Response: Interruptions in the Production of Scientific Knowledge

Responses is a collaborative archive that explores the productive potential of being interrupted and the labour of interrupting in scientific knowledge production. It draws upon the everyday experiences and networks of members of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Research Action (CLEAR) a feminist, anti-colonial marine science lab specializing in monitoring plastic pollution. It offers a critical examination of the ways that different scientific practitioners grapple with bringing feminist and anti-colonial commitments to bare on their practices, and how those practices help them understand how other scientists are grappling with similar issues. This collective endeavour situates the counters and forces of interruptions within specific contexts in which we as students, teachers and researchers are deeply implicated. In this exhibit, interruption is framed not simply as occasions or encounters that get in our way, prohibiting us from completing our work. Instead, they are instances that prompt us to reflect upon how our ways of working, and making knowledge claims about phenomenon, and the world, are already entangled in relations and structures of power. With an emphasis on the contingent and the contextual, this collection provokes curiosity about how interruptions can serve as a powerful catalyst that enables new modes of working both politically and personally, as well as serve as moments where power relations come to discipline and direct knowledge.