Against Mutuality, for Infrastructure: A Theory of Change for Research Across Significant Difference
Presented by the UNB Atlantic Canada Studies Centre and STU Sustainability and Environmental Studies program.
A webinar with Dr. Max Liboiron (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
Date: Wednesday, Sept. 16
Time: 4 - 6 p.m.
Location: Teams
About the webinar
When two fundamentally different cultural groups decide to collaborate, how do we deal with the combination of power imbalances and separate knowledge paradigms?
This talk starts from the premise that even with the best skills, ethics, and training, most methods of collaboration assume mutuality, and thus function as a redemptive fantasy of unity rather than addressing structural power imbalances. Drawing on a nine-year collaboration monitoring plastics in Inuit homelands, the talk describes how even with Indigenous co-leadership, Western epistemologies continued to dominate.
Rather than pursuing impossible integration or relying on mutuality, we found uneven success by shifting toward infrastructure: the material supports such as contracts, funding flows, and data ownership, that orient action regardless of intention or even understanding. Rather than hearts and minds (mutuality), this talk argues for a theory of change based in infrastructure.
About Dr. Max Liboiron
Dr. Max Liboiron is a Professor in Geography at Memorial University, where they direct the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR). CLEAR develops feminist and anti-colonial methodologies to study marine plastic pollution.
Liboiron is author of Pollution is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021) and co-author of Discard Studies: Systems, Wasting, and Power (MIT Press, 2022).
