Technoscience
Salon
Join us for the
2025/2026 Technoscience Salon:
Ethical Grounds
The Technoscience Salon is an open forum for entangling intellectual and political questions about technoscience across the disciplines composing Science and Technology Studies. TRU is thrilled to announce this year's Technoscience Salon Series: Ethical Grounds.
Across 2025-2026, the TRU will gather Indigenous scholars, community members, and students to think together about what it means to do science, technology, and environmental research differently. From Soil and More to Indigenous AI, to radical imaginings of Scientific Ethics, we’ll dive into how Indigenous research is:
developing research methods suited to data and computationally-driven contexts
shifting environmental regulations and needs, and transforming scientific policies, protocols, and practices
The Technoscience Salon is not your usual academic series. It is a forum where work-in-progress, emerging ideas, and experimental approaches are celebrated. Our guests share their work through public-facing talks and closed workshops with students while our stirrers (graduate students and community members) get the conversation going and keep it interesting.
The 2025-2026 Technoscience Salon Series: Ethical Grounds invites everyone to think expansively, creatively, while rigorously about what Indigenous Science, Technology, and Environmental Studies can be and do.
The series is hosted by the Technoscience Research Unit (TRU), an Indigenous-led home for critical and creative research on the politics of technoscience at the University of Toronto.
Kelsey Leonard :: Ethical Grounds
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Dr. Kelsey Leonard is a water scientist, legal scholar, policy expert, writer, and enrolled citizen of the Shinnecock Nation. Her work focuses on Indigenous water justice and its climatic, territorial, and governance underpinnings for our shared sustainable future. Dr. Leonard represents the Shinnecock Nation on the Mid-Atlantic Committee on the Ocean, which is charged with protecting America's ocean ecosystems and coastlines. She also serves as a member of the Great Lakes Water Quality Board of the International Joint Commission. Dr. Leonard has been instrumental in safeguarding the interests of Indigenous Nations for environmental planning, and builds Indigenous science and knowledge into new solutions for sustainable water and ocean governance.
Jessica Kolopenuk and Rick W. A. Smith :: Ethical Grounds
Thursday, January 15, 2026
4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Jessica Kolopenuk (Cree, Peguis First Nation) is an associate professor and the Alberta Health Services (AHS) Chair in Indigenous Health in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry. Prior to this appointment, she was an assistant professor in the Faculty of Native Studies (FNS) (2018-2022). She completed her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Victoria in 2020 for which she was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal.
Rick W. A. Smith is a biocultural anthropologist working at the intersections of genomics and Science and Technology Studies (STS). He completed his Ph.D. in 2017 at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining the faculty at Mason, he completed a three year postdoctoral fellowship with the Neukom Institute for Computational Science and the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. In addition to working within the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Mason, he is affiliated with the Women and Gender Studies program and is the director of the Science and Society Research Hub within the Center for Social Science Research.
The Technoscience Salon is an open forum for entangling intellectual and political questions about technoscience while remixing the disciplines composing STS.
Launched in 2008, the Salon aims to create a lively community of thinkers with interests in technoscience studies in Toronto. Drawing participants from multiple universities as well as artistic and technical communities, the Salon aspires to prompt playful and experimental engagements, as well as new collaborations and conversations.
The Salon encourages experimental, short, playful and conversational forms of gathering. Instead of typical research papers, we invite our co-organizers and speakers to deliver provocations that are geared towards opening up discussions and further collaboration. Discussants stir up the conversation with short improvisational responses that kick start our collective thinking.
We are committed to pushing the form and genre of intellectual gatherings and collaborate with our speakers to that end.
We are incredibly thankful to all the co-organizers, funders and participants who have made the Technoscience Salon so successful over the past 13 years. Thank you to everyone who has taken the lead on organizing the Technoscience Salon in past years, including:
M. Murphy; Kristen Bos; Natasha Myers; Patrick Keilty; Nicole Charles; Nehal El-Hadi; OmiSoore Dryden; Metalab; Rohini Patel; Reena Shadaan; Vanbasten de Araujo; Sophie Jaworski; Lindsay LeBlanc; Sajdeep Soomal; Dawn Walker; Shiho Satsuka; Sebastian Gil-Riaño; Astrid Schrader; Sofie Afriat; Emily Simmonds; Sarah Tracy; Edward Jones-Imhotep and Sergio Sismondo.
The Salon has received generous financial and in-kind support from many peoples and places since it started in the late 2000s. From 2007 – 2013, the Salon was funded by the Toronto Node of the SSHRC Situating Science Research Cluster Grant and between 2014 – 2015, it was sponsored by the Institute of Science and Technology Studies at York University. We thank IHPST for sponsoring the 2015-16 Salon. The 2016-17 Salon was supported by a grant from the office of Graduate Studies and Research in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies and the Jackman Humanities Institute. From 2017-2021, the Salon was supported by WGSI, the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory (DREC), and the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. Our 2023-25 Salons were supported by the What is a Chemical SSHRC project. The 2025-26 Salon is supported by Acceleration Consortium CFREF.
