Isabelle Boucher

Isabelle Boucher’s work is situated at the intersection of feminist STS, environmental humanities, and political ecology. Her research project consists of a historical and material analysis of cleantech’s cybernetic underpinnings by probing the overlapping physical and political realms of energy and information.

By looking at, for example, energy trading, carbon removal projects (and carbon credit markets), as well as military tech’s green turn, among other case studies, this research offers a broader understanding of Canada’s energy transition landscape, as it is mediated by dominant forms of scientific, economic and military powers. Building on recent contributions that define contemporary capitalism as “cybernetic” (Overwijk 2025, Dyer Witheford and Mularoni 2025, Ström 2022, Ouellet 2010), her research seeks to uncover the connections between so-called “clean” energy regimes, metrological systems, and informational capital (data sets, models, prediction software, etc.) By outlining a “politics of uncertainty,” she asks: who gets to make and control predictions about energy futures and for whom?

She previously taught a course titled “Critical Studies in Climate Change” in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University and will be teaching again in the Department of Communication Studies a course titled “’Green Media’: Critical Approaches for a Just Transition.”

Projects

[Forthcoming) August 4-6, 2026. Presenter at Energy Ethics 2026: Infrastructures of Energy Accepted paper title: Critical Credits: Venturing into the Uncertainty of Carbon Dioxide Removal

Panel title: Critical Abstractions: Mediations of Risk, Security, and Expertise in Extractive Landscapes. 

July 16-19, 2024 “When Copper Turns Green: Rethinking Copper's Elemental Possibilities.” EASST-4S 2024: Making and doing transformations (University of Amsterdam).

This presentation focused on copper, which can be viewed as both a material condition and a heuristic object that lies at the intersection of cleantech, environmental justice, and sustainability discourses.

March 14-17, 2024. “Planetary Energetics, The Politics of Uncertainty.” Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association 2024, Palais des congrès de Montréal, March).

This presentation sought to probe the overlapping physical and political realms of energy and information, each of which defines production and economic flows within different frameworks of constraints and freedoms. From there, I explored how the “politics of uncertainty” emerged as the “ability to make and control predictions” about energy futures that can paradoxically prevent change in the present.

November 8-11, 2023: Presenter at 4S Honolulu: Sea, Sky, Land, Endangered Ecologies, Solidarities. Accepted paper title: “Beholding the Earth: Putting Waste Under the Macroscope, the Case of the Second Biosphere.”

The paper investigates the ways in which the emergence of Earth System Science (ESS) has impacted human agency, as well as the political articulation of knowledge, energy and waste. I will argue that ESS’s technosphere concept (Haff 2013) fails to consider the uneven social and material conditions that enable its closed and integrated framework.

Publications

Boucher Isabelle, Alex Custodio, Hanine El Mir, Janna Frenzel, and Robert Marinov. “Hopeful and Just Futures Across Scales: Situated Solar Relations: Rethinking Scale for the Renewable Energy Transition." Utopian Studies 35, 1 (Spring 2024).

Boucher, Isabelle. “The Multiscalar Worlds of Remediation. Sitting Halfway Down a Meandering Path” Public Journal 68 (Fall 2023).

This environmental creative nonfiction invites the reader to consider a small, contaminated patch of land tucked inside the Pointe-Aux-Trembles neighborhood in Montréal (Tiohtià:ke). By exploring the multiscalar geographies and histories of this site—now a municipal phytoremediation testbed in close proximity to an oil refinery complex—I seek to reframe the notion of remediation against the extractive and colonial logics that underpin Western technoscientific modes of “healing” places and bodies.

Boucher, Isabelle. “Urban Mires: What Happened to the Garden of Moss?” Heliotrope Journal (April 2023). https://www.heliotropejournal.net/helio/urban-mires.

Activity

Reading/working groups:

Subsumption Working Group led by GRG members Hannah Tollefson and Burç Kostem.  

Toxic Life Working Group led by Krista Lynes (Professor, Communication Studies, Concordia) and Ayesha Vemuri (Research Fellow at the Feminist Media Studio, Concordia)