Two Paradigms Walk into a Lab
Annual Flagship Lecture
Thursday 21 January 2027, 12 midday - 13.30pm
Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
All welcome
How do you braid Indigenous and Western knowledges? Integrate local worldviews with scholarship built inside colonial institutions? This talk proposes: you don’t. Not only is it methodologically impossible, but it’s also rude.
Even within Western science, Thomas Kuhn (1962) showed there's no shared framework between paradigms in something as similar as Newtonian and Einsteinian physics. There is no common measure, logic, or even sense of the universe. Indigenous and Western knowledge systems diverge further still.
When two incommensurate paradigms get “woven,” “braided,” or “integrated,” rather than ending in a paradigm shift, there is always a problem of power, not method. How then do we, as academics, encounter marginalized knowledge paradigms ethically? This is a genuine research question.
Negotiations between knowledge systems cannot be achieved through better intentions, more dialogue, or increased care, all of which assume paradigms can still be made legible to one another. This talk proposes two alternatives, based on ten years of partnered, collaborative research on plastic pollution between both local and Indigenous rights holders, and an Indigenous academic. The first route is infrastructure: the standards, protocols, funding structures, and data practices (Murphy 2017) that materially shape benefits and harm in research. The second is refusal, a surprisingly complex and difficult methodology that requires specificity and materiality.
Dr. Max Liboiron is a Professor of Geography at Memorial University and Director of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), a lab recognized for its inventive blend of feminist, anti-colonial, and community-led science. Their work moves fluidly between grassroots practice and national policy, from creating new tools for plastics monitoring to reshaping how Canada understands plastics and Indigenous research. Liboiron is the award-winning author of Pollution is Colonialism (Duke, 2021) and co-author of Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power (MIT, 2022).
