Doing Ethics with Cod

• In Event: Making and Doing: Activating STS through Knowledge Expression and Travel - II

Abstract

We are members of Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), an anti-colonial marine science laboratory. Through our handling of fish, dull knives, specimen bags, and animal intestines, we find that we must be accountable to these things in ways that don’t always show themselves when we are theorizing at our desks. Indeed, understanding accountability in practices is a core strength of making and doing as a methodology in Science and Technology Studies (STS). We follow these threads of STS as well as those on good relations laid out in Indigenous thought to understand that relations, ethics, and obligation are synonymous in science. As such, we aim to enact this simultaneity by making and doing marine science in a good way. Yet, various obligations that arise from Western science, Indigenous thought, and feminist science, we well as the Métis, Kablunangajuk, Inuit, local settler, and come-from-away settler positions lab members occupy are sometimes at odds with one another. In this presentation, we use lab stories to talk about how our obligations and relations are often compromised, meaning we are beholden to some over others, and how we aim to mind our relations in a compromised field within marine science protocols. Stories include killing fish, disposing of used samples, and assigning author order to those who have produced value for scientific studies.

Authors

• Max Liboiron, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador

• Emily Simmonds, York University

• Edward Allen, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador

• Emily Wells, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador

• Jessica Melvin, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador

• Alex Zahara, Department of Geography, Memorial University

• Charlie Mather, Department of Geography, Memorial University