Max Liboiron
CitizenshipCanadian
TitleProfessor
AwardsCollege of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, Royal Society of Canada
Academic background
Alma materNew York University Ph.D

Stony Brook University MFA, grad certificate

Mount Allison University BFA
ThesisRedefining Pollution: Plastics in the Wild (2012)
Academic work
Discipline
Sub-disciplineScience and technology studies
InstitutionsMemorial University of Newfoundland
Websitemaxliboiron.com

Max Liboiron is a Canadian researcher and designer known for their contributions to the study of plastic pollution and citizen science.[1][2]

Career

Liboiron directs the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), an interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory based at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.[3] Liboiron was the Managing Editor of the online journal Discard Studies for nearly a decade,[4] which publishes research on industrial waste and its social, political, cultural, and economic implications.[5]

Liboiron is professor of geography at Memorial, with cross-appointments to the university's Department of Sociology, Environmental Sciences, and the Fisheries and Marine Institute. From 2018 to 2020, they served as Memorial's inaugural Associate Vice-president, Indigenous Research.[6]

Research Methods

Liboiron and their lab have created several research methods aimed to bring humility, accountability, and good land relations into research.[7][8] These include: community peer review, where people who are impacted by research are part of the review process to validate and publish research;[9] returning biological samples back to the land;[10] university-level policies requiring consent from Indigenous groups to engage in research on their lands and communities;[11] and a legal contract for Indigenous data sovereignty where Indigenous groups own and control how data about their lands, people, and culture are used.[11]

Liboiron has invented build-it-yourself tools for monitoring marine plastic pollution, including a device called BabyLegs. The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum exhibited BabyLegs as part of its Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial from May 2019 to January 2020, which recognized designers "forging meaningful connections between humanity and the Earth".[12][13]

Liboiron is a proponent of the Global Open Science Hardware (GOSH) movement, which argues that high equipment costs and intellectual property restrictions stifle scientific progress.[14]

Equity in academia

An example of Liboiron's equity in academia is deciding author order by consensus; valuing care work and other forms of labour that are usually left out of scientific value systems; and taking intersectional social standing into account.[15][16] Other examples include using anti-oppressive facilitation to run lab meetings, and consensus-based decision making in the lab.[17]

Writing

Pollution is Colonialism

Liboiron's book Pollution is Colonialism argues that the environmental policies of many jurisdictions, and the dominant science upon which those policies are based, are characterized by colonialism.[10]

Redefining pollution and action: The matter of plastics

Their article Redefining pollution and action argues that in order to find attainable solutions to plastic pollution, it is necessary to consider the physical characteristics of plastics, such as density, size, or their molecular bonds.[18] Many people think of marine plastics as what is seen on land: plastic bottles, plastic bags, food wrappers, etc. Liboiron instead emphasizes the definition of marine plastics as the small microplastics that are harmful to life. This idea of harm is explored extensively throughout the article. The metaphor “toxic smog” is created by Liboiron and the others on the voyage from Bermuda to New York City to help common people and large plastic producing companies understand the harm. As explained, most people know that smog consists of particles in the air that are basically invisible to the human eye but harmful to health. Similarly, the microplastics in the ocean are also invisible, mostly because not many people are traveling to the middle of the ocean or to the ocean floor where most microplastics settle. Plastic is not the only cause of harm as their chemical additives, called monomers and plasticizers that sit on plastics and can detach at any point, cause additional harm. Today, studying the effects these toxic chemicals have on humans and animals is very difficult. Every human and animal that has been tested carries chemicals from plastics either directly or from monomers and plasticizers. This problem makes it impossible to create control groups to closely study the exact harm of plastics. It is well known that plastics correlate with harm to health. What is not known, and difficult to ascertain, is which plastics produce which effects, the amount of plastic it takes to cause harm, and at what point can effects be considered harmful. A main goal of the article is to create change, mostly through legislation and advocacy.

See also

Awards

References

  1. ↑ "Dr. Max Liboiron". Oceanic Global. 2019-02-11. Retrieved 2021-06-10.
  2. ↑ "Do-it-yourself science is taking off". The Economist. 2017-12-19. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 2021-06-10.
  3. ↑ Buder, Emily. "The Feminist, Anti-Colonialist Scientific Approach to Micro-plastics and Pollution - The Atlantic". www.theatlantic.com. Retrieved 2021-06-10.
  4. ↑ "Max Liboiron". Memorial University of Newfoundland. Retrieved June 10, 2021.
  5. ↑ "What is discard studies?". Discard Studies. 2018-08-01. Retrieved 2021-06-11.
  6. ↑ "Research". Memorial University of Newfoundland. Retrieved 2021-06-11.
  7. ↑ Liboiron, Max (2021). Pollution is colonialism. Durham. ISBN 978-1-4780-2144-5. OCLC 1240501259.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  8. ↑ CLEAR (2021-09-04). "CLEAR Lab Book: A living manual of our values, guidelines, and protocols". doi:10.5281/ZENODO.5450517. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  9. ↑ Liboiron, Max; Zahara, Alex; Schoot, Ignace (2018-06-07). "Community Peer Review: A Method to Bring Consent and Self-Determination into the Sciences". doi:10.20944/preprints201806.0104.v1. S2CID 150153902. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  10. 1 2 Liboiron, Max (2021). Pollution is Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-1-4780-2144-5.
  11. 1 2 "Research". Memorial University of Newfoundland. Retrieved 2021-09-11.
  12. ↑ Dr. Max Liboiron "BabyLegs" | Nature–Design Triennial, retrieved 2021-06-10
  13. ↑ "Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial | Exhibitions | Collection of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum". collection.cooperhewitt.org. Retrieved 2021-06-10.
  14. ↑ "By GOSH, it's Global Open Science Hardware!". HackSpace magazine. 8 November 2018. Retrieved 2021-06-10.
  15. ↑ Liboiron, Max; Ammendolia, Justine; Winsor, Katharine; Zahara, Alex; Bradshaw, Hillary; Melvin, Jessica; Mather, Charles; Dawe, Natalya; Wells, Emily; Liboiron, France; Fürst, Bojan (2017-10-19). "Equity in Author Order: A Feminist Laboratory's Approach". Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. 3 (2): 1–17. doi:10.28968/cftt.v3i2.28850. ISSN 2380-3312.
  16. ↑ Chawla, Dalmeet Singh (2018-12-20). "Assigning authorship for research papers can be tricky. These approaches can help". Science | AAAS. Retrieved 2021-06-10.
  17. ↑ Laboratory Life: How We Run a Lab Meeting (Episode 3), retrieved 2021-09-11
  18. ↑ Liboiron, Max (2016). "Redefining pollution and action: The matter of plastics". Journal of Material Culture. 21 (1): 87–110. doi:10.1177/1359183515622966. S2CID 51917993 – via SAGE.
  19. ↑ "Arctic and Northern Regions Archives". Gazette - Memorial University of Newfoundland. Retrieved 2021-06-11.
  20. ↑ "Building DIY citizen science technology to see invisible marine plastics". Society for Social Studies of Science. 2015-12-29. Retrieved 2021-06-11.
  21. ↑ "2018 Award Winners: Nature Inspiration Awards | Canadian Museum of Nature". nature.ca. Retrieved 2021-06-11.
  22. ↑ "Strong Animals: Humility in Science". Science for the People. 22 January 2020. Retrieved June 11, 2021.
  23. ↑ "Distinguished Visiting Indigenous Faculty Fellow, 2020-21 | JHI". humanities.utoronto.ca. Retrieved 2021-06-11.
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