Strategic translation: pollution, data, and Indigenous Traditional Knowledge

Abstract

AbstractThis essay examines the role of data practices in the making and refuting of settler colonial environmental science. Investigating the epistemic contestation surrounding environmental contamination produced by the oil industry in Alberta, Canada, I discuss an alternative approach to toxicology: a community‐based monitoring programme that uses a ‘three‐track’ methodology to present data in three distinct forms. Using this method, First Nations communities engaged in strategic translation, balancing their aim of rendering Traditional Knowledge and community needs legible to policy‐makers against their desire to protect Traditional Knowledge from being assimilated into the dominant data paradigm. This translation, I argue, enacts a form of resistance in an era of relentless datafication: making‐things‐into‐data can reflect the exercise of agency rather than submission to external pressure. In this way, the three‐track methodology models how marginalized communities can leverage data's productive capacities for their own ends and produce scientific knowledge on their own terms.