This session explores the multitude of ways that colonial, settler science in Canada masquerades as democratic, and how some Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors are unsettling what counts as ‘Canadian’ science. Technoscientific institutions and practices are a primary modality through which the settler colonial state inflicts violence, and this violence is enacted both materially and epistemically. We suggest that technoscientific practice—be it microbiology, genomics, demography, fisheries, mining, forestry, or data science and AI—continues to do the work of the contemporary colonial state in Canada by reinforcing colonial hierarchies and exclusion, legitimating capitalist extraction, propping up liberal ideas of multiculturalism and diversity, and enabling cultural genocide. This panel also addresses Canadian scientific and innovation infrastructure—tri-council funding agencies and academic and federal science—to consider how funding and research structures enable the ongoing exclusion and marginalization of Indigenous knowledges and practices.

We invite contributions from scholars exploring a range of technoscientific practices, actors, and areas of expertise in the Canadian context to examine the national politics of transnational technoscience in the settler state. How has settler science worked to delegitimize Indigenous-led projects? How can we remake technoscientific methods in order to move toward caring, good relations? We seek papers that offer empirically grounded analyses of the relations and material practices that make up settler science. By examining the ways in which Canadian technoscience might be unsettled and decolonized, we aim to facilitate urgently-needed conversations in STS on the possibilities for challenging the persistent colonial work of Canadian scientific projects.