SON[I]A #403
M Murphy
![SON[I]A #404](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1024px-Sarnia_Chemical_Valley.jpeg)
Petro-chemical industry of Sarnia's Chemical Valley, Ontario, Canada. Photo: P199. Source: Wikipedia.
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.”
THIS PODCAST IS PART OF NEW PERSPECTIVES FOR ACTION. A PROJECT BY RE-IMAGINE EUROPE, CO-FUNDED BY THE EUROPEAN UNION. COPRODUCED BY SONIC ACTS.
CONVERSATION: ROC JIMENEZ DE CISNEROS AND ANNA RAMOS. SCRIPT AND SOUND PRODUCTION: PANTEA. VOICE OVER: JAVIERA CADIZ. Sounds: RWM sound library
IMAGE: Petro-chemical industry of Sarnia's Chemical Valley, Ontario, Canada. Photo: P199. Source: Wikipedia.
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
OBJECTHOOD #9 keeps asking questions about the limits and borders of stuff all around us – from countries to nuclear sites. We talk to Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou about her work on exclusion zones and radioactive waste management, focusing on temporal and spatial thresholds. Our second guest, researcher and activist Nishat Awan, talks about unsettlement and geopolitical borders, especially in relation to Pakistan and her field work in Balochistan. Get ready for a deep dive into the oddness of boundaries, including political demarcations, the interplay between insects and radiation leaks, forced displacements, and gigantic triangles, to name but a few. Curated by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros
Elaine Gan
A grain of rice sits in a field on the banks of the Mekong river. A water buffalo breaks up soil in the Ifugao terraces in the Philippines. A black box containing rice seeds is placed on a shelf inside the Svalbard seed vault at -18°C in Norway. From such a common seed, hidden in plain sight, artist-scholar Elaine Gan weaves a dynamic network of relationships connecting agroecology and more-than-human sociability, subsistence farmers and climate change, contaminated taxonomies and feminist theory.In this podcast, Elaine Gan talks about crop science, feral technologies, the global pandemic, radical difference, the art of noticing, Matsutake mushrooms, and, of course, the blahblahsphere.
AM Kanngieser
Political geographer and sound artist AM Kanngieser works in the coordinates between space and sound. This merging of disciplines that seems completely normal to her tends to be more perplexing to the compartmentalised world of science and academia than to the undisciplined field of artistic practice. In this podcast, we become the listeners as AM Kanngieser reflects on expanded listening, on the inaudible, and on our anthropocentrism. They talk about their long-standing interest in sound governance and dissect the many tensions that built up in the project “Climates of Listening”, which was originally based on the intention of amplifying campaigns for self-determination and self-representation in the Pacific.