Isabelle Boucher

Isabelle Boucher’s work is situated at the intersection of feminist STS, environmental humanities, and political ecology. Her research project examines the cultural values, the knowledge politics and the political economy that underpin the recent development of Earth System Science (ESS). More specifically Isabelle questions how ESS, rooted in the history of cybernetics, informs global and local renewable energy and sustainability narratives, policies, and infrastructures, and seeks to uncover its underlying assumptions about “the Earth,” without ignoring the complexities and critical potential of this science in the context of climate change mitigation strategies and environmental remediation endeavors. By triangulating the grammars of energy, sustainability, and power according to ESS (neo-)colonial histories and scientific methodologies, she highlights the critical intersection of environmental and social justice issues and argues for the importance of epistemic justice at the heart of decolonial energy and sustainability imaginaries. She recently collaborated with Professor Liz Miller on a creative research project about the environmental and colonial histories of Montreal’s Notre Dame and Sainte Hélène islands. She is currently a member of Concordia’s Milieux Institute and its student-run Solar Media Collective, as well as a research assistant for the Institute’s Ethnography Lab and for her supervisor Krista Lynes.