10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17589
application/pdf
2038-3460
17589
2
en
Miriam Tola
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism, Duke University Press, 2021
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
13
Book Reviews
2023-02-19
2023-06-30
2023-02-19
2023-10-30
173-178
TS
Miriam Tola
2022
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17589
173
University of Lausanne
2038-3460
2
en
178
Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism, Duke University Press, 2021
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17589/16437
13
Book Review                                                                   173

References
Coleman, G. (2014) Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anon-
      ymous, London and New York, Verso Books.
Crabu, S. and Magaudda, P. (2018) Bottom-up Infrastructures: Aligning Politics and
       Technology in Building a Wireless Community Network, in “Computer Sup-
       ported Cooperative Work (CSCW)”, 27(2), pp. 149-76.
Fuchs, C. (2007) Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age, New
       York, Routledge.
Fuchs, C. (2021a) Marxist Humanism and Communication Theory: Media, Commu-
       nication and Society Volume One, London, Routledge.
Fuchs, C. (2021b) Foundations of Critical Theory: Media, Communication and Society
       Volume Two, London, Routledge.
Fuchs, C. (2021c) Digital Capitalism: Media, Communication and Society Volume
       Three, London, Routledge.
Fuchs, C. (2022a) Digital Fascism: Media, Communication and Society Volume Four,
       London, Routledge.
Fuchs, C. (2022b) Digital Ethics: Media, Communication and Society Volume Five,
       London, Routledge.
Fuchs, C. (2022c) Digital Democracy and the Digital Public Sphere: Media, Commu-
       nication and Society Volume Six, London, Routledge.
Kelty, C.M. (2008) Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Durham,
        Duke University Press Books.
Musiani, F., Cogburn, D.L., DeNardis, L. and Levinson, N.S. (2016) The Turn to
      Infrastructure in Internet Governance, in “Information Technology and
      Global Governance”, New York, Palgrave Macmillan.

                                    ***

    Max Liboiron
Pollution is Colonialism, Durham, Duke University Press, 2021, pp. 216

Miriam Tola University of Lausanne

   Laboratory studies are a popular genre within STS. Since Latour and
Woolgar’s Laboratory Life, a now classic ethnography of a neuroendocri-
nology lab in California (1979), STS has long been interested in science in
the making. Following the day-to-day work of scientists, lab studies show
that scientific knowledge emerges through the interactions between humans,
174                                                                     Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


research infrastructures and nonhuman actors, including mediating technol-
ogies, pathogenic bacteria and experimental animals. Max Liboiron draws
on this tradition but departs from it by foregrounding the relationship be-
tween scientific practices and the reproduction of colonialism. What is dis-
tinctive about Liboiron’s approach is the use of autoethnographic accounts
of lab life for drawing attention to the assumptions about land, nature and
property in pollution science, and modeling an anticolonial methodology.
     The author, who identifies as Métis/Michif and settler and uses
they/them pronouns, directs Memorial University’s Civic Laboratory for
Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) in the island of Newfoundland,
Canada. Once the ancestral homelands of Beothuk and Mi’kmaq popula-
tions, settled by Irish people working in the fisheries under British control,
the province of Newfoundland and Labrador remains a fishing area where
people, settlers and indigenous, are economically dependent and inti-
mately related to cod. In this place where colonialism is ongoing and contin-
uous, CLEAR’s team develops open-source tools and protocols for monitoring
plastic pollution in local water, marine animals and food webs. This means
collecting fish stomachs, assessing the presence of plastics and disseminating
research through publications and other means. The goal is finding out if and
to what degree marine animals that were caught for food have digested plastics.
Yet, what really matters is how this research practice is performed.
    CLEAR, defined by Liboiron “a feminist anticolonial lab”, produces
science informed by the guiding principle that all knowledge is embodied
and place-based, that is, emerging from specific relations to land. Here re-
searchers are trained to address a set of practical questions with anti/colo-
nial implications: how to collect, analyze, and dispose of fish guts in ways
that honor the animal and the land where they came from? How to conduct
non extractive research with local communities, indigenous and settlers,
while remaining accountable to them? The lab is the primary case study for
the book to examine pollution as central to colonial relations that see land
mainly as a repository of resources and sink for waste. Vignettes from field-
work, excerpts from the lab’s protocols, and reflections from lab members
are interspersed in the text. Liboiron uses them for examining “the role of
science in achieving both colonialism and anticolonialism” (p. 36) and devel-
oping an anticolonial methodology as “a way of being in the world” (p. 1).
    Pollution is Colonialism highlights the ambivalences of developing an-
ticolonial practices in a settler colonial context. It considers the difficult
relation between colonial science that assumes land as resource and sink,
and Indigenous science that sees Land as the connections:

      between material aspects some people might think of as landscapes – water,
      soil, air, plants, stars – and histories, spirits, events, kinships, accountabili-
      ties, and other people that aren’t human. (p. 43)
Book Review                                                               175

    These knowledge systems, writes the author, “are not monolithic and
stable, but rather changing, moving, patchy, incomplete, plural and di-
verse” (p. 130). In discussing plastic pollution through embodied and
place-based perspectives, this book contributes to the robust body of fem-
inist and Indigenous STS, including the work of Kim TallBear (2013) and
Michelle Murphy (2017). These authors, central interlocutors for Liboiron,
have developed nuanced accounts of colonial legacies within technosci-
ence and interrogated their effects on people and land.
    Pollution is Colonialism comprises an introduction and three chapters
complemented by unusually rich footnotes that include personal details,
humorous comments and acknowledgments to the book’s many sources.
The introduction outlines key concepts and useful distinctions. Colonial-
ism is defined as ongoing access to indigenous land, concepts and life-
worlds “to advance settler and colonial goals, even if they are benevolent
ones” (p. 26). Following Tuck and Yang (2012) decolonizing means the
restitution of indigenous land and life rather than something that is done
in university classrooms, through seminars and syllabi. Liboiron acknowl-
edges that colonization is not one but many and that decolonial traditions
in Latin America and Africa have long been struggling for the decoloniza-
tion of knowledge. Yet, in settler colonial Canada, as well as the rest of
North America, the indigenous decolonial project insists on claiming land
back. In this sense, decolonial is not synonymous with anticolonial, a con-
cept enacted through a diversity of claims and subject positions, obliga-
tions, and accountabilities. For instance, as a lab comprising settler and In-
digenous researchers, CLEAR does anticolonial rather than decolonial or In-
digenous science. It develops protocols for pursuing good land relations that
“do not reproduce settler and colonial entitlement to Land” (p. 27).
    Chapter 1, titled Land, Nature, Resource, Property, interrogates how no-
tions of natural resource and property ownership underwrite modern pol-
lution science since the early 20th century. In the 1910s, H.W. Streeter and
E.B. Phelps, North American scientists working in sanitation engineering,
conducted research in the Ohio River Valley, an area where the US Public
Health Service had identified a water sanitation problem. They introduced
a mathematical model for measuring water’s assimilative capacity, that is,
the conditions and rates under which water can self-purify from pollutants.
This work laid the ground for a landmark theory of pollution: nature can
metabolize a certain amount of pollution before it becomes harmful. Li-
boiron, however, demonstrates that this pollution model naturalizes spe-
cific land relations predicated upon the appropriation and maximum use
of resources. This has happened despite the scientists’ best intentions.
Phelps was “a bold environmental conservationist” (p. 8) and yet he advo-
cated for “all rivers on all lands to be governed – carefully! Precisely! – as
proper sinks for pollution” (p. 9).
176                                                        Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


    Chapter 2, titled Scale, Harm, Violence, Land, extends and complicates
this critique through a discussion of the industrial chemical bisphenol A
(BPA), an endocrine disrupting chemical found in plastic. It looks at sci-
entific studies of BPA that have contested the dominant threshold theory
of harm. This work, argues Liboiron, is useful for moving from the scale of
harm, focusing on the action of discrete chemicals in a specific moment in
time, to the scale of violence that allows to see how contaminants operate
over time within industrial relations and through the interactions with
other chemicals. In the case of BPA, argues Liboiron, “dominant science
has provided its own critique of the hallmarks of colonial science, including
autonomy, discreteness, and separation by seeing contaminants differ-
ently” (p. 97). In other words, dominant science is not a monolith but a
field animated by both colonial and anticolonial impulses.
    Chapter 3, titled An Anticolonial Pollution Science, centers CLEAR’s
place-based approaches for researching plastic pollution. The lab has de-
veloped methods that are committed to good land relations and informed
by Indigenous science while also drawing on dominant science. For exam-
ple, CLEAR’s researchers have stopped using chemicals that require haz-
ardous waste disposal even though this has posed problems for the study
of plastic pollution in certain marine animals. They have crafted a model
of community peer review that, although quite similar to traditional aca-
demic peer review, requires the inclusion of local indigenous groups and
fishers in the decision-making process concerning the research objects and
its dissemination. Rich in ethnographic details, this chapter addresses im-
portant questions about developing critiques of universalism while at the
same time allowing anti-colonial methods to move across contexts. Liboiron
asks, “How do place-based, nonuniversal methods travel? How do we take
messages with us without being extractive or Resource-oriented?” (p. 37).
These questions challenge STS to account for the ways in which “we always
already are in L/land relations, and they come out in our methods” (p. 37).
    The book troubles the (white, colonial) canon of STS by foregrounding
the contribution of Indigenous and anticolonial scholarship. It denatural-
izes the North American habit of identifying Indigenous authors with their
tribal citizenship and authors of color as black while assuming that white
and settler scholars are the neutral norm. So, in the same way that Kim
TallBear’s name is followed by her tribal affiliation (Sisseton-Wahpeton
Oyate), Bruno Latour’s name is followed by the term “unmarked” in pa-
renthesis. The choice to make explicit the relation to whiteness is an invi-
tation for authors to positions themselves, clarify where they are speaking
from and what structures of privilege they inhabit. This is another contri-
bution to the STS community and beyond to become more self-reflexive
in thinking about power, privilege and land relations.
    Provocative and highly readable, Pollution is Colonialism challenges
readers, specifically whites and settlers and particularly those who like to
Book Review                                                                  177

think of themselves as supportive of Indigenous people’s struggles, to con-
sider how seemingly innocent or well-intentioned research methods, tech-
niques, and modes of dissemination can reproduce dominant science. The
book invites to question the collective land relations of which we are all
part of. While it studies plastic pollution in Canada, its generative critique
spans beyond North America. Reading it in Italy, as the writer of this re-
view did, means having the chance to reflect on the legacies of the Italian
and European colonial projects. It means rethinking how European colo-
nialism has reduced land inhabited by others to waste through patterns of
power and pollution that continue today. The transnational disposal of
plastic and other wastes from areas of privilege to other places, is just an
example of ongoing colonial relations.
    It is interesting that the book’s release coincides with the peak of the
decolonial turn across academic disciplines and at a time when significant
questions are raised about how “decolonization” has become a buzzword
within the university, often used without even mentioning the vital work of
Indigenous scholars and researchers from colonized groups. Pollution is
Colonialism directs attention to the uses and misuses of decolonial, antico-
lonial and indigenous frameworks in academia. For example, Liboiron
notes the “rampant fetishization of nonhumans as kin” (p. 110) and reads
it as a form of appropriation and redemption performed by non-indige-
nous academics toward indigenous cosmologies. This aspect would have
deserved more discussion as it also interrogates STS’s focus on human and
nonhuman associations. Liboiron does not delve deeply into this particular
tension between Indigenous studies and STS but invites to slow down the
enthusiasm for more-than-human entanglements that characterizes much of
STS and, more broadly, the environmental humanities and social sciences.
    Readers of Liboiron’s book, particularly outside of North America,
would have benefitted from further discussion about the history of
CLEAR, the financial resources supporting the lab and its relation to the
Canadian state and other settler colonial institutions. This would have
helped to produce a better understanding of what aspects of the lab’s
methods can be adapted into other contexts to develop situated anticolo-
nial science. Notwithstanding this minor point, Liboiron’s contribution is
of great value for STS and adjacent fields. It shows that another science is
possible, but it requires disrupting the habit of assuming land as resource
and sink, and experimenting with more ethical modes of being in the world
and conducting research.

References
Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1979) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific
       Facts, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Murphy, M. (2017) Afterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations, in “Cultural An-
      thropology”, 32(4), pp. 494-503.
178                                                          Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)

TallBear, K. (2013) Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise
       of Genetic Science, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Tuck, E. and Yang, K.W. (2012) Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, in “Decoloni-
       zation: Indigeneity, Education & Society”, 1(1), pp. 1-40.

                                   ***

   Ksenia Ermoshina, Francesca Musiani
Concealing for Freedom: The Making of Encryption, Secure Messaging and
Digital Liberties, Manchester, Mattering Press, 2022

Michele Veneziano University of Bologna

    Concealing for Freedom by Knesia Ermoshina and Francesca Musiani is
the first book on encryption primarily grounded in STS. It is a much-
needed book, that successfully shows how the STS toolkit can advance a
socio-technical understanding of encryption, unfolding several major is-
sues that would otherwise remain unrevealed.
    Encryption is certainly among those technologies that are perceived as
obscure and abstruse by most of the population. Despite the tendency to
classify this technology as something for tech-savvy, activists, and war re-
porters, in recent years there has been a rise in media interest in the issue.
Of course, the Snowden 2013 revelations – with which the whistleblower
Edward Snowden leaked the existence of highly classified intelligence-
gathering surveillance programs run by the U.S.’s National Security
Agency and the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters – have
been a turning point for the field of encryption that started gaining popu-
larity also beyond the specialized circles, becoming a matter of public con-
cern. Since then, the topic has regularly sparked interest. Recently, for in-
stance, after European Commission’s proposal to force tech companies to
scan private messages protected by end-to-end encryption in search of
child sexual abuse materials, several digital rights activists and watchdog
organizations started to speak about the “EU war on encryption”. Similar
debates occurred also concerning the necessity to have a “backdoor” to
open encrypted chats to prevent terrorism. Therefore, the topic is tremen-
dously important not only for the impact it has on the personal freedoms
of users and citizens but also on social phenomena that are particularly
sensitive to public opinion, such as the cases of terrorism and child abuse.
    The book originates from a three-year interdisciplinary research project
called NEXTLEAP, which ran from 2016 to 2018, with the aim of deploy-
ing communication and computation protocols for a secure, trust-worthy,
and privacy-respecting Internet that could ensure citizens’ fundamental
