination of some forms of justice can cause harm; and to ground a call for fellow researchers to use a more intentional and systematic approach to evoking models of justice in our work. Liboiron's goal is to offer descriptions and insights about different models of justice and their relationships to one another to increase the sophistication of the ethical orientations of our research, our collaborations, and our fields.
Dr. Max Liboiron (Michif, they/them) develops and promotes anticolonial research methods in a wide array of disciplines and spaces. Their lab, CLEAR, is an interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory whose methods foreground humility and good land relations. Liboiron has influenced national policy on plastics and Indigenous research, invented technologies and protocols for community monitoring of plastics, and is the author of Pollution is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021) and co-author of Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power (MIT Press, 2022). Dr. Liboiron is an Associate Professor in Geography and served as the inaugural Associate Vice-President (Indigenous Research) at Memorial University from 2018-2020.
About the Symposium
"Ecologies of Justice: Wasteland, Wastewater, and Human Disposability" is a two-day symposium featuring a public keynote presentation along with collaborative working sessions among an international group of scholars to advance interdisciplinary research that:
• Recognizes what justice within the scope of environmental humanities research looks like;
• Understands how ecologies of justice and ecologies of injustice are interrelated;
• Deepens our understanding of ecologies discourses across disciplines; and
• Applies ecologies of justice as a possible methodology or influence for their work.
This cross-disciplinary collaboration addresses the problems of disposability and waste as traced in circuits of production and consumption that impact interlocking values of health, social, and environmental relationships. We name this approach “ecologies of justice” to signal how governmental and economic perspectives on waste are connected to cultural imaginaries of the environment. Through the lens of ecologies of justice, we demonstrate how these matters are inexorably co-constitutive in order to establish a practice against regimes of management, surveillance, and enclosure that define safety in terms of exclusion and disposability.
Sponsors: Institute for Humanities Research, Social Transformation Lab, Department of English (Film and Media Studies).