Environment Seminar Series: “I wish these were trees”: A case against sacrifice zone framings with Dr. Laurence Butet-Roch
When and Where
Speakers
Description
The School of the Environment invites you to virtually attend this seminar led by Dr. Laurence Butet-Roch, as part of our 2025-26 Environment Seminar Series.
Register here to attend online.
About the Seminar
Initially used in livestock and energy management circles to designate spaces earmarked for exploitation and degradation in order to preserve others, the nomenclature of sacrifice zones has been reclaimed by the environmental justice movement to call to our attention the unequal distribution of environmental harms due to the spatial patterning of industry. While the term helps bring visibility to how racialized and marginalized communities bear a high burden of environmental hazards, it is also toxic, for it has resulted in narratives that consistently stress how polluted an ecosystem is and how unhealthy the communities it sustains are. This is treacherous terrain, for perceptions of populations and ecosystems as “waste(d)” prime them to become pollution sinks. Simultaneously, such rhetoric, by championing relocation as the most desirable remedy to environmental injustice, encourages further land dispossession. To make this case, this presentation probes framings of Aamjiwnaang First Nation’s experience of environmental injustice and offers representational justice as an orienting principle that acknowledges the binds between representation as a civic and political right and representation as depiction, as how one is shown and made recognizable to the world.
About the Speaker
Dr. Laurence Butet-Roch
Laurence Butet-Roch is a post-doctoral fellow in Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) where her research probes the entanglements of the politics of visibility, representational justice and petroculture. This expands her inquiry into toxic visualities and counter-visualities as expressed in her doctoral research (York University, Environmental Studies) which focused on the visual representation of Aamjiwnaang First Nation and its experience of environmental injustice in Canadian news outlets. She’s received funding from the Fond de Recherche du Québec, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, York University, and the Sylff Foundation, as well as was awarded the Governor General Gold Medal for this work. Her research draws on her decade-long and counting professional experience as a photographer, photo editor, curator and writer.