2016 Stockholm Archipelago Lecture

KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory

at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment

presents

5th Stockholm Archipelago Lecture

Michelle Murphy

AlterLife in the Aftermath of Industrial Chemicals

27 October 2016, 15.00-17.00
R1 Experimental Performance Space & Presence Lab Drottning Kristinas väg 51, KTH Campus, Stockholm

Abstract:
Biomonitoroing studies suggest that all people living today have PCBs and other persistent pollutants incorporated into their bodies.  Today life and embodiment are in a condition of having already been altered by industrial chemicals and environmental violence.  We are both connected and divided by these ubiquitous, yet unevenly distributed, chemical exposures that are also the extension of capitalist, colonial, and racist violence into the intergenerational future.  Rooted in the histories of the Great Lakes region, this talk draws on the work of Frantz Fanon and Indigenous Reproductive Justice  to develop the concept of alterlife as a decolonial orientation to already altered life with and against technoscience, anthropocene narratives, and damage-based research.

Michelle Murphy  is Professor in the History Department and Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, Director of the Technoscience Research Unit, and co-organizer, with Natasha Myers, of the Toronto Technoscience Salon. Her work focuses on environmental politics, technoscience, chemical exposures, infrastructures, capitalism and economics, race and colonialism, and reproduction from the 20th century to the contemporary through feminist, decolonial, anti-racist, postcolonial, political economic, and queer approaches.

The Stockholm Archipelago Lecture series is part of the public activities of the . Find out about previous lectures in the series .