speculative fish-ctions (Dr. Zoe Todd)

Official Bio (2022): Dr. Zoe Todd (she/they) (Red River Métis) is a practice-led artist-researcher who studies the relationships between Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish futures in Canada. As a Métis anthropologist and researcher-artist, Dr. Todd combines dynamic social science and humanities research and research-creation approaches – including ethnography, archival research, oral testimony, and experimental artistic research practices – within a framework of Indigenous philosophy to elucidate new ways to study and support the complex relationships between Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish well-being in Canada today. They are a co-founder of the Institute for Freshwater Fish Futures, which is a collaborative Indigenous-led initiative that is ‘restor(y)ing fish futures, together’ across three continents. They are also a co-founder of the Indigenous Environmental Knowledge Institute (IEKI) at Carleton University. They were a 2018 Yale Presidential Visiting Fellow, and in 2020 they were elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars

Longer bio:  My name is Zoe. I live, breathe, and dream all things fishy, fishy refraction, and speculative fishction.

I am a researcher-artist who studies the relationships between Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish futures. I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. I hold a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. I also hold a BSc in Biological Sciences (2006) and an MSc in Rural Sociology (2010), both from the University of Alberta, Canada. I was a 2011 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar and a 2018-2019 Yale Presidential Visiting Fellow in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine. I am a member of the Fluid Boundaries team. In 2018, I founded the Institute for Freshwater Fish Futures, which is a collaborative organization that brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous community leaders, artists, scientists, journalists, architects, and social scientists in ‘restor(y)ing fish futures, together’. In 2021, I founded the Indigenous Environmental Knowledge Institute (IEKI) at Carleton, in partnership with Algonquin Knowledge Keepers. I am a Co-PI on two projects investigating human-fish-water-extraction relations in Alberta and beyond.

In 2015, I worked with Erica Violet Lee and Joseph Murdoch-Flowers to coordinate the #ReadTheTRCReport project.

Initially, I started this blog in 2010 to write about urban issues.  At the time, I sought to challenge the way that people think about what cities are capable of doing, and I continue to aim to re-assert a Métis discourse into prairie contexts where colonial erasure of Indigenous presence(s) is the norm.

And most importantly, I’m trying to tend to tenderness.

In the spirit of ethical sharing, if you are inspired by anything I have written or shared on this blog, and/or would like to re-post my work, I would appreciate that you give me credit and link back to this site.

If you want to check out my more academic-oriented work, please visit https://fishphilosophy.org/

I tweet at @ZoeSTodd.

Instagram: @drfishphilosopher

My artwork: https://society6.com/zoestodd

(All photos on this site are my own unless otherwise credited).

Urbane Adventurer by Zoe Todd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.