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.