What is an ‘ethical substance’ and how it might be defined? This project explores these questions through queer, anti-colonial, Indigenous, and justice-oriented perspectives, alongside community partnerships and through art-based practices. By examining often-overlooked ethical tensions and ongoing harms of substances, we foreground Indigenous and and value-based understandings of substance in materials discovery and research.  

Our research approach centers collaborations with workers and communities to reimagine relationships to substances in ways that honor land, bodies, and collective well-being.

Key initiatives include: What is a Chemical? Workshops; land-based and art-making practices; workers-led visions of ethical nail salons with the Parkdale Queen-West Community Health Centre and Nail Technicians’ Network; collaboration with the Environmental Data Justice Lab and Aamjiwnaang First Nation chemical risk research; critical minerals research with Sacred Earth.

This research reimagines data through Indigenous perspectives centering sovereignty, ethics, and governance across the full cycle of research. We shift understandings of data from information or neutral resources, to a set of  relations deeply tied to people, land, and governance systems. We bring Indigenous Data Sovereignty frameworks to think about governance across many forms of data, Indigenous, environmental, chemical, community, and computational; and, pay close attention to risks or harms that current scientific data practices pose to communities.

We ask: Who benefits? Who decides? What is data? How might data systems be transformed if aligned with values and governance? 

Key initiatives include: curriculum in IDGov and IDSov; capacity-building with Indigenous faculty, students, and communities; research across Indigenous data, AI, data ethics, and open data and big data; gatherings for dialogue and co-develop of data governance protocols and practices.

This international Indigenous-led project, funded by an NFRF Transformation Grant, builds community-based chemical risk analysis tools of use to frontline Indigenous communities and brings Indigenous methods and knowledges into chemical risk analysis and new methods of toxicological analysis.

Data Fabrics is an art-based learning series that explores Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance through creative, relational, and hands-on approaches. The series creates spaces to think critically about data beyond colonial and institutional frameworks and toward Indigenous ways of knowing, governing, and caring for data. 

Across workshops, Data Fabrics brings together discussions, readings, art-making, and reflections to support participants in engaging with data as relational, contextual, and embedded in lands, communities, and responsibilities. Each workshop in the series focuses on a different aspect of data using creative practices as tools for learning, sense-making, and reimagining data futures.