EVENTS
Technoscience Salon
Join us for the
2026/2027 Technoscience Salon:
Indigenous Science and 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: Indigenous Science and Ethical Grounds.
As continuation of last year’s theme, 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, with a focus on developing research methods suited to data and computationally-driven contexts, and 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 2026-2027 Technoscience Salon Series: Indigenous Science and 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.
Two paradigms walk into a lab: A conversation with Max Liboiron
Thursday, October 1, 2026
5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Dr. Max Liboiron is a Professor in Geography at Memorial University, where they direct the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR). CLEAR develops feminist and anti-colonial methodologies to study marine plastic pollution. Liboiron is author of Pollution is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021) and co-author of Discard Studies: Systems, Wasting, and Power (MIT Press, 2022).
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.
Past Salons
