Finding a good starting place: An interview with scholars in the CLEAR Lab

Abstract

The CLEAR lab is an interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory whose methods foreground humility and good land relations. In this interview, María Fernanda Yanchapaxi and Eve Tuck speak with CLEAR lab founder, Max Liboiron, and co-investigators, Katherine Crocker and Deondre Smiles. Together, they explore Indigenous perspectives on climate change and outline the problems with how Western education thinks about it. Our guests question individualism in the understandings of and responses to climate change and reveal the importance of dismantling individual saviour complex perspectives embedded in educational approaches. Our guests invite educators to reflect on and redefine the values at the core of their practice and seek new ways to act on them.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

María Fernanda Yanchapaxi

María Fernanda Yanchapaxi is a Ph.D. student in the Social Justice Education Department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto. Yanchapaxi is Kichwa/Mestiza from Panzaleo territory (Sigchos, Ecuador) where her family still lives. Her research examines the suitability of the intellectual property system to protect Indigenous knowledges and its impact on the assertion of Indigenous knowledge sovereignty.

Max Liboiron

Dr. Max Liboiron (Michif, they/them) Liboiron is an Associate Professor in Geography at Memorial University, Canada. Their lab, CLEAR, is an interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory whose methods foreground humility and good land relations.

Katherine Crocker

Dr. Katherine Crocker (Kaw, they/she) is an interdisciplinary biologist interested in how animals are influenced by the environments of our ancestors, and how we gain and describe knowledge. They earned their PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (and their MS in Post-Secondary Science Education) from the University of Michigan. They are currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and a co-Investigator in Dr. Max Liboiron’s CLEAR lab.

Deondre Smiles

Dr. Deondre Smiles (he/him/wiin) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria (BC, Canada). A citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, Smiles’ research interests are multifaceted, focusing on critical Indigenous geographies, political ecology, Indigenous cultural resource preservation, and science/technology studies. Smiles is a co-investigator in the CLEAR Lab and is the director of the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory (or GIF Lab) at UVic.

Eve Tuck

Eve Tuck is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. She is Canada Research Chair of Indigenous Methodologies with Youth and Communities. Tuck is the founding director of the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab. Tuck is Unangax̂ and is an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska.