Response: Interruptions in the Production of Scientific Knowledge

Our contrubution to this show draws upon a rich tradition of situated practitioners who use anticolonial and feminist frameworks to actively engage in confronting and intervening in the challenges of contested and controversial ecological and infrastructural futures. Like many, we see this as necessary work given the critical role that the sciences, including the social sciences, continues to play in shaping the colonial present, and the potentiality of liberatory futures.  

 Conscious of the limits of this ambition, and of the potential of unintended reductionist consequences, we chose to use this space as an occasion to engage more thoughtfully with the role that interruption plays in the process of our becoming researchers, scientists, activists, colleagues and teachers in contexts which we are deeply invested and implicated in.

 We explore the politics of interprupting and the labour of interrupting in this show to ask questions rooted in our values: What does it mean to process fish guts like a feminist? How can we interact with lab equipment and build  datasets in ways that actualize and forefront anticolonial commitments? How do we do place-based research on our own traditional territory, or as a guest on somebody else's territory in a good way? What needs to be undone to open up the conventions of academic writing and other forms of representation to ensure that they are relevant and responsive  to multiple communities?

Across these questions, we explore how the sciences, including the social sciences, might aid in an anticolonial struggles, all the while asking what needs to be interrupted, what is the work of interrupting, why is it important, and for whom?