2021 Research Day

Dr. Max Liboiron

Associate Professor of Geography
Memorial University

Director
Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)

Dr. Max Liboiron is a well-known leader in both developing and promoting anticolonial research methods into a wide array of disciplines and spaces. As founder of CLEAR, an interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory whose methods foreground humility and good land 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.

Liboiron’s book, Pollution is Colonialism, to be released by Duke University Press in April 2021, bridges Science and Technology Studies (STS), Indigenous studies, and discard 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 an anticolonial scientific practice associated with Métis concepts of land, ethics, and relations, and demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible, but it is currently being practiced. One reviewer for the book wrote that the text “is at the leading edge of a significant turn in STS towards thinking with settler-colonialism as a structure and terrain and contributes significantly as well to thinking about how ethical principles related to lab science and studies of pollution and shorelines. There are exceedingly few texts of this kind that ask, how might we consider relations with land/waters and science – and still practice ‘good’ science?” 

Dr. Liboiron is an Associate Professor in Geography and is formerly the Associate Vice-President (Indigenous Research) at Memorial University. Liboiron is Métis/Michif (Woodman via Red River) who grew up in Lac la Biche, Treaty 6 territory. Gender pronouns: they/she. Liboiron is pronounced: Lee-Bwah-rohn.