Dr. Max Liboiron’s research, mentorship, and administrative work focus on developing and promoting anticolonial methods in 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 created protocols for fostering research collectives. Recently, they are a co-director of the IndigeLab Network, a new international research hub where Indigenous researchers collaborate on innovative methods for creating and maintaining research collectives. 

Liboiron’s first book, Pollution is Colonialism (Duke Press, 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 foregrounding land, ethics, and relations, and demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but 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?”

In May 2022, Discard Studies: Systems, Wasting, and Power (MIT Press, 2022) was released with co-author Josh Lepwasky. This Open Access book argues that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. 

Dr. Liboiron is a Professor in Geography and was formerly the Associate Vice-President (Indigenous Research) at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Liboiron is Red River Métis/Michif and settler raised in Lac la Biche, Treaty 6 territory. Gender pronouns: they/them. Liboiron is pronounced: Lee-Bwah-rohn.

*Thank you for all the invitations to speak at events. I am fully booked into the summer of 2024 and am not taking any more bookings at the moment. Thank you for respecting my overflowing inbox and existing commitments.*