Counting across worlds (or, how to love a zero)

Indigenous knowledge systems and Western science are incommensurate—they do not share measures of sense or value. This presentation outlines the rocky efforts of two Indigenous researchers to collaborate across incommensurability through an extremely relational form of Western knowledge: statistics. Through their work monitoring plastics, community co-analysis of data challenged many of the premises of environmental science and quantitative analysis, such as what number you start with when you count (not 1!) and how to aggregate numbers into a central figure (not the average!). The case study speaks to the depth of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, the ways commitment can (sometimes!) span significant differences, and if you’re a numbers geek, the beauty of quantitative methods when they start (and fail, and restart) with Land, and love, and fish.

Photo by Nick Hillier on UnsplashAll welcome but plese register to attend.

Professor of Geography at Memorial University

Max Liboiron is a queer Two Spirit scientist and Indigenous STS scholar whose thinking around science is informed by these intersections.

Liboiron directs the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), an interdisciplinary lab known for developing anticolonial research methods and equitable models of collective research. Their work has shaped national policy on plastics and Indigenous research, while also inventing technologies, measures, and protocols for community-based plastics monitoring. Liboiron is the author of the multiple award-winning book Pollution is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021), and co-author of Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power (MIT Press, 2022). They served as the inaugural Associate Vice-President (Indigenous Research) at Memorial, where their team implemented a groundbreaking policy on early-stage, collective consent for Indigenous groups impacted by research. Currently, Liboiron co-directs the IndigeLab Network, which supports Indigenous-led research collectives across Canada, the United States, Nigeria, and Aotearoa.

More about Dr Max Liboiron

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