Laurence Butet-Roch

Laurence Butet-Roch (she/her) is a FRQ postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in the Department of Art History and Communication. Drawing on her professional experience as a writer and photographer focusing on environmental justice issues, her research takes on the tensions that manifest in the entanglements of extractivism, media representation and the politics of visibility. Her doctoral research, which based on affective, collaborative and participative visual discourse analyses of the media coverage of Aamjiwnaang First Nation and its experience of the industrial pollution caused by Chemical Vally argues for representational justice in environmental injustice reporting was awarded a Governor Gold Medal. Building on this media study, she is continuing her probe of toxic visualities and counter-visualities by attending to the media dynamics surrounding the resistance to the Coastal GasLink Pipeline. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Environmental Media, Visual Studies, RACAR, edited volumes, as well as many national and international news titles. For more: lbrmedia.ca

Contact: laurence.butet-roch@mcgill.ca

Projects 
Sights of Resistance: Overseeing the Media Iconography of the Wet’suwet’en Anti-Pipeline Movement

Pipelines, which are critical to the exploitation of natural resources, are only visible as they are being built. Once buried underground, they become a fait accompli, cementing the subterranean system underpinning extractive capitalism well into the future. Given the funds invested in laying these conduits, from both private and public sources, they are then expected to be in operations for decades, extending our dependence on fossil fuel at a time when transition is sorely needed. In this context, opposition movements, which are most active when new pipelines are proposed, are pivotal to the public debate on the ongoing logics of extractivism, as is their representation in news outlets. Put succinctly, how the actions of land and water defenders are mediated shapes how Canadians appraise the viability of fossil fuel infrastructures and of the alternatives called for by environmental and Indigenous groups. A framing that justifies the civic acts would indicate a shifting understanding of the necessity of fossil fuel infrastructures. While depicting such disruptive activities as criminal would signal a persistent appreciation of pipelines as nation-building and continue to legitimize the state’s violation of Indigenous sovereignty. With this in mind, I attend to the media dynamics surrounding the resistance to the Coastal GasLink Pipeline by analysing the images of the Wet’suwet’en anti-pipeline movement published in Canadian news outlets, interviewing the media professionals involved in this coverage and investigating the RCMP’s deployment of a “media exclusion zone” to control access.

Remediating toxic images: picturing environmental justice in Aamjiwnaang First Nation (PhD Dissertation, Environmental Studies, York University, Completed November 2024).

Aamjiwnaang First Nation, an Anishinabek community impacted by Chemical Valley—Canada’s densest concentration of petrochemical manufacturing—appears in the news intermittently when concerns for the health and environmental consequences of industrial contamination (re)surface. In these instances, media interest amounts to a secondary form of exposure. Bodies, natural and human, are first exposed to the toxins released by extractive industries. News reporting exposes them once again, this time to the scrutinizing gazes of photojournalists, which shape how they are then seen, understood, and engaged with by the wider public. Grounded in an understanding of environmental injustice as a manifestation of colonial racial capitalism’s right to maim, this dissertation probes how Aamjiwnaang First Nation has been depicted in Canadian news media. By being attuned to the haunting capacities of photographs as well as the breadth of the imperial scopic regime, I consider how pictures of Aamjiwnaang First Nation assist and create ruptures in narratives that cast a territory and its inhabitants as acceptable sites for environmental harms. Through a participatory approach to visual discourse analysis, which engaged Aamjiwnaang residents in dissections and discussions of images of their community and concerns published in local, provincial and national news outlets, participants articulated their vision of what representational justice would look like for them. They stress the need to resist “half-truths” by finding an equilibrium between portraying the negative realities of industrial pollution and emphasizing the beauty of the First Nation and the strength of its culture. In thinking through this balancing act, Aamjiwnaang community members articulate how photographers, newsrooms and, by extension the public, can witness environmental harms without reinscribing the dominant narrative of bodies and lands exposed to industrial pollution as damaged. Alongside them, in this dissertation, I argue that refusing such extractive views is necessary to unsettle perspectives that construct racialized lives and places as ungrievable, wasted and, therefore, primed for continued contamination.

 Elaborated images as decolonial praxis

As a visual research method, elaborated images can be understood as a mode of photo elicitation, which uses images as prompts during interviews. Much like in photo elicitation, participants are asked to reflect on the content and composition of the photograph as well as explain the feelings and memories it evokes. However, they do so directly onto the image, rather than rely on the researcher to create a distinct textual record of the conversation. Rather than an image and its interpretations living side-by-side, the two now intertwine in such a way that they become indissociable. The image cannot be viewed without registering the annotations, revisions, additions, or subtractions that were made to it. In this way, the polysemic nature of photography, how it invites multiple interpretations and allows for their coexistence, is laid bare. Consolidated onto a single frame, the inscriptions point to the multiple ways to engage and understand the image, thereby reflecting its inherent polysemy. A span of dialectical relationships manifests itself through the annotations. The dialogue may be one of assent, where the annotator builds on and amplifies all or part of the message carried by the frame. On the other end of the spectrum, it could convey dissent, offering amendments or rectifications to the representation. Most often, the dialogue exists somewhere in between, providing evidence that a photograph, while indexical, is not gospel.

 (We are) of rivers, lands and skies.

This curatorial project, initiated for the Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen Art Gallery at the University of Moncton foregrounds photographic works that reflect ways reciprocal relationships with nature are expressed and the worlds they sustain. This perspective stems from my research on the representation of environmental issues: how to convey the multiple emergencies we face without reinforcing the perception that the outcome—the destruction of our planet—is inevitable. As such, beyond representing the damage caused by the overexploitation of natural resources and industrial production, and/or focusing on eco-responsible initiatives—two approaches that are certainly necessary but which are part of a problem-solution binary —I wanted to highlight stories that affirm the existence of connections with nature based not on a relationship of ownership and exploitation, but rather on mutuality, that is, the recognition of the intrinsic value of our ecosystem as well as our interdependence and responsibility towards everything that constitutes it. The first exhibition featured works by Amber Bracken, Stephanie Foden, Alex Jacobs-Blum, and Josée Pedneault which speak of wonder, restrain, stewardship and kinship.

Publications 
Laurence Butet-Roch. “Brighter, Better Days”: Relating (to) toxic images through attuned visual practices. In Sensing and resisting environmental crises through visual culture. Edited by Tatiana Konrad. University of Exeter Press. 26 pp. (forthcoming()

 Laurence Butet-Roch, Jacob McLean, Laura Tanguay and Isaac Thornley. Dear Comrades: Letters on Extraction and the Crimes of Occupation. In The End of Extraction as We Know It. Edited by Erynne Giplin, Amy Janzwood and Sarah Marie Wiebe. University of Athabasca Press. 29 pp. (forthcoming)

Laurence Butet-Roch. Remediating toxic images: relating practices for representational and environmental justice. RACAR Vol. 50, no. 1, 2025, pp. 14-29

Laurence Butet-Roch and Deanna Del Vecchio. Elaborated images as decolonial praxis. Visual Studies Vol.39, no. 4, 2024, pp. 732-747. 

Laurence Butet-Roch, Sarah Marie Wiebe and Ada Lockridge. Chemical Valley and Aamjiwnaang First Nation. In Encyclopedia of Technological Hazards and Disasters in the Social Sciences. Edited by Duane Gill, Liesel Ritchie and Nnenia Campbell. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024, pp.109-116.

Laurence Butet-Roch. Toxic Images. In Encyclopedia of Technological Hazards and Disasters in the Social Sciences. Edited by Duane Gill, Liesel Ritchie and Nnenia Campbell. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024, pp.701-705

Sarah Marie Wiebe, Laurence Butet-Roch and Kauwila Mahi. Introduction: Current of crisis: Emergent life beyond the climate emergency across the Pacific. Journal of Environmental Media, Vol.2, no. s1, 2021, pp.1-6.

Activity
Beyond Extraction is a collaborative, interdisciplinary and creative critique of (and resistance to) the cultural narratives and partnerships of the extractive industry. Since 2020, to disrupt the growing influence of the mining industry in Canadian curricula and cultural production, artists, activists and academics, have come together to produce counter-tools such as an in-person and audio-visual digital tour of the Royal Ontario Museum’s mining-sponsored exhibition of minerals (2022), a colouring book about resource extraction available in four languages (2024), and, currently in development, a board game through which players navigate key actors and landmarks of Toronto’s ecologies of extraction.

Course –  COMS 500: Special Topics in Communication Studies 1:  Extractive visualities and counter-visualities (McGill University, Winter 2026)

To be concerned with extractive visualities is to consider how images participate in the destruction of worlds, as well as in their rebuilding, with a particular attention to their discursive and material roles in shaping environmental and labour realities. In this seminar, which brings together insights from settler colonial studies, discard studies, disability studies, media studies, and environmental humanities, we will think about how we can represent environmental injustices in ways that resist perpetuating the damaging, discriminating, and dehumanizing narratives that serve extractivism. Our work will consist of two complementary endeavours: to identify and dissect the historical ways of seeing that continue to prime lands and bodies for exploitation, and to imagine and amplify alternative representational strategies that make visible the extractive logics that have been naturalized while also prefacing more sustainable and just futures.