2025 Technoscience Salon: Jayson Maurice Porter
Jayson Porter x What is a Chemical?
Tuesday, March 4th, 2025
4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Seminar Room #10031
700 University Ave, Toronto, ON
University of Toronto
Jayson Maurice Porter was born in Maryland like his great-grandmother Winona Amanda Spencer Lee (1909-2012), who worked family farm land on the Eastern Shore until the early 2000s. His research specializes in environmental politics, science and technology studies, food systems, and racial ecologies in Mexico and the Americas. He is also an editorial board member of the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA) and Plant Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Book Launch & Panel: A Woman is a School
Join us for the Toronto launch and book panel of A Woman is a School with Céline Semaan, founder of the Slow Factory.
The Technoscience Research Unit is excited to host A Women is a School Toronto book launch and panel with author and Slow Factory founder Céline Semaan, in conversation with Samira Mohyeddin from On The Line Media and Tai Salih from The Red Ma’at Collective.
A Woman is a School is the first memoir and cultural anthropological book by Slow Factory founder, Céline Semaan. As a war-survivor and child refugee sharing endangered and discredited ancestral knowledge of the Global South, particularly tales from Lebanon from 1948 to 2023—the book follows the tradition of the hakawati, the storytellers of the Levant, holding Indigenous knowledge and wisdom, Céline Semaan, a hakawati herself, documents what she has witnessed throughout her life and the lives of her family members, sharing her upbringing and cultures of resistance.
Céline Semaan is a Lebanese-Canadian designer, writer, artist, speaker, and advocate working at the intersection of environmental and social justice. Céline is the founder of Slow Factory, a 501c3 public service organization addressing the intersecting crises of climate justice and social inequity — filling the gap for climate adaptation and preparedness, building community power through open education, narrative change and regenerative design.
Samira Mohyeddin is an award-winning producer and broadcast journalist and is the President and Editor in Chief of On The Line Media. She has a Master of Arts in Gender and Mideast History from the University of Toronto and a post graduate diploma in journalism from Centennial College's Story Arts Centre.
Tai Salih (she/her), E-RYT® 500, YACEP®, is an unapologetic intersectional pan-African abolitionist and fierce womanist from Sudan. As a multi-disciplinary social and healing justice educator and facilitator, she dismantles oppressive systems through her diverse roles as an integrative counsellor, social justice advocate, anti-oppression educator, wellness ambassador with lululemon, and emergency response reservist with the Canadian Red Cross. Her life's mission is rooted in decolonization and the radical empowerment of marginalized communities.
The Slow Factory is an award-winning arts for collective liberation movement and organization led by Arab and Afro-Indigenous women and queer gender non-comforming artists, producing media, conferences, interactive exhibitions, gatherings and workshops centering the lived experience of people of the Global Majority: displaced or local, who thrive for collective liberation. Built on a feminist lens for climate and social justice, its practice is to create in a way that is good for the planet and good for people.
The Technoscience Research Unit is an Indigenous-led home for critical and creative research on the politics of technoscience. Since 2007, the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto has been the institutional Indigenous-led home for many scholars researching within the fields of science, technology and environment. Through research projects, micro-laboratories, and working groups, we support and foster Indigenous, feminist, queer, environmental, anti-racist and anti-colonial methodologies for studying the history and politics of technoscience. Our research activities – clustered together in laboratories – are organized according to three priority areas: Environmental Data Justice; Indigenous Science, Technology & Environment Studies; and Indigenous Science and Ethical Substance.
Andrew Barry: The Geography of Chemicals
Andrew Barry: The Geography of Chemicals
Tuesday 28 January 2025
4:00pm - 6:00pm EST
Seminar Room #10031
700 University Ave, Toronto, ON
University of Toronto
Register via Eventbrite →
This talk addresses three themes that are common to chemical and geographical thought that together shed light on the broader question of ‘what is a chemical?’. The first is the temporality of chemical substances and, specifically, their accumulation over time, across generations, creating shifting distributions and compositions of chemical substances. Chemical geography, which was initially defined in terms of the imperial control of mineral resources, or what today has come to be called the problem of ‘critical minerals’, is necessarily concerned with the political geography of novel chemical substances, including toxic materials, and their uneven accumulation. The second theme is scale, a topic that has long been central to the identity of both Geography and Chemistry as disciplines. After all, Chemistry is a science that dwells on the problem of how to understand the relation between the microchemical, including molecular and atomic structures, and macrochemical phenomena such as water pollution the depletion of the ozone layer. Here I focus not on discrete and purified chemical substances, but on the multiple relations between the micro and the macrochemical that are central to the question of what is a chemical, and its politics. The third theme is sensing, and the diverse ways in which the presence, transformation and circulation of chemicals has come to be both registered and supplemented through being recorded. I sketch a history of sensing the chemical, through the ongoing use of animals as proxies through which the presence of toxic chemicals has been recognised, to the development of citizen action and science, and technologies of sensing including isotopic environmental chemistry, remote sensing, and computer simulation. While the range of chemical substances proliferates, the presence of chemicals is registered in multiple ways, generating new ‘informed materials’, and supplemented by vast data bases. The politics and geography of the chemical revolve around all these three themes: accumulation, scale, and sensing.
Andrew Barry is Professor of Human Geography at University College London. He studied Physics, Chemistry and the History of and Philosophy of Science, and subsequently completed a PhD in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Sussex. He has been involved in a series of innovative institutional initiatives including the development of the Centre for Study of Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths College, the UCL Anthropocene initiative, and the Chemical Exposures research group. His publications include: Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society; Foucault and Political Reason; Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences; and Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline. He is currently writing a book on Chemical Geography.