IndigeLab Network
Max Liboiron and Stephanie Carroll are Co-directors of the IndigeLab Network (IN). The Network focuses on how Indigenous-led research collectives work and make change. It supports Indigenous PIs in the usually behind-the-scenes knowledges and methods of bringing Indigenous methodologies and theories of change into the social worlds of labs, studios, portfolios, centres, and other research collectives, especially when they are based in colonial institutions. This project is funded by a SSHRC Partnership grant.
Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)
CLEAR aims to do scientific research and lab-based social relations in a way that foregrounds humility, accountability, and good land relations. From how we choose research questions (and with whom) to how we hire new lab members, our methodologies can be best described as anticolonial; rather than reproducing mastery over nature and access to Indigenous lands for research, we use and create ways to uphold Indigenous self-determination and recognition of relations. The lab has ~ 30 members from a various disciplines and career stages. CLEAR and our methods are highlighted in Pollution is Colonialism(2021) and the CLEAR lab book. This work is funded by a SSHRC Insight grant.
Plastic Pollution Monitoring in Nunatsiavut
The Nunatsiavut Government’s Department of Lands and Natural Resources has partnered with CLEAR to co-create a community-based monitoring program for plastic pollution in water, snow, ice, shorelines, and traditional wild foods. Liz Pijogge is the Nunatsiavut lead on the project and Max Liboiron is the CLEAR lead. Data is owned and controlled by the Nunatsiavut Government and publications occur after community review. This work is currently funded by the Canada-Inuit Nunangat-United Kingdom Arctic Research Program (CINUK), the National Research Council (NRC), POLAR Cananda, The Northern Contaminants Program (NCP), and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC).
Discard Studies
Critical Discard Studies is a relatively young, interdisciplinary field that takes waste and wasting, broadly defined, as its topic of study. The field questions premises of what seems normal or given and analyzes the wider role of society and culture, including social norms, economic systems, forms of labour, ideology, infrastructure and power in definitions of, attitudes toward, behaviours around, and materialities of waste, broadly defined. Liboiron’s new open-access book with co-author Josh Lepawsky, Discard Studies: Systems, Wasting, and Power (2022), argues that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things.
Indigenous Quantitative Methods
This new project seeks to address two areas that have remained separated for some time: Indigenous methodologies on one hand, and quantitative methodologies on the other. The project begins from the premise that as Indigenous Peoples, we already have numeric traditions and capacities and that quantitative research is not antithetical to Indigenous methodologies. Much of the theorization of this project is done collaboratively through an IndigeLab Network Working Group, and draws heavily on our work with the Nunatsiavut Government. In particular, we consider the crucial differences between “population measures” versus measures about those fish over there, the role and status of zeros and nulls in monitoring research and how they differ in community and Western science, and outline some of the methods of participatory statistics and other forms of community-based co-analysis that led us to these insights. This work is supported by an NSERC Discovery Horizons grant and the Killan Foundation.