Liboiron’s projects stretch across the nautral and social sciences. The following are the main containers for multiple sub-projects:

Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)
CLEAR is a feminist, anti-colonial, marine science laboratory that studies plastic pollution. Our goal is to create methodologies for field and bench science grounded in the values of feminist and anti-colonial thought such as equity and humility, from how we choose research questions (and with whom), to regularizing community self-determination by soliciting community peer review before publication. The lab has over 30 members from a variety of disciplines and career stages. Collaboratively, we seek to change how science is done. CLEAR and our methods are highlighted in Pollution is Colonialism(2021).

Plastic pollution monitoring in Nunatsiavut
The Nunatsiavut Government’s Department of Lands and Natural Resources has partnered with Max Liboiron 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.

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. Both are interdisciplinary in their own rights. But to date, most (though certainly not all) work on Indigenous and decolonial methodologies have focused on qualitative methods in the social sciences and humanities, to the point where it can seem as though quantitative methods are antithetical to Indigenization or decolonization. We are at the early stages of this work.