Activist and writer M. Murphy is a professor in History and Women and Gender studies and an interdisciplinary scholar whose work explores the complexities of colonialism and its impact on Indigenous communities, particularly in the areas of science, technology, and environmental politics. Their own Métis background brings a unique perspective to Murphy’s research, which focuses on Indigenous ways of knowing and understanding the world, and challenges hegemonic worldviews.

They work with and against technoscience in the areas of environmental justice and data politics, colonialism, sexuality, reproduction and race. Their approach is interdisciplinary not only in the sense of involving various areas of knowledge, but also in enacting their dual responsibility: the almost impossible task of dismantling extractive racial capitalism, by means of re-imagining radical Black, queer, Indigenous and feminist decolonial horizons and worlds of care. Their work asks questions about how to open up to being guided by indigenous jurisdiction, and how to find different ways of being together.

In this podcast, M. Murphy walks us through permission-to-pollute infrastructures in and around Chemical Valley in the Great Lakes area, the largest basin of fresh surface water on the planet. They talk about co-directing the Indigenous Environmental Data Justice Lab, about the redistribution of resources and collective writing, and about other modalities of consent, data and memory. Seeking to go beyond a one-world epistemology —through humble questions and strong solidarities—they talk of alterlife, more-than-pessimism, and, in their own words, of “coming together not only in relations of killing, but also inviting each other to be alive in each other’s livingness.”