coe180_liboiron.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Everyone, welcome back to the podcast.

Speaker2: [00:00:30] I might try something little.

Speaker3: [00:00:31] Yeah, I know, you know, I was thinking

Speaker2: [00:00:32] That I need a jingle.

Speaker3: [00:00:34] I was thinking that I always sound exactly the same. Every time I say, welcome back to people, it's the same kind of sing song like, Hey

Speaker2: [00:00:42] Everybody, welcome back.

Speaker3: [00:00:44] Hey, podcast. It's like, really way too high pitched.

Speaker2: [00:00:47] And I don't know.

Speaker3: [00:00:48] It's not quite falsetto, but it's like a little too cutesy. So I'm going to try and change. I don't know, but I don't know what to do. So you have to welcome

Speaker1: [00:00:54] Some angrier and

Speaker2: [00:00:56] More threatening. Ok, well,

Speaker3: [00:00:58] I sound more Thera knows.

Speaker2: [00:00:59] Why am I talking? There are no's that those their nose there knows you call Thanos

Speaker1: [00:01:05] Can't spell their nose without Thanos, as it turns out.

Speaker2: [00:01:08] Well, yeah.

Speaker3: [00:01:09] Well, I did think that actually, I thought it was an interesting choice of of name. I think I would have called it something else.

Speaker2: [00:01:16] Yeah. Apocalypse like my bleep, my bloody blow up or something like that

Speaker1: [00:01:21] Good corporate name. So we have what's going on today in in the News World. Just like no end of shenanigans over the Democratic National Committee, where apparently Jay Inslee and Jay Inslee, for those of you who aren't aware of him, is a candidate. One of the like 75 candidates running for the Democratic nomination, and he's the only candidate who really has made climate change, is like he's a single issue climate change candidate.

Speaker3: [00:01:46] I heard I heard him give his pitch. Yeah, his little stump speech, such as it is now and he's a governor, right?

Speaker1: [00:01:52] So governor of Washington and the Democratic National Committee sent him, he and I think Elizabeth Warren put in a request to the Democratic National Committee to have a debate focused on climate to give this issue higher

Speaker2: [00:02:03] Prominence because

Speaker1: [00:02:05] He proposed it along with, I believe, Elizabeth Warren. And there was the response they got, and this went on on Twitter this morning.

Speaker2: [00:02:12] Well, wait, let me guess. Fuck you guys. Yeah, basically, it was like literally like a middle.

Speaker1: [00:02:16] Not only I huge like, listen to this. Not only did they say, no, we are not going to host that climate debate, but if you participate in anyone else's climate debate, you're cut off from our debates.

Speaker2: [00:02:29] Oh, like totally.

Speaker3: [00:02:30] How is that even possible?

Speaker1: [00:02:32] I don't know.

Speaker2: [00:02:33] And then it's not allowed

Speaker3: [00:02:33] To debate some rando at some school someplace.

Speaker1: [00:02:36] This is on the heels of frontrunner Biden. Yeah, it came out yesterday that part of his climate plan had been cut and pasted from some fossil fuel industry lobbyists.

Speaker2: [00:02:46] Oh, nice. So that'll go, Joe. Good job, Joe. So my question is you give two

Speaker3: [00:02:51] Shits about Joe Biden. How can he possibly be the frontrunner? Have you heard the man speak? He's like the most uninspiring.

Speaker2: [00:02:58] Oh yeah, like

Speaker3: [00:02:59] Drone of a politician.

Speaker2: [00:03:01] Here's my advice getting excited.

Speaker1: [00:03:03] Hi, my name is Joe Biden. I'm a man who's chaired a lot of meetings. If you're looking for my qualifications are I'm white,

Speaker2: [00:03:12] I'm old and I operate.

Speaker3: [00:03:14] Yeah, and I only pat women on the head. I never hugged

Speaker2: [00:03:17] Them from behind and I give that good shoulder rub. Ok, creepy. I just don't get. But I'm wondering, it's like,

Speaker3: [00:03:24] Sorry listeners who are into Joe, maybe even send us an email about why. I mean, is he the most heinous human in the world? Of course not, but I just don't understand how he inspires any kind of enthusiasm. But apparently they say

Speaker2: [00:03:39] They

Speaker3: [00:03:40] Say he's a frontrunner. Do we believe

Speaker2: [00:03:41] That?

Speaker1: [00:03:42] I think he's a frontrunner by virtue of the fact that he has 30 percent of the vote and you have twenty five other people splitting the other 70 percent. And it's kind of like the Trump phenomenon, though, too.

Speaker2: [00:03:52] I mean, if he's kind of

Speaker1: [00:03:53] Alive, if the idiot Republicans had gotten their act together earlier to, you know, winnow their field down to like two or three people, Trump probably wouldn't have been their nominee. And I'm afraid the Democrats will, because of their own sense of self-importance, will not be reasonable about this two or the people who are likely to drop out or the kind of the people you'd actually want in there at the end anyway. So but I'm just saying like, well, we get it,

Speaker3: [00:04:17] So you wouldn't want Inslee to drop out, but then a lot of folks wouldn't want Kamala Harris to drop out.

Speaker2: [00:04:22] You know, yeah, no. I get it for Bernie.

Speaker3: [00:04:24] Yeah, I mean, it's hard. It's actually hard kind of to decide. Yeah, if only we could do a fusion of some of their aspects and create a super super dem.

Speaker1: [00:04:35] Yeah. And I don't think of myself as being a single issue voter in that way. But because I think it's intersectional struggle all the way to change this civilization. But I think that this would be a great time neo not to have a white man running.

Speaker2: [00:04:49] So I think that that's generally maybe coming from a good place. But I I don't think we

Speaker1: [00:04:53] Need them right now, and we certainly don't need Joe Biden. And what disturbs me the most is just, you know, I like to live in my bubble of saying the majority of Americans, you know, are smart and they understand climate change. They're being lied to or they would understand climate change if they weren't being actively misinformed and lied to by propagandists. And then this sort of stuff happens and you're like, even the supposedly left wing party is totally burying their head in the sand going into the election. They're their top candidate so far is obviously a hack. In a stooge, sorry, Biden supporters, but I feel like, you know, he's got to prove us wrong on that and he hasn't yet. And you know, so what? You know what? I don't know what to do. Well, is to be done.

Speaker2: [00:05:36] That's a lot like three W's.

Speaker1: [00:05:38] Yeah, I'm sorry. And I made a weird mouth sounds. So anyway, that was this weird thing that was animating me.

Speaker2: [00:05:43] Ok, so what's on? Yeah, that's on your mind. So many.

Speaker3: [00:05:46] Well, let's see what is on my mind. Well, I was going to ask you about this concept of writing a memoir to yourself or for yourself. So bizarre. Kind of. It's like the diary you never kept in retrospective. It's a retrospective, but it's not meant to be consumed by anyone because it'd be too embarrassing to have anyone read it. You wouldn't want anyone to read it while you're alive, necessarily. And plus, no one would be interested.

Speaker1: [00:06:15] You mean you want to write a memoir to be posthumously published?

Speaker3: [00:06:19] No, I wouldn't want anyone to read it when I'm dead, either.

Speaker1: [00:06:23] So you're writing it just

Speaker3: [00:06:24] To just to remember that because I was so I never kept while I did for a minute, but I didn't really keep a diary very consistently. And so when I get old and decrepit of mind, I might want to be able to remember some things.

Speaker2: [00:06:37] I should write it. I should turn out young.

Speaker1: [00:06:40] Sorry, that's how I see it. All right. You are. Well, my mind has been better, but I think yours is fine. Ok. I mean, do it for sure. Why not? I mean, if it's something that's meaningful as a project, yeah, that seems like a good thing to do. Try to put things in order. Get some clarity.

Speaker2: [00:07:00] Maybe do some

Speaker1: [00:07:01] Remembering, do some remembering. I think when you do start to try to write things

Speaker3: [00:07:05] You kind of wanted to, I wanted to do. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Some stuff would come back if you sort of put yourself in the place and then you remember some of the little details. I mean, obviously there's some things that one remembers and some things that you don't. And most of my life has been forgotten. Like most of us, I think you actually don't remember ninety nine point nine percent of it, right? But the little tiny point one percent that you do remember, maybe you want to write it down.

Speaker2: [00:07:29] I don't know. You know, the part I and

Speaker3: [00:07:30] Maybe no one would ever. Maybe you yourself never even read it, but you have it recorded somehow.

Speaker1: [00:07:35] You know the part that I to remember. I want to remember waiting in line at the DMV.

Speaker2: [00:07:40] That's the Department

Speaker1: [00:07:41] Of Motor Vehicles. For those of you who are non-American

Speaker2: [00:07:44] Listeners, I mean,

Speaker3: [00:07:44] I do actually remember standing in line here at the DMV here in Texas, where in Houston I remember I only had to do it once in the 10 years that we've been here. But one thing I remember very vividly exactly the layout of it, and I think I kind of

Speaker2: [00:07:58] Know where it is that your first chapter of the

Speaker3: [00:08:01] Dmv will be my first chapter. It's going to be riveting.

Speaker2: [00:08:04] But you

Speaker3: [00:08:04] Know, one thing I did appreciate about the DMV is the most diverse place

Speaker2: [00:08:09] In the city. Of course everyone is there.

Speaker3: [00:08:11] Everyone is there like you look around and there are like, you know, fuzzy white men in suits and they're circus clowns, you know, Latino guys who you know have been working outside. You got circus

Speaker2: [00:08:25] Clowns, great dancers,

Speaker3: [00:08:27] You got women, you got men, you got people. The one thing that you maybe don't have is you don't have a full range of ages because they'll, you know, maybe have some little babies who are with people. But then I guess you'd have to be 16. So maybe you don't have like teenagers there.

Speaker2: [00:08:41] You have old people like pretty old

Speaker1: [00:08:43] People and you don't know like how many of the people in trench coats are actually two small people, like two children on top of each other, shoulders with a hat on top, like in the little rascals.

Speaker2: [00:08:53] Yeah, that could

Speaker1: [00:08:53] Just say, I'm saying, like you probably have seen in children DMV, you never know. With that level of vivid memory, I don't see what's going to hold you back. I mean, things are coming back, and maybe some of them will be grand adventures. And maybe some of them will be just, you know, I really want to remember what it was like to wait for two hours in line.

Speaker2: [00:09:13] It's all gold. It's memoir gold

Speaker3: [00:09:15] Today. Well, there you go. Impressions. Little impressions left on the gray matter. Little little dents in the brain that somehow got recorded.

Speaker1: [00:09:24] I had one other thought, OK, well, I mean, unless you want to talk more about the memoir,

Speaker2: [00:09:29] No, I

Speaker3: [00:09:29] Don't really have. It's really it's very speculative and I don't know. I don't have anything more to say about it, except that I wondered what you thought of it as an idea. And you sound a little bit supportive, but not too supportive as long as it doesn't conflict with any other projects.

Speaker1: [00:09:43] We want to see pages.

Speaker2: [00:09:44] I know that's the thing.

Speaker3: [00:09:47] See, if you really wrote the really the raw stuff like the really real stuff, then you wouldn't want anyone to read it.

Speaker2: [00:09:54] I think, right?

Speaker3: [00:09:54] Because it'd be too intimate. It'd be like a diary.

Speaker1: [00:09:56] The sad thing is, I think I can't imagine a writing project that doesn't have publishing attached to it because I have so little time to write. When I write, it's always to write something that's going for an audience somewhere.

Speaker2: [00:10:08] But don't you

Speaker3: [00:10:09] Think that's just narcissism?

Speaker1: [00:10:10] Yeah, because, well, the audiences

Speaker2: [00:10:11] Are like,

Speaker3: [00:10:12] Oh, if I'm going to if I'm going to read, if I'm going to write it, it must be read. People must consume.

Speaker1: [00:10:16] Well, it's also it's narcissism, but it's also kind of the commodity logic of academia, which is like, if you're. To write something by God, you better publish it, because if it just languishes somewhere, it's not going to ever happen, man. Like if you write a memoir in the forest and no one's around, did

Speaker3: [00:10:32] It and the squirrels eat your pages? Did it ever

Speaker1: [00:10:34] Happen? Big problem.

Speaker3: [00:10:36] The squirrels are like pooping out your life or on the forest floor.

Speaker2: [00:10:39] You know whatever

Speaker1: [00:10:40] Happened. You know why more people don't write memoirs in the forest because of the fucking squirrels, man, they're all over that shit. And the badgers? Yeah. And the and the monkey did.

Speaker3: [00:10:48] Or maybe make it into a little nest or something, but they would surely shred it. But in either case. So that's why it would be not a good idea to write in the forest. I think once you had some four walls around you like a little cabin or something.

Speaker1: [00:11:00] I had one other thing to say this is just because we had talked about this this week and I had caught myself maybe more than often saying the phrase in the pipeline not unrelated to academic commodities, right? You know, Oh, I got this in the pipeline or this in the pipeline. And now when I say it, I catch myself always and I'm going, Ha ha ha. Yeah, of course. Bad metaphor, but it's so deeply ingrained. I keep coming back to this stupid metaphor again. So what I wanted to put forth to our listenership is just to say, like, can we come up with like three or four different metaphors that are that are just as good, that say the same thing, that don't use the word pipe?

Speaker2: [00:11:34] Uh. And so well,

Speaker3: [00:11:36] Can I just I want to remind you that the reason that you had this epiphany, this little light bulb moment about the metaphor that you've been using is because of our conversation with Max. Oh yeah, because Max said a couple of times, she said, like, you got to look up the pipe like look up the pipeline to see where where the toxicity is coming from, to see where the plastics are coming from. And so that kind of that image of looking up the pipeline or up the pipe is really important, but it did draw attention to this pipeline.

Speaker2: [00:12:04] I mean, OK, what

Speaker1: [00:12:06] She was saying is slightly different metaphor.

Speaker2: [00:12:07] No, I like that.

Speaker3: [00:12:08] I know. But look, I think looking up the pipe is a really good takeaway. Anyway, the listeners will get to hear that. And in a second, because I think

Speaker2: [00:12:15] That happens a couple we introduce or when we finally

Speaker3: [00:12:17] Do get to Max, who is coming,

Speaker2: [00:12:19] Actually. And here's what I

Speaker3: [00:12:21] Yeah, the pipeline. Well, all right. I'll listen to yours, but I have another one that's kind of boring. It's kind of boring, but it already exists. And I think I use this instead of pipeline because I don't say pipeline. I never say that, OK? I say if I was talking about that, I'd say I have x y z in the works.

Speaker2: [00:12:37] Yeah, that's

Speaker3: [00:12:38] Fine in the works. It's boring, but it's clear.

Speaker1: [00:12:40] Yeah, listen, this may be the limits of my own masculinist imaginary. Oh no, I totally. I totally accept that.

Speaker2: [00:12:47] But here's Morrissey. Go, go.

Speaker1: [00:12:51] Here's my thought. How about in the dance line?

Speaker2: [00:12:56] That's that's it. You give

Speaker1: [00:12:57] Me twenty dollars if I use in the dance line in in

Speaker2: [00:13:00] A really weird academic conversation. That's really weird. Ok? Why? Ok, why is it? Because it immediately. Why is this just one of

Speaker1: [00:13:10] Those one of those dance lines where people are like doing a conga line through a

Speaker2: [00:13:13] Party or something? Oh, is that

Speaker3: [00:13:14] What you see? I see, like square dancing or like some kind of folk dancing, like Russian folk dancing or Scottish folk dancing where people are lined up facing each other. And then they go grab their partners or like our country, western dancing like to stepping. I think that they get

Speaker2: [00:13:28] Into a line. That's what I think of a lot better.

Speaker3: [00:13:31] Well, that's your conga line is a cool idea, but that's I didn't even go there. I imagine these two lines next in the dance line now. Well, how

Speaker2: [00:13:38] Come what doesn't it? What's this

Speaker3: [00:13:40] Dance thing? You're not like a dance dancer?

Speaker2: [00:13:43] I'm not a dancer. I mean,

Speaker3: [00:13:44] You do dance and you dance well, but you're not a dancer.

Speaker1: [00:13:46] Maybe this isn't the place that is close that I've become a bit of a river dance enthusiast of late, and I'm hoping to do a little

Speaker2: [00:13:54] Dance, right? That's got it.

Speaker3: [00:13:56] That Scottish dancing, which I can't remember the name of it is super fun.

Speaker1: [00:13:59] Remember that minute where river dance is like the biggest thing? I don't know that it was like for about 30 seconds. Anyway, tell me yours. And then we got to introduce our guest.

Speaker3: [00:14:06] I don't know if I have

Speaker2: [00:14:08] One in the works was

Speaker3: [00:14:09] In the works is that's a common one. I have to think about what my what my metaphor would be. How about you? Here's another one. This is not new, but like something could be brewing. That's kind of nice. Like a coffee

Speaker2: [00:14:20] Thing. Yeah, or a stew? I don't know.

Speaker1: [00:14:23] I've got I've got three projects doing right now. I like that. I got them in the pressure cooker.

Speaker3: [00:14:28] You have like these word dogs, too. It's like, I've got, you know, I've got a dog for that. Do you do that like when you have a project to do? Sometimes I go and make the word doc and give it some kind of working name so that it's real. It's like actually realized if it exists somewhere in a folder on my

Speaker2: [00:14:44] Screen, that's all it is. All you have to do first step is it's for

Speaker1: [00:14:48] Those of you facing writer's block, just

Speaker2: [00:14:50] Start, fucking start the document, start a lot

Speaker1: [00:14:52] Of folders, first of all, and then in those folders start a lot.

Speaker3: [00:14:55] That's what I do. I make a folder and then, now and then I put a document into it.

Speaker1: [00:14:59] That's I know it's like the monkeys typing Shakespeare like an infinite number of monkeys. One of them will read Shakespeare, like if you create an infinite number of folders and blank documents, one of them will eventually become the one that you need almost without further intervention on your part.

Speaker3: [00:15:15] I'm going to think about this pipeline because I get I get the linearity of it is one of the pieces because you said dance line, but I'm not. Sure, if it has to have a linear, but I'm going to think about it.

Speaker2: [00:15:24] Ok, let's start to

Speaker1: [00:15:25] Think about post commodified logic for talking about the

Speaker2: [00:15:27] Product that's

Speaker3: [00:15:28] Maybe more like Hetero Punto. That's not

Speaker2: [00:15:31] Exactly a

Speaker1: [00:15:32] Lot. Not so tailoring at Fortis.

Speaker2: [00:15:34] Exactly. Right? Yeah. Ok. Ok.

Speaker1: [00:15:36] On that note, I'm sorry for

Speaker3: [00:15:38] All made up a new world. It's called Hetero Punto.

Speaker1: [00:15:40] That's actually I like it.

Speaker2: [00:15:42] And like many points, yeah, hetero kind of

Speaker3: [00:15:44] Rhizomes, but not boring

Speaker1: [00:15:46] Like that. But it also sounds like, you know, there's going to be a homo punch response to it pretty soon

Speaker2: [00:15:51] That we're going to have already been living in

Speaker3: [00:15:53] Homo punctuality, our entire lives.

Speaker2: [00:15:56] That's what we don't realize anyhow.

Speaker1: [00:15:58] Ok, so

Speaker2: [00:15:59] Just don't be

Speaker3: [00:15:59] Afraid to look

Speaker2: [00:16:00] Up the pipe. So for

Speaker1: [00:16:02] Those listeners who are hoping to

Speaker2: [00:16:04] Hear just our

Speaker1: [00:16:05] Guest and are tired of all the settler nonsense, we sympathize and we will now move to our wonderful guest. Dr. Max Leveron

Speaker2: [00:16:15] Finally got it.

Speaker1: [00:16:16] Memorial University Newfoundland, who runs the Clear Lab, which is a wonderful experimental anti-colonial feminist lab doing amazing work both in terms of their content of marine plastic pollution, as well as the methods they're innovating. And I think she's a force to be reckoned with in all the good senses of that term. Great to talk to her, I thought, and super generous with her time, as well as with her ideas. And we've got a link in the show notes to her lab's web page, which we would totally encourage you to go to read, appreciate and also cite.

Speaker3: [00:16:52] Because politics of citation.

Speaker1: [00:16:55] It's all about being good relations and being good relations means acknowledging the people who've inspired you. So I want to just acknowledge Dr Max for inspiring me. It was great. I really enjoyed the conversation and I think people are going to are going to love this one. I agree when I add anything to it.

Speaker3: [00:17:09] No, I like Dr Max is a good name too. That's cool.

Speaker1: [00:17:13] And you get to meet

Speaker2: [00:17:14] Grandmother, grandmother,

Speaker1: [00:17:15] Grandmother, who's her awesome dog who makes makes a guest appearance. I love

Speaker3: [00:17:19] Your mother. I'd like to have grandmother and shadow have a meeting somewhere, somewhere in the middle,

Speaker1: [00:17:25] Somewhere between Nana and Nanoscale Dog and

Speaker2: [00:17:28] The black,

Speaker3: [00:17:29] All black dogs with cute faces. And so that's

Speaker2: [00:17:32] Why they need to.

Speaker1: [00:17:33] You need look no further than this episode's image to find the find grandmother highly respected place. So, so

Speaker3: [00:17:40] Many take it away. This is brilliant. You're going to like it and we say, Go Max. Hey, there, cultures of energy, folk were really glad to have you back on the line with us and we are very happy to be on the line from Newfoundland.

Speaker2: [00:18:12] I believe Max, I again said again, actually boron. Very nice.

Speaker1: [00:18:20] Very good. In my best. Pretty good digging

Speaker2: [00:18:22] Deep on this. Pretty good for a Dominic. Ok, so we

Speaker3: [00:18:25] Were just we were just talking with Max about French surnames and pronunciation and the fancy ification of the Francophone world. And so on that note, we're going to let Dominique

Speaker2: [00:18:37] Boyer begin our

Speaker1: [00:18:38] Oh yes, I'll do my best to get started, Max. It's such a thrill to talk to you because, you know, over the past couple of years, it's more and more people are talking about your work and recommending your scholarship and being inspired by it. And I thought, there's a lot of places to start your prolific. You're involved in a lot of really fascinating projects, but it seems that the center of many of them is your civic laboratory for Environmental Action Research, or clear is the acronym. And I understand that, you know, the work here is both about, if you will, the content, but also about the method and particularly about developing anti-colonial and feminist methodologies for community and collaborative research. And so I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about the philosophy behind your lab and then kind of how it got started.

Speaker4: [00:19:24] Sure. Well, yeah, you're right. The lab is sort of the center of, you know, the focus of a bunch of my practices. It's where I do plastic research, but it's also a giant incubator, like you said, for these methods. So I have an elder who does a lot of teaching for me. His name's Rich Voya. And he said his mom always said that taking a chocolate bar out of your back pocket is a prayer. Yeah, and I heard that story many times before I understood what it means, and I probably honestly still don't understand what it means. But what I think at this moment, what it means is that every action that you do is is a prayer, and a prayer is our ways of honoring and expressing our relations to other things. And you can do that better or worse, more in obligation with what you should be doing or less an obligation with what you should be doing. And so the lab clears this space where we try and take out chocolate bars. Real good. Everything we do, ordering supplies, hiring people, not hiring other people. How we put out job ads, how we pay people, we always pay people these sorts of things. We always try and make sure that we are doing things as good as good in relation as we possibly can. And so we spend a lot of time talking about like, well, what? What is a good relation like, what would characterize that? And then once we've got that figured out as we continue to figure out that out, like every Tuesday, what does that actually look like when you have to do scientific work like plastic pollution research? So over many years, the sort of characteristics we've come up with in this moment are the two that I talk about.

Speaker4: [00:20:57] The most, I guess, are equity and humility as things that characterize good relations where equity is different than equality. Equality means you treat everything the same. It's a very mathematical, standardized relation and a lot of people. And that's important if people are very uneven. But equity recognizes that people start from very different and even locations. And so if you treat them all the same, that might actually be produce relations you don't want to. So we don't treat everyone the same in the lab. Junior scholars get more time. Senior scholars get less time to talk, right? This sort of stuff. And then humility. So humility. I always have to do teachings for people coming new into the lab about the difference between humility and modesty, because a lot of folks in academia and in professional science are taught about modesty, but not humility. Modesty means you don't talk about how damn awesome you are, because that might make people, other people seem less awesome. You might elevate yourself artificially above them, or even for real above them, but you should just be so modest that you don't need that.

Speaker4: [00:21:56] That's very Christian. Yeah, and people come by it, honestly. And yet that makes a lot of sense. But humility is different. The way it was taught to me is that humility means that you're connected to all these other people and beings and places and things you don't even know about or occur to you how those pipes get the water from whether it's going into you so that you can be 80 percent water. You know, the janitorial staff, whoever's looking after your kids or your dogs or your classroom or whatever it lets you be wherever you are, whatever it is that's making these sound, come into your ears right now, like that's your part of all of that. You're related to all of that differently and then evenly. But if you say how great you are, you have accidentally cut out all those relations. So you don't say how great you are, you seeing how great we are or how great all this is, and you acknowledge how whatever so great is because of all that stuff. So then the trick is like, OK, equity, humility. A few other things too. Ok, you got to kill a fish now. Or maybe you don't, but anyway, you need to get a sample. How are you going to do that with equity and humility? And that is the research question of the lab, basically.

Speaker3: [00:22:57] That's amazing. So do you have the answer to that or is that kind of a work in? Progress the the taking of the fish life in order to acquire the sample,

Speaker4: [00:23:06] There is no answer to our only prayers. Right. There's only like always trying to be in relation. So at this moment in the lab and the question of, say, killing a fish, which is the example we do kill, we did float the sort of vegan feminist ethos of not killing. But we've got a lot of indigenous people in the lab, and killing isn't a bad relation. You can kill better or worse. But you know, it's a normal part of relations. So we kill for food, not for science. So what that means is that we either eat our samples or we don't gather them. Ok, yeah. So I don't work on plankton. I don't know how to eat a plankton. And I don't know how to bring plankton into my into my food world very concretely. I'm sure I could figure it out in the lab could figure it out. But right now, we don't do science on plankton or seagulls. And sometimes when we get a sample, we get someone else's eaten it. So we get gifted a lot of guts from animals. Other people have hunted or fished. Ok. We also, for instance, don't. There's a very popular way of doing plastic science where it's like I'm bivalves, like mussels or clams, where you can't really like dissect a muscle or a clam for its gastrointestinal tract because it doesn't have one or not the one that is discrete. So you dissolve it in potassium hydroxide. This like intensely basic thing and it dissolves the muscle and the and the the little gooey parts and the shell. And then what's left is fat a little bit fat in the plastics. It's all very tidy, but no one gets to eat in that scenario. So we can't study muscle either. Yeah. So that's sort of that's one example among many, many of sort of how our research subjects and approaches or sort of co constituted through these values. Mm hmm.

Speaker3: [00:24:48] I mean, I love the idea of kind of incorporating the quote unquote the into the kind of scientific project, like incorporating the body of the fish into your own bodies as researchers, as a kind of continuation of that kinship or that connectivity or that relational entity that you're that you're performing and enacting in the lab. And I have to say, the clear lab sounds like a very nice place sitting down here

Speaker2: [00:25:10] In Trump's hate filled America.

Speaker4: [00:25:12] Well, we do eat fish a lot together, which is pretty nice. Yeah, yeah. So actually, and one of the things that you just touched on is it not only sort of being said brings the body of the fish into the body of the lab, but our literally our own bodies. But also it sort of reinforces a type of accountability that science doesn't fully do is that we research our own food webs. There's not a separate object out there that we're researching in the sort of benevolent way like that's that's our food that can that the contaminants is is in our food web. And so we're accountable to our families and our communities, as well as as other folks who eat fish.

Speaker3: [00:25:49] Mm hmm. So I I have a question and this wasn't one that I had expected to ask, but because of what you brought up in terms of the practice of modesty and humility or the difference between modesty and humility, right? Humility being the kind of normative academic performance of, oh, you know, gosh, I'm not that brilliant kind of almost and sometimes false

Speaker4: [00:26:09] Humility, right? Yeah. Well, false modesty well, was mostly actually carried out by women in academia.

Speaker3: [00:26:15] So what I want, so this is what I wanted to ask you. So one of the challenges that I find in the classroom pedagogically often is that there's a certain gendering of vocal performance in particular, right? This kind of I find that there are a lot of female people, women, young women, older women who are very anxious or, I don't know, overly modest or feeling some sort of humility. I'm not sure what to call it, but well, are uncomfortable speaking as much as the male counterparts. I think you know what I'm talking about. This is like old school, you know, sort of sexism, you know, being recapitulated in the classroom. So how do you? Is there a way in do you talk explicitly about this, you know, in your lab with your group? Because I feel like there's there's possibly a risk there too of I don't know of inhabiting that practice. How do you get around that or work with that?

Speaker4: [00:27:12] So first of all, the vast majority of the people in the lab are women. We have more people of color, indigenous and black folks in our lab than other folks in our faculty. So just like so first of all, you're not outnumbered and a lot of classrooms, I think women are often outnumbered, at least in science and some of the places where I hang out. So that helps. But we do something called, well, we call it round robin. Other people sometimes call it talking circles. There's a bunch of different names for it, but basically and I do this in my classroom, too. Even if the classroom has 200 people in it, you basically just go one at a time. So if you're like, OK, guys, what did you think of the reading? Ok, guys, what do you think about killing fish? How should we do that humbly? You go one at a time and everyone gets their turn to talk and anyone's allowed to pass. And I've taught classes where for an entire semester that one person will pass. But that also means they speak every class. And they are part of the class and they are part of the conversation, even if they pass because it's a choice.

Speaker4: [00:28:05] And what happens at least in the lab and usually in my classroom or that's not true, always in my classrooms is that people who wouldn't normally talk talk because it's their turn. They can see it coming. They have time to think. Usually what happens is the first person asks to pass and then we come back to them because like, it's hard to think immediately. The other thing is, as people, as people watch people who don't normally talk talk, it turns out they agree with them. So they'll get reinforced. And if someone like and this doesn't happen in the lab, but it does happen in classrooms, if someone's out of line and they're like, Well, I don't know something ignorant about gender or something like that or something racist. Every single person after them will correct them and they will be outnumbered. So, so that's that's sort of it's just a very simple facilitation technique, and we only use facilitation techniques in the lab. We don't use like leadership techniques or individualized sort of greatness techniques. They're all facilitation. And that's a very concrete one to address that

Speaker3: [00:28:59] Because you're right, that's great. So so here is I did want to bring up a piece and that is the the piece that you have co-authored in Catalyst and and in this piece, you collectively talk about author order that is the way in which or the order in which authors are ordered on the, you know, the byline for any article and you discuss these different academic, scientific sort of stem norms about how that ordering happens and that you in your lab and in your work more broadly have really conservatively taken up different sets of values for creating author order, consensus care work and recognition of social location. So we've touched upon some of this over the last few minutes, including the question of equity versus equality and equality, not recognizing the uneven position from which people originate right or come from. But I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about this catalyst piece, how you came to it collectively and how you made decisions about these priorities and the significance, because I think this is really important the significance of prioritizing authors placement differently.

Speaker4: [00:30:12] Sure. So usually when I talk about this, I talk about scientific papers. But recently, two lab members have shot a documentary about the lab, so I'm going to talk about film credits as well. So I think everyone has arrived in the lab with some sort of experience of being told where your value is in some form of publication, either by not being on it, particularly undergrads. They were like data grunts or you just like, come to your work one day and your name is somewhere and you just notice what you're valued. And of course, for some of us, you're always valued less than you think you should be. And for the other ones, we think we're exactly where we should be, which is near the top. And again, that's very gendered. Yeah. So so what we do, first of all, consensus that means I mean, so these take like a gazillion meetings and everyone has to be there. And sometimes it's exhausting, but it's also very good. And the reason we do everyone in the lab, even if they're not on the paper, is so that people can witness and testify both to power relations like just in case, because I am the boss of the lab, it's not horizontal. I am the boss. And sometimes I get bossy and other people can hold me accountable. Actually, not sometimes I am a very bossy person. It's part of my charisma, and Thomas knows no one else has told me that, though, so we shall see. So, so anyway, it holds me accountable and it holds other people, but also what tends to happen.

Speaker4: [00:31:29] That's why I put that in place. But the unanticipated effect of that is the testimony part and the witnessing part where people are like, here, here's who's on the paper and someone else will be like, No, Jess is on that paper. I saw her working on it and she was like, Oh, I was just filling in because so-and-so is sick. You're like, Well, that means you're on the paper. And she's, Oh, I guess it is right or oh yeah, someone will be talking about like, Oh, that reference librarian, they were really helpful. They might be on the paper. Oh, yeah, right? So people start getting included, who wouldn't normally be included through that process? And then the second thing you said was we also think about what gets valued. So in this in this film, for example, so usually the first thing in the film is like the producer and stuff like that. But we've decided that the first thing in the film should be featuring and the first thing we decide. The most important feature we thought of in the film was actually the landscape. So the first being featured in these credits featuring the island of Newfoundland and then like and then something else. And then there's a human, and then there's another human, and then there's another non-human. Right? So when you watch the one day that the documentary will come out, hopefully the next year and you will see that the landscape and the weather and the wind hitting the microphone are major major influencing factors in that. And yeah, it is. They are the greatest feature.

Speaker1: [00:32:53] That's wonderful. And I can't wait to watch the documentary to

Speaker3: [00:32:56] Have a name yet,

Speaker4: [00:32:57] Max. It has a name. The name is.

Speaker3: [00:33:00] Oh, All right, that's my ball.

Speaker4: [00:33:03] Yeah, and the the producer directors are Noah Hunton and Taylor Hess, and they were they're actually from New York City and they called me up one day. Noah particularly called me one day, and it's all going to come to the lab and do a documentary. And I was like, Nah, I'm sorry, but we don't like anthropologists who come and take our culture and leave. You think it's really rude? There's a meeting on Vine Gloria Jr. And so I said, you have to become full lap members. You have to cut fish with the rest of us. You have to show up to lab meetings. You have to. This has to be you have to be accountable the way we're all accountable. And so they've been for about a year. They've been full lab members and they're great lab members. So they're producing this film.

Speaker2: [00:33:41] Yeah, that's excellent. That's a good story.

Speaker1: [00:33:43] I mean, I think we could probably spend a whole hour just talking about the methods and protocols of the lab because they're fascinating and, you know, kind of revolutionary infrastructure in their own right for changing things in science, which is deeply needed. I wanted to to say, though, that, you know, also the content of the research is fascinating. And so I wanted to ask in terms of the the marine plastic pollution research that you're doing. How do you feel that these place based deep ethical scientific protocols that you're developing? How do they how do they change the kinds of research questions that you might ask and maybe also the findings?

Speaker4: [00:34:16] Well, so it's not that we had these great lab ideas and then went out and did plastics that I arrived here being a plastics expert and was like, OK, I'm ready to go to work. And then I hit and then Newfoundland hit me in the face right? Right with its Newfoundland ness, which often means wind and ice and rocks and other things. So one of the first things I tried to do was was a shoreline study, which just means you go to a shoreline and you see if there are plastics. And I was going to use my universal, you know, there's a universal protocol that Noah in the United States and the United States or United Nations Environmental Program put together. And I know it well. I've been trained on it and I went to do it and I couldn't because it assumed sand. And there is no sand in Newfoundland, my friend. Not in this part of it. It's all rock, big, black, gothic, pointy. Very hard rocks. Well, crashing waves and like angry seagulls. So I couldn't do the protocol and I was like, huh? Universal things don't work in Newfoundland, and many Newfoundlanders know this.

Speaker4: [00:35:13] You know, electricity roads are very saleable. And then even worse in Labrador, which is the northern part of the province. So, so some of this this idea of place baseness the types of research questions that mattered here. It's not actually a reach. A lot of people give me more credit, I think, than is due. But I think if you come to Newfoundland and you try and do something, the place here is so strong that it would affect anyone's research questions. So for instance, fish here, especially in the island of Newfoundland, it's cod is people sing about it. Little baby kids, you know the different know how to identify cod from other forms of fish. You know, it's I'll be walking down the street and it's cod season. Someone will be like, Oh, Max, have some cod and they'll pass me some fish out their window, right? So cod matters here. So it's not hard to come up to a research question to be like, Oh crap, is plastic affecting cod? That wasn't a reach.

Speaker2: [00:36:06] Yeah, it wasn't.

Speaker4: [00:36:08] So, so. So that's sort of the give and take. And because that was the research question. And so I remember standing over the sink, looking through cod guts from cod that people had caught and given to me the guts and I found a plastic and I was super excited because I'm a pollution geek. I was like, Oh my God, this is so exciting. And I was like, Oh shit, I know who ate this fish? Oh shit, how am I going to tell them that their food is contaminated? Oh, and then I got hit in the face with accountability in a way you wouldn't normally if they were like randomized fish samples as opposed to somebody's food who passed it out the window to you. So, so these sort of things start to feed each other formally. Then we formalize some of it. So formally, we get most of our research questions at this point from community through community meetings where we say, here's some stuff on plastics. What are you worried about? People like this? I'm like, OK, we'll check that out. What about this? Ok, we'll check that out. And we now have like many years worth of research questions to work on. How bad is it anyway in this province? That's what working on now. It's really hard to coordinate provincial data that was never meant to talk to each other. And because the province is sort of the unit of intervention in terms of what matters here, which is fishing gear and sewage in terms of plastic, we we need to do it.

Speaker1: [00:37:20] I'm not an expert on plastic, but it seems like a lot of what we get through the general news media about plastic pollution these days is about we're finding plastic everywhere. We're finding plastic, a plastic bag at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. We're finding microplastics and German beer, which is supposedly so pure. You know, the idea of the kind of the proliferation of plastics and microplastics through the entire biosphere seems to be like the dominant motif of a lot of coverage. And yet, it seems like in some of your recent publications, you're pushing back against that discourse. And I just wanted to invite you to talk a little bit about those findings and about what you think. The implication is, for example, that at least in the study, you did that the Atlantic salmon had ingested zero percent. Plastic, which I guess makes means they're smart or something or lucky.

Speaker4: [00:38:04] No, it means they're it means that they're spawning and they're not eating anything.

Speaker2: [00:38:08] They're actually or nothing to do with intelligence.

Speaker4: [00:38:10] It has to do with making babies. There you go. Fish style. So yeah, so I absolutely agree that plastics are ubiquitous. The thing is, and this is the foundation of justice spoiler, they're uneven. They're unevenly ubiquitous, and they have uneven effects within that ubiquity. And so that's that's the discourse I try and push back against and the study that you mentioned. So I had an amazing student and colleague fall asleep. No relation. Oddly, we're the only liberals we've ever met that we were not directly related to. It's very confusing. We gave our family trees to our nan's and we're like, OK, figure that out, grandma. And no, we were not. We're not related. So anyway, she was doing all of these silver hake samples. She had a couple of hundred of them silver hake you would know as fake crab, probably if you're into that kind of low cost. And she did whatever a couple of hundred samples, and she said, Yeah, it didn't find any plastics. I was like, Oh crap, you just ruined a study like, there has plastics. And so I did some quality control and I couldn't find any plastics, and I was like, Oh, what's going on? And so we did a literature review to try and find other studies with silver hake to see what they found. We didn't find any, either. I know no one cares about a fake crab fat whitefish, so there's no other studies on it. And so we started looking around at other literature just to see, like, how often do this no or low rates happen? And it turns out 40 some odd percent of the time fish don't eat plastics by species and different species, eat differently, have different foraging habits. And so that's that's your determinant in your risk determinant for ingesting plastic.

Speaker4: [00:39:38] Forty three percent. And it blew my mind because at that point, I had been studying plastics full time for about 12 years and I had zero and in fish and I had zero idea that almost half of them don't eat plastics. And I was like, What the hell? So I think part of it is publishing bias so people would like amalgamate all their different species together so they'd get a positive result because that's what you publish. But in the I use that as a case study to talk about unevenness, to talk about justice, to talk about specificity. And this comes up a lot, including an anti-colonial and feminist methods, if that's going to be characterized by good relations. And there's this idea that that often non-Indigenous people have when they hear indigenous people say, like, Oh, all our relations were all related and folks are like, yay. But sometimes people understand that to mean we're all related evenly. And no, that would be pretty impossible to be obliged to everything. The same would be impossible. And we know this you're obliged to your daughter differently than you're obliged to your mail mail carrier, but you are obliged to both of them. You are in relation with both of them, but they are different. So the same thing happens with other beings in the world like fish and plastics and pollution and harm. Is that to do your obligations, to do action, you have to know what those uneven obligations would be. And so knowing where there are a lot of plastics ingested and where there aren't many or any is integral to how you would go forth and do justice work.

Speaker3: [00:41:04] So this is great because I had a question too about the the silver hake, actually, and I did not know that it was fake crab. So that's interesting. I've got a whole new insight on that little fish. And I wanted to come back to one of the articles that you wrote about this question of zero, and you kind of mentioned this just in passing that zero is not something that gets published. There needs to be some sort of impact, you know, according to whatever standards have been established through the STEM fields, that zero somehow is not exciting. It's not sexy. It's not something that's going to, you

Speaker1: [00:41:38] Know, it's kind of like nature abhors a vacuum. Science, of course, is zero zero.

Speaker3: [00:41:41] Yeah. So I think this is a really interesting insight and and I'd love to hear you talk more about that. But I also wanted to talk about what happened when you did publish some results on the silver hake and its zero ingestion of plastic. And you said that you got a lot of hate mail and that you got these social media posts that accuse you of working for the plastics industry, which listeners she does not not. And that the zero result suggests that there was no problem with pollution, but nothing could be further from the truth. You write. So this is I'd love to hear you talk about zero a bit more. But I also wanted to get to this other piece where you say, I'm just going to read it really quickly, you say. But just because we see uneven harm to the fish does not mean there is uneven environmental violence. The plastic industry is still the only source of plastic waste. True, regardless of which species of fish tend to ingest plastics or not. And you say harm focuses only on effects, but violence captures causes of multiple and uneven effects. And I think that this is a really, really, really, really important point. Harm focuses on effects. Violence captures causes of multiple and uneven effects,

Speaker4: [00:42:53] Structure, power structures. So, I mean, this is what people like. Michelle Murphy research right. And I think you guys have as Michelle on the show before. Yeah. Environmental violence, right, and a lot of people write about environmental violence because it is the thing more so than environmental harm, because environmental harm is caught up in all of these politics of state forms of evidence which are almost always insufficient to prove what a lot of people know is that they're being harmed. They are sick, their communities are sick, they are the beneficiaries of end of pipe things. So so yeah. So the focusing away from harm and towards violence and the structure is, is, is crucial, I think, to justice work. And it's another way to talk about unevenness is that unevenness comes from somewhere. And even if in patterns of unevenness are not random, they are what are called judgmental in science. So they. The pattern comes from somewhere. The pattern of unevenness. So, yeah, so do you want me to back up and talk more about the fish story or. Yeah, totally. You just read all the highlights.

Speaker2: [00:43:54] Totally. Yeah. Yeah, please. Ok.

Speaker4: [00:43:56] Ok, so we did publish. So in science, there's there's zero and there's null and they're slightly different things and zero is a number and it is a finding. And so how many plastics were eaten zero by what percent of the population? Zero. Those are numbers, but it's also a null. It is the negative form of the hypothesis. Our hypothesis were that silver hake eat plastics. I wonder how many? Oh, no, just kidding. And it's the old no. Just kidding that never gets published right? So I wonder if this. No, not so sexy. So and that's there's a mini movement, I would say, in science to push publications to publish novels because they actually are valuable because a lot of people spend their will trying to look at the same things. And people have already found that they aren't true, but they never get published. Sorry, do you hear my dog barking in the background?

Speaker3: [00:44:47] We hear a relational non-human over there calling

Speaker1: [00:44:49] Dogs on the podcasts.

Speaker4: [00:44:50] That's grandmother. He is a co-author on the equity and author paper that we have just discussed, and he is barking at the neighbor's dog.

Speaker3: [00:44:58] That's cool. I love that grandmother as a boy dog.

Speaker4: [00:45:01] Oh yes, I had the name before I had the dog, and he doesn't care. Yeah, hang on one second.

Speaker2: [00:45:07] Grandmother, good. Good, good grandmother.

Speaker4: [00:45:15] He's pretty good. Yeah. So yeah, unfortunately, the neighbors are sunning themselves and he would like to join them.

Speaker2: [00:45:20] Oh, OK.

Speaker4: [00:45:22] Yeah, it's almost never sunny here. So he has a he has a valid point.

Speaker2: [00:45:25] I was going to can't blame a dog.

Speaker1: [00:45:26] Now we feel guilty for keeping you inside.

Speaker3: [00:45:28] Ok, so the mini movement and science to publish null findings? Yes.

Speaker4: [00:45:32] Yeah, to publish. So I'm one part of this mini movement. Actually, it wasn't hard for us to publish that silver hake paper. We didn't get pushback on the zero. And I think part of the reason is we had in the paper this this large, this large discussion section about how important it was to publish null results. And you know, Einstein said this about null results and how you should publish them. Therefore, please publish this paper. So that went. All right.

Speaker3: [00:45:56] That's good. It's good to pull out the Einstein card when you need

Speaker4: [00:45:59] It, and it's, you know, I'll go there. Yeah, totally for that low hanging task. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, the testicles of science. I'll go there. Yeah. Low hanging fruit. Yeah, yeah. Harmless fun. So, yeah, so when I published that piece, the just the silver hake piece I put everything I publish goes on social media for the lab, everything we publish. And I did get hate mail. I got hate mail pretty regularly. But this hate mail was very organized and always constantly about the same issue. And the thing was they had a point. I do take hate mail very seriously. I do think it is expressing something. I almost always disagree with it, but there's a point to what they're saying. And the point to what this hate mail is saying is that industry constantly says, if you can't prove there's harm, then there isn't any. Then there's no violence, right? No harm, no violence. Right. So because they had that point, I then wrote the conversation piece that you quoted from. All right, I'm going to close the thing so that you can stop hearing grandmother doing his relations.

Speaker2: [00:46:57] Sorry, hang on one second. I think it's OK

Speaker3: [00:46:59] Having him there. He's not to

Speaker1: [00:47:00] Load his phone, but

Speaker3: [00:47:02] It's probably a distracting for her.

Speaker1: [00:47:04] Yeah, to hear the dogs, but it's much louder on her side.

Speaker3: [00:47:06] Yeah, yeah. It sounds like a big dog, but I kind of want to know what he looks like.

Speaker1: [00:47:09] Now you're you to get a photo we got.

Speaker3: [00:47:11] I think he's really furry. Oh my God. She mentioned Labrador. So now I'm imagining a Labrador like a really furry Labrador. Yeah. So Max Max, we've just been we sorry to interrupt, but we now we need to know what grandmother looks like. Like I'm picturing a large black super furry dog.

Speaker4: [00:47:28] He is but a poodle poodle.

Speaker3: [00:47:31] Oh my god, that was not in my imaginary.

Speaker4: [00:47:34] Ok, yeah. So Newfoundland and Labrador do have dogs called Newfoundland Dogs and Labrador dogs, and we have statues out front in one of the parks that have both of those dogs and grandmother does sniff the statues bums. That's hilarious. Oh my god. But yeah, he's a poodle.

Speaker3: [00:47:49] That's brilliant. I love that. Like animal semiotics, he recognizes that he recognizes the dogs as dog shape, even though they're made out of metal or stone.

Speaker2: [00:47:57] Yeah, so amazing.

Speaker4: [00:47:59] Teaches me a lot about protocol. So I came in, there's a protocol for dog broadly defined and like, well, I guess I got to do protocol for plastics then even though they're not alive.

Speaker3: [00:48:07] Yeah, well, we don't want to do dog protocol. That could be messy.

Speaker2: [00:48:11] Right now, I've forgotten where we were, though.

Speaker4: [00:48:14] Oh, hate mail. I'm sorry. The haters make haters make points. Some of them are valid points, so the haters are making this point. That industry will use something like a zero ingestion rate, which is what I found to argue that there is no harm in there for no violence. And that is true. They do that all the time, and she does it all the time. The industry are the greatest activists in terms of trying to change things, right? And that's one of their techniques. So I did write the conversation piece that you quoted from to try and articulate just so industry. You can't do this. You can't do this because see, the point I'm making to your industry is that you're still a jerk. You still are the only source of plastics. And it doesn't matter what I do or do not find me looking at the end of pipe is only a way for me to point back up the pipe to industry and oil.

Speaker3: [00:48:58] Yeah, because this is related. I wanted to bring in the article that you wrote for Teen Vogue, which has, as I understand it over the last several years has become kind of a hotbed for, you know, sort of political theorizing in some ways and action. I mean, I guess especially among young people. But as I was thinking about it, it's probably primarily young women and maybe some queer men who read Teen Vogue. I don't know if there's a lot of like straight white hetero boys out there reading Teen Vogue, but maybe. But I'm imagining it as a certain kind of audience, but one that has a lot of investment in overturning things like the toxic environments, which are increasingly those that we inhabit. So you talk about in this article about different approaches to dealing with marine plastic, and there's a kind of set of suggestions that comes from one organization. And this is this is in I think it's all around Southeast Asia, right, that you're talking about the top five marine polluters where you see the most marine plastics. Yeah. And I don't have the countries right in front of me, but I'm sure you know which they are.

Speaker4: [00:50:03] And Sri Lanka? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:50:05] So so then so then there was this proposition to burn the plastics, but another group said, like, let's not burn that stuff, because then you're adding, you know, those toxic toxins to the atmosphere and to air pollution, which is already a problem in places like China, for example. And so there, you know, there's this kind of tension between these two approaches to dealing with marine plastic. And you talk about the fact that the existence of plastics and this idea that they can be disposed of in terrestrial spaces is a kind of colonial imprint. Not kind of is a colonial mindset is a colonial imprint that that we could, you know, could deposit or sort of use landfill in places like China and other parts of the world like Africa to dispose of plastics. So what I wanted to ask you is a kind of blunt question is that what should we do collectively about marine plastics and about the plastics that might become landfill either here or there in the future?

Speaker4: [00:51:09] So again, it's focusing on violence instead of harm. So the the main critique of those like end of pipe solutions incinerate it on someone else's land, landfill it on indigenous land, recycle it, which indigenous land. So make it in the first place by and large disposables in the first place reduce mass production. So, so look back to industry. Oh, because it turns out that plastics require the extraction of petrochemicals. Oh, I wonder how that goes for indigenous folks. Spoiler not well. So, so it's not. They're not different systems. They're part of the same sort of colonial mindset. Just manifest in a bunch of these different ways. And so what you do is you turn up pipe and you take it to industry. So the folks fighting fracking, that's plastic, the folks fighting Big Oil, that's plastics. Same deal. So you put your put your energies towards that and it'll have farther reaching effects. So yeah, so that's the that's the where where the where to point and shoot. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:52:04] I wanted to ask you also about the thoughts you've had on toxic agency two. I love this line where you say that agency is never pure, and this recognition lets us be more intentional in how we might compromise as practitioners of diverse scientific analogies. And so it's kind of about the ethics of agency or how to act in this world. That is, I guess, permanently polluted in some sense. In other words, I guess I kind of want to ask about why science is your medium in this and are there? Did you think about other media like other kind of practices and then decide on science? Or was there something else that led you to think about how you wanted to channel your own agency?

Speaker4: [00:52:40] Yeah. So I used to be a full time artist in New York City. I have to ask arts.

Speaker1: [00:52:45] Pretty, pretty great too. I should say thank you.

Speaker4: [00:52:47] I was a successful artist. I was making money that I could live on as an artist in New York. I have two art degrees, and I left art very specifically because it wasn't getting shit done. Mm hmm. So the work that I wanted to do, which is changing the world and being a good relation both for myself, but also making spaces for good relation. But I've become more articulate and intentional in that as I've gotten wiser and older. Not in that order older than wiser. And art wasn't getting it done. That doesn't mean art can't get it done, but I don't see it, but I don't see a lot of evidence of art getting it done. I see a lot of evidence actually of art, sometimes reintegrating mythologies about plastics, which drives me crazy. Like 10 small things you can do in plastic bottles and end of pipe and harm stuff. So I started doing science because science scales. Science is truth here. Science circulates and dominant structures better, and this is going back to compromise. Like you don't get a blank slate from which to do your activism. That's the colonizers dream that you have located someplace with no previous history, no previous people, no previous politics, no previous obligations doesn't exist. So if we're going to get our hands dirty, let's get our hands dirty and dirty. Dirty science, right? Colonial science. Ok, let's do that. So and I have found that it scales better and we have been able to do things. I've been able to keep people in the academy who would normally get pushed out. I have managed to channel money to land better. I have managed to keep a certain folks on their land by paying them to hunt and fish in ways that I couldn't have done with art. You know, there's all this sort of good relations stuff that I've done at various scales. So, yeah, I have chosen the media of science, and as soon as science stops working, then yeah, I'll will be a sanitation worker, an artist again or whatever. But it works, works pretty well,

Speaker1: [00:54:29] And it seems like it's really becoming a prototype. What you're doing in your lab, that's inspiring a lot of other labs. And I guess maybe this is a follow up question on that is how how important do you think is this project that folks like you and Sarah Wiley and Michelle and many other people are working on to create the kind of hardware the platforms for open science and citizen science? How important do you think is that to this broader project of changing the world?

Speaker4: [00:54:54] I think it's mixed. So, so OK. So I'll I'll give you a memory that I have. So I was in my home community maybe five years ago at this point. Goodness. And there was someone there. My home community is very toxic by the tar sands in Alberta, which is a major petrochemical extraction zone, and we lived downwind and to some degree, down downstream. And a lot of people get sick, and I was tending to someone. I worked at a hospice, so I was tending to someone who was dying of cancer, and we're all pretty sure it was related to that job. So he was an oil rigger and I said, Oh my God, I'm getting my PhD or this is maybe seven years ago. Now I'm getting my PhD and I do environmental stuff like I can. I can start to work towards proving this sort of relation that you're sick and dying because of this stuff. And he was like, No, the most important thing you do is you keep social services from taking away my kid. You make sure that my parents are the kid's guardians. That is your job as an academic, as someone with doctor in front of your name, that is your proper job not going and doing this other stuff. And that that's one instance. And the lessons come again and again and again in many different ways, which is that like, yeah, science improving harm, which is what those instruments you just talked about are for. Open science is for mostly proving harm, but it does not address violence and the violence of taking kids away from families, indigenous kids away from families and putting them with white families and extracting petrochemicals and producing plastics and putting them in other people's land as sinks.

Speaker4: [00:56:26] That's all from the same problem. It's about entitlement to other people's stuff indigenous stuff, life, land, kids, et cetera. And so he said, No, that's not my priority. My priority is not you doing your crazy hardware invention. Super cool stuff. Your job is to go to family court and say, my name is Dr. So-and-so and keep my kids safe and out of the system. So that's I'm one of the most valuable things I've ever done is a scientist. Go to family court and testify. Keep families. Families want to be. So, yeah, you know, hardware is all right. It does some stuff and sometimes you need that stuff. But it's not. It doesn't deal with violence. Monitoring does not deal with violence. It can only deal with harm. Right. And so unless you can somehow point that monitoring stuff back upstream and back up towards violence and the source of harm, it's not that useful. And most ways that open science hardware gets used is not about violence, it's about harm, or it's about inviting people in to science who are not usually invited in. And spoiler science is super racist and sexist. And so creating platforms so that more people can join a racist, sexist place is a really crappy invitation. So not not a very genuine invitation. So that's why I would say open hardware. Super important. Very mixed.

Speaker2: [00:57:42] Mm hmm.

Speaker3: [00:57:43] Mm hmm. That's really that's very

Speaker1: [00:57:44] Interesting and not not not good enough on its own, obviously,

Speaker3: [00:57:48] Right? It's like it's not good enough. The hardware is not good enough on its own without the care work that goes with it. Right. And that's, I think what you're pointing to in terms of, you know, doing testimony. Exactly right, that's the care work justice. So, Max, one of the other things that you are quite known for in terms of your scholarship and your interests is broadly, broadly stated waist studies and you've been doing this stuff on discard studies and you have a discard studies compendium and a lot of cool stuff online that people can look up. So we haven't gotten to talk too much about that. Exactly. I wrote down a bunch of waste words because there's a lot of them. So as our final question, I wanted to throw out. Throw out a bunch of waste cards. Oh my god, I just caught myself in a really stupid joke.

Speaker2: [00:58:36] But it's kind of funny in disposable culture. This is the

Speaker3: [00:58:40] Best. Isn't it insane? And I think that waste studies discard studies.

Speaker2: [00:58:44] Rubber studies is full of it, really. It's like it's OK. It's a can for us. They're on a roll up, right?

Speaker3: [00:58:51] So, OK, so I'm going to throw out these words and then you pick one that you like or hate or name another and just love to hear your thoughts on, OK? Waste filth. Refuse or refuse trash, rubbish, crud, dirt, pollution contamination. Toxicity, poison.

Speaker4: [00:59:12] Well, I would say, except for poison, they're all basically the same thing as far as violence goes. Not harm, not materiality, but certainly violence. So the reason that this card studies use the term discard is so that people don't accidentally confuse it with waste like trash, like dirt, like literally dirt or soil. So discard studies. And all those terms, except for poison, are about power relations and the way that power has to externalize certain things to keep the center held. And so minimum wage missing and murdered indigenous women. Arsenic in mining tailings all come from the centre holding and waste, systematically laying waste wasting, disposing, devaluing, pushing out and annihilating. All of those are forms of annihilation. All are about power because all of those things are a threat to power. And so they have to be wasted out as the basic theory of discard studies, which is why I have a blog about it. So plastics is one example of that, but so is climate change. So is sex work. So? So there are lots of other things. Again, because if you go upstream high enough, you come to violence and structures of violence that produce a whole lot of externalities. So we have been talking about discard studies the whole time. Everything we've been talking about, about power relations, externalities and how power holds.

Speaker1: [01:00:28] Absolutely. I've got one final question, and this could be answered very briefly if you want to. It's hopefully testimony to just how deep we're willing to go in background research before our before our conversations. Ok, Max, which is more fun stand up or roller derby hall.

Speaker4: [01:00:45] That's I don't know. I don't think you can. I don't think you can answer that question. Still go to heaven

Speaker2: [01:00:52] Because

Speaker4: [01:00:53] Picking one just stems you to hell. I don't think. Yeah. There are different kinds of fun if you like self. Well, actually, they both are self-deprecation. Pretty successfully. Yeah, they're different ones, one's of the mind and one's of the body. So it depends where you get your kicks.

Speaker1: [01:01:07] Do you still do standup?

Speaker4: [01:01:08] I do not, nor do I do roller derby. Oh no. I have 40 year old knees, hun. Ok. There's only so much I ref now. And if they hit me, they go to the penalty box. So that's that's the condition under which I can roller derby at this point. Yeah, I still do comedy. Just not stand up.

Speaker1: [01:01:24] Oh, OK, OK, that's good because I feel like you've got those chops, so I'm glad you're still exercising.

Speaker4: [01:01:29] I'm doing comedy right now. You don't think I'm funny. I'm being funny this whole time. That's doing

Speaker2: [01:01:33] It right. I agree. I agree. I agree.

Speaker3: [01:01:36] I'm going to go put on my roller skates. I agree so much.

Speaker2: [01:01:39] There we go.

Speaker1: [01:01:41] So it's been just a delight. Talking to you, Max. Thank you so much for taking the time and thank you for all the work you and your colleagues are doing at Memorial. I think it's incredibly inspiring and it obviously it is kind of giving ideas and courage to a whole lot of people who who really want to move in the same direction that you're moving and, you know, open invite to come to Houston and see where the plastics start. If you

Speaker2: [01:02:07] Ever want to

Speaker3: [01:02:08] Get a lot of what got a lot of top of pipe here.

Speaker2: [01:02:11] Yes.

Speaker4: [01:02:12] Yes. Actually, oil from here, oil from Newfoundland. Offshore oil does go to Texas to go process. Can I end on one note?

Speaker2: [01:02:21] Oh, sure, absolutely.

Speaker1: [01:02:22] Anything anything else you want to talk about? Please?

Speaker4: [01:02:24] Yes. So thank you so much for having me here. You have a great series with some great folks. If people who are listening have been inspired do want to think about this. Do you want to take up these? Do read my sort of stuff. Please cite us. We've encountered this new and ongoing issue where people talk about how great clear is, and our work doesn't get cited where people take up our equity and author process, but don't cite it. It's a method, folks. Please cite it. Hashtags cite indigenous folks.

Speaker2: [01:02:51] Yeah, think

Speaker3: [01:02:53] That is a really excellent note. It's super, super important because. Citation does matter. It's really it's really important, and people need to be reminded of that.

Speaker4: [01:03:03] I'm not tenured guys, I don't have tenure. I really actually concretely need your citations.

Speaker2: [01:03:08] Yeah, yeah. Ok, good now.

Speaker1: [01:03:10] And we'll put links to everything we've discussed in the show notes, too, to make it easy for people. Just click your way right over there.

Speaker3: [01:03:16] That's good. Ok. And please give grandmother a little pat on the head or wherever he likes it. Far from us.

Speaker2: [01:03:24] Not in Texas. Ok, OK, perfect. Ok, thanks, Max.

Speaker4: [01:03:29] Ok, bye bye.