M. Murphy

M Murphy is a feminist, anti-colonial technoscience studies and environmental justice scholar. They are the co-director of the Technoscience Research Unit, which has strengths in justice-oriented science and technology studies, Indigenous science, technology, and environment studies, environmental data justice, and community-based research. They co-lead the Indigenous Environmental Data Justice lab with Vanessa Gray, which focuses on the relationships between pollution and colonialism in Ontario’s Chemical Valley. They are the lead social science PI in the CFREF funded Acceleration Consortium, which focuses on automated forms of substance discovery; they lead research in ethical governance of research, what is an ethical substance, and Indigenous approaches to chemicals. They are the author of The Economization of Life (2017), Seizing the Means of Reproduction (2012), and Sick Building Syndrome and the Politics of Uncertainty (2006), all with Duke University Press. Their forthcoming co-authored book (with Tim Choy, Jake Kosek, and Joseph Masco) is titled Fear of a Dead White Planet (spring 2025). Their current research concerns: 1) anticolonial conceptualizations of chemicals and 2) questions of alterlife, defined as life already altered by industrially produced chemicals, and yet still open to future alteration. Their research focuses on the Great Lakes region. They are Red River Métis from Winnipeg. 

Awards

2024        President’s Impact Award, University of Toronto
2020        Fellow, Royal Society of Canada
2020        Infrastructure Award for Catalyst Journal, Society for the Social Studies of Science, Co-Editor of Catalyst
2019        Ludwik Fleck Prize, Society for the Social Studies of Science
2017        Making and Doing Award for Distinguished Achievement, Society for the Social Studies of Science
2017        J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award, Society of American Archivists 
2016        Jackman Humanities Research Fellow 
2008        Ludwik Fleck Prize, Society for theSocial Studies of Science
 

Select Publications

2023    Vanessa Gray, Beze Gray, Fernanda Yanchapaxi, Kristen Bos, M Murphy, Data Colonialism in Canada's Chemical Valley: Aamjiwnaang First Nation and the Failure of the Pollution Notification System, Yellowhead Institute, 2023

2023    James M. Ataria, Michelle Murphy, Deborah McGregor, Susan Chiblow, Bradley J. Moggridge, Daniel C. H. Hikuroa, Louis A. Tremblay, Gunilla Öberg, Virginia Baker, and Bryan W. Brooks, Orienting the Sustainable Management of Chemicals and Waste toward Indigenous Knowledge, Environmental Science & Technology 2023 57 (30), 10901-10903.

2023     With and Against: Conspiring with Aliens Towards Other Possible Worlds in Reality was Whatever Happened: Butler AI and other Possible Worlds, ed. Beth Coleman (k. Verlag, 2023) 59-76.

2021    Reimaging Chemicals, with and against Technoscience,in  Reactivating Elements, Edited by M. Puig de la Bellacasa, D. Papadopoulos and N.Myers (Duke University Press, 2021):257-79. 

2020    Shaadan, R. and M. Murphy, EDC's as Industrial Chemicals and Settler Colonial Structures:  Towards a Decolonial Feminist Approach Catalyst, 6.1 (May 2020):1-36.

2020    Some Keywords Towards Decolonial Methods: Studying Settler Colonial Histories and Environmental Violence from Tkaronto History and Theory 59.3 (September 2020): 376-384. 

2019    Vera,L, Walker, D., Walker, M. Murphy, M., Mansfield, B., Ogden, J.,  When Data Justice and Environmental Justice Meet: Formulating a Response to Extractive Logic through Environmental Data Justice Information, Communication, & Society 22.7 (2019): 1012-1028.  

2019     Fa-ti Fan, Chia-Ling Kao, Shunling Chen, Michelle Murphy, and Matt Price, and Liz Barry, Citizens, Politics, and Civic Technology: A Conversation with g0v and EDGI, East Asian Science, Technology and Society 13.2 (2019):1–19. DOI 10.1215/18752160-7542932. In Press

2019     Dillon, L., Lave, R., Mansfied, B., Wylie, S., Shapiro, N., Chan, A., and Murphy, M. Situating Data in a Trumpian Era: The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109.2 (2019), 545-55.

2018     Lindsey Dillon, Vivian Underhill, Nicholas Shapiro, Christopher Sellers, Jennifer Liss Ohayon,Marianne Sullivan, Chris Amoss, Stephen Bocking, Phil Brown, Vanessa De La Rosa, Jill Harrison, Sara Johns, Katherine Kulik, Rebecca Lave, Michelle Murphy, Liza Piper, Lauren Richter, Sara Wylie, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative The Environmental Protection Agency in the Early Trump Administration: Prelude to Regulatory Capture. American Journal of Public Health 108: S2. (April, 2018): S89–S94.

2018     Against Population, Towards Alterlife in Making Kin, Not Population, editors Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway and (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018):101-24

2018     Leif Fredrickson, Christopher Sellers, Lindsey Dillon, Jennifer Liss Ohayon, Nicholas Shapiro, Marianne Sullivan, Chris Amoss, Stephen Bocking, Phil Brown, Vanessa De La Rosa, Jill Harrison, Sara Johns, Katherine Kulik, Rebecca Lave, Michelle Murphy, Liza Piper, Lauren Richter, Sara Wylie, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative Paving the Way for Trump: Past Presidential Assaults on Environmental Protection. American Journal of Public Health 108:S2, (April, 2018): 89-94.

2017     Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Exposures Cultural Anthropology (Nov) 

2017    The Economization of Life (Duke University Press). Winner of the 2019 Fleck Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science

2017     Dillon, Lindsey, Dawn Walker, Nicholas Shapiro, Vivian Underhill, Megan Martenyi, Sara Wylie, Rebecca Lave, Michelle Murphy, and Phil Brown. Environmental Data Justice and the Trump Administration: Reflections from the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. Environmental Justice 10, no. 6 (October 5, 2017): 186–92. 

2017     What Can’t a Body Do Catalyst 3.1 (Fall 2017)1-15. (doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i1.227.g247)

2015    Unsettling Care: Troubling Transnational Itineraries of Affect in Feminist Health Practices for special issue “The Politics of Care in Technoscience” of Social Studies of Science 45.5 (2015)

2013    Distributed Reproduction, Chemical Violence, and Latency The Scholar and Feminist Online 11.3 (October, 2013)

2012    Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Technoscience, and Health (Duke University Press)

2006    Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Duke University Press, 2006).  Winner of the 2008 Fleck Prize from Society for the Social Studies of Science

2004    Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy and Christopher Sellers, eds., Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments, Osiris Vol. 19, (University of Chicago Press).