Laurence Butet-Roch (PhD Environmental Studies) is an environmental media scholar, photographer and writer.
Her doctoral research (2024, York University) considers how to bear witness to environmental harms caused by extractivism without further reinscribing frontline communities and habitats as damaged, unworthy, and thus expendable. Given that the conceptualization, selection, designation, and production of sacrifice zones are a strategy of land dispossession through pollution, there is a pressing need to attend to how these spaces are discursively made and reproduced, using tools such as photography. As these mechanisms come into sharper focus, so does the need to centre representational justice in environmental justice work. Such commitment entails moving away from damage-based reporting to ensure that the communities feel aptly depicted, in all their complexities and richness. Her project is grounded in the Canadian news media coverage of Aamjiwnaang First Nation/Chemical Valley (Southern Ontario) and uses participatory methods to create a layered visual discourse analysis and recommendations.
Laurence’s scholarship draws on her professional experience as a writer and photographer focusing on environmental justice issues. She is currently pursuing her inquiry into the entanglements of the politics of visibility, representational justice and petroculture as a post-doctoral fellow in Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University thanks to funding from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec.
UPCOMING
April 12, 2026, 11.00am - 1.30pm
Contact Gallery, Toronto.
Mine-o-Polis: Playing against extraction
Mine-o-Polis is an alternative board game created by Beyond Extraction that invites players to explore Toronto as a centre of extractive power. Play as a junior mining firm seeking to stake, extract, lobby, and accumulate its way to extractive success from the mines to the markets. Unearthing Toronto’s role as a global capital of mining finance, Mine-o-Polis invites players to participate in extractive practices to raise to the surface how capital flows, how extraction is valued, and who benefits or is harmed by these processes. Play extraction against extraction.
This spring, we’re inviting the Beyond Extraction community to playtest the pilot version of Mine-o-Polis at an in-person workshop in downtown Toronto. Join us on Sunday, April 12 at CONTACT Gallery to learn about how the city’s landmark institutions—from the Toronto Stock Exchange to banks and universities—uphold Canadian extractivism. Be among the first to play Mine-o-Polis while enjoying a catered lunch and connecting with a community of activists and researchers around the ways extractive politics can be made visible and resisted through the power of play.
Registration is FREE but limited. Please register on Eventbrite to attend.
Panel convened with Isaac Thornley and Alexandra Watt-Simpson
Submit to the CfP by Nov. 1, 2026
Aug 4-6, 2026
Energy Ethics Conference
Centre for Energy Ethics
St.Andrew’s, Scotland
Affective Infrastructures, Vital and Extractive
According to LaDuke and Cowen (2020, 245), infrastructure is not inherently colonial: a pipe can carry fresh water or toxic sludge. The frustrated possibilities of infrastructures can endow them with an affective form of politics. Building on Kai Bosworth’s (2023) dual notion of affective infrastructures—physical infrastructures generate specific affects, but affects also undergird political movements—this panel explores forms of affect in the perception of extractive and vital infrastructures, their linkages and their environmental and social reverberations. Our goal is to unravel how energy projects, and the communities and ecosystems they impact, are rendered (in)visible, (il)legible, and ultimately (in)significant through the intervention of various tactics of mediation amid the energy transition. Drawing on Elysia French and Amanda White (2024), who challenge researchers to consider how we might account for the visual and sensorial evidence that is often overlooked by dominant capitalistic-colonial ideologies, we invite inquiries into the role of art, embodiment, psychoanalysis, and visuality in ushering diverse and ambivalent responses to extractive projects—from fervently favourable, to merely acquiescent, moderately skeptical or outright hostile, amongst others—and how these then inform and nurture different political factions and their actions. Infrastructure development is central to decarbonization, but to bring about an energy transition that is radically just will require the mobilization of political affects and social infrastructures of care and environmental knowledge.
This panel asks: What insights can attention to subjective experience, the senses, the body, and the unconscious as important sites of (un)knowing bring to an understanding of shifting perceptions of energy infrastructures? What can a focus on affect reveal about the relationships between desire and energy futurities? How are various feelings about energy infrastructure generated, mediated, and sustained, and what actions do these in turn enable and constrain?