Isabelle Boucher (MA in Philosophy) is a PhD student in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Drawing on feminist STS, energy humanities, and waste studies, her research project examines the socio-environmental impacts of energy transition plans. Her current focus is on analyzing how Western epistemologies and ontologies inform current sustainability politics in Quebec and Canada. By considering the triangulation of knowledge, power, and aesthetics through their colonial and extractive histories, she highlights the critical intersection of environmental and social justice issues and argues for the importance of epistemic justice at the heart of decolonial and feminist energy imaginaries.
More specifically, she explores how water became the index of sustainability in Quebec, and elsewhere. Looking at how technoscientific artifacts such as energy infrastructures disrupt, link and merge with the elements whose names they bear, she will focus on hydroelectricity, and the processes by which dams, hydraulic systems, and toxic chemicals concresce and sublimate into widely accepted notions of sustainability. Water is at once the mediating force through which Quebec’s energy future has been imagined and built, the flooded hinterland of electricity consumption habits, and the very real threat that displaced and poisoned Indigenous communities.
Isabelle is studying in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University under the supervision of Professor Krista Lynes.
The title of Isabelle's thesis is Elective Energies: from affective to waste flows, towards a just energy future in Quebec.
Contact Isabelle at Isabelle.a.boucher AT gmail.com.