Michelle Murphy is Red River Métis and French-Canadian from Winnipeg and a Professor in the History Department and Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. They are a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Science and Technology Studies and Environmental Data Justice, co-director the Technoscience and Research Unit, which has a strength in Indigenous Science and Technology Studies, and they are a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Their research is situated in technoscience studies and history, examining decolonial approaches to environmental justice, colonialism, data politics, chemical exposures, sexuality, infrastructures, reproduction, and race. Murphy is also the co-director of an Indigenous Environmental Data Justice Lab, along with Vanessa Gray of Aamjiwnaang First Nation, that focuses on pollution and data in Canada’s Chemical Valley through community-based research that includes policy and technology creation, such as the Pollution Reporter App, and the online Land and Refinery history project.
Murphy’s most recent book, The Economization of Life (2017) traces the history of the “population control movement” which emerged out of the early 20th century eugenics movement. The movement prioritized national economy, assigning value to human populations and dividing them into categories of more or less worth of life and reproduction based on economic incentives. Murphy shows how this ideology was, and continues to be, deeply steeped in colonialism and racism. They were awarded the Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science for this book in 2019.
Murphy’s current research project is called Alter Life in the Ongoing Aftermath of Industrial Chemicals and explores the unevenly shared condition of life of being altered by human-made, industrially produced chemicals. The project focuses on chemical exposures and altered life on the lower Great Lakes, Anishinaabe and Haudenoshaunee land, while also striving to amplify decolonial, reparative, and feminist potentials.
Contact:
Email: michelle.murphy@utoronto.ca
Website: https://michellemurphy.net/
Select Works:
Vanessa Gray, Beze Gray, Fernanda Yanchapaxi, Kristen Bos, and M Murphy. “Data Colonialism in Canada’s Chemical Valley: Aamjiwnaang First Nation and the Failure of the Pollution Notification System.” Special Report. Toronto: Yellowhead Institute and Technoscience Research Unit, 2023. https://yellowheadinstitute.org/data-colonialism-in-canadas-chemical-valley/.
“Pollution, Colonialism, and Re-imagining Chemicals.” Keynote Seminar for the Deakin Science and Society Network, 23 June 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fTL-iRyM3U
Shadaan, Reena, and Michelle Murphy. “EDC’s as Industrial Chemicals and Settler Colonial Structures: Towards a Decolonial Feminist Approach.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 6, no. 1 (May 15, 2020). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i1.32089.
Environmental Data Justice Lab. “The Land and the Refinery: Past, Present, and Future.” Toronto: Techoscience Research Unit, 2019. https://www.landandrefinery.org/.
“Against Population, Towards Alterlife.” In Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations, edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway, 101-124. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018.
The Economization of Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
“Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Exposures” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4 (Nov 2017): 494-503.
“What Can’t A Body Do?” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3, no. 1 (Fall 2017): 1-15.
“Abduction, Reproduction, and Postcolonial Infrastructures of Data.” Talk for TRAVERSING TECHNOLOGIES, Scholar & Feminist Online 13.3 – 14.1 (2016). https://sfonline.barnard.edu/michelle-murphy-abduction-reproduction-and-postcolonial-infrastructures-of-data/
“Unsettling Care: Troubling Transnational Itineraries of Affect in Feminist Health Practices” Social Studies of Science45, no. 5 (2015): 717-737.
Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.