Isabelle Boucher
Isabelle Boucher’s work is situated at the intersection of feminist STS, environmental humanities, and political ecology. Her research project examines the cultural values, the knowledge politics and the political economy that underpin the recent development of Earth System Science (ESS). More specifically Isabelle questions how ESS, rooted in the history of cybernetics, informs global and local renewable energy and sustainability narratives, policies, and infrastructures.
By triangulating the grammars of energy, sustainability, and power according to ESS (neo-)colonial histories and scientific methodologies, she highlights the critical intersection of environmental and social justice issues and argues for the importance of epistemic justice at the heart of decolonial energy imaginaries. She is now a course instructor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, where she teaches “Critical studies in Climate Change.”
Contact: Isabelle.a.boucher@gmail.com
Projects
November 8-11, 2023: Presenter at the forthcoming conference 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.” This research addresses one aspect of my thesis.
The paper investigates the ways in which the emergence of Earth System Science (ESS) has impacted human and technological agency, as well as the political articulation of knowledge and energy/waste. I will argue that ESS’s technosphere concept (Haff 2013) fails to consider that which eludes the epistemo-technological framework that has assembled these spheres into a closed and delimited system. If defining the boundaries of an organism is a site of political governance (Daggett 2019, 120) then one might ask which forms of governance are associated with ESS knowledge, as well as what alternative worldviews might be sidelined to inform the political systems it drives. By drawing from the example of the Biosphere 2 closed system experiment—which famously failed due to declining oxygen levels and would have failed if fossil fuels had not condition its climate—I will investigate how its energy use and waste management practices reflect the cybernetic assumptions and fallacies of ESS’s overreliance on technological agencies and on a transcendental outside observer/knower to determine the nature of energy/waste, and how they must be re-cycled.
June 28-30, 2023: Co-presenter (with GRG member Robert Marinov) at the conference STS Italia: Interesting Worlds to Come. Paper title: “Copper Cities: Opening the ‘black box’ of smart city sustainability discourses.” This is part of an ongoing collaborative project about the environmental cost of Smart Cities and “green technologies.” For this presentation we focused on copper, which we argued could be viewed as both a material condition and a heuristic object that lies at the intersection of urban governance, environmental justice, and sustainability discourses. We would like to extend our research to policies and discourses on sustainable development in Quebec, including recent developments in battery technologies.
Publications
[In Print] 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 imaginaries and practices of healing.
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 group: Subsumption Working Group led by GRG member Burç Kostem.