Isabelle Boucher

Thesis title: In the borderlands of Science and Capital: Cleantech and the Politics of Uncertainty

Isabelle Boucher’s work is situated at the intersection of feminist STS, environmental humanities, and political ecology.

Her research project consists of a historical and material analysis of cleantech’s cybernetic underpinnings by probing the overlapping physical and political realms of energy and information. For example, by looking at energy trading, carbon removal projects (and carbon credit markets), as well as military tech’s green turn, among other case studies, this research offers a broader understanding of Canada’s energy transition landscape, as it is mediated by dominant forms of scientific, economic and military powers.

Building on recent contributions that define contemporary capitalism as “cybernetic” (Overwijk 2025, Dyer Witheford and Mularoni 2025, Ström 2022, Ouellet 2010), her research seeks to uncover the connections between so-called “clean” energy regimes, metrological systems, and informational capital (data sets, models, prediction software, etc.) By outlining a “politics of uncertainty,” she asks: who gets to make and control predictions about energy futures and for whom?

She previously taught a course titled “Critical Studies in Climate Change” in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University and will be teaching again in the Department of Communication Studies a course titled “’Green Media’: Critical Approaches for a Just Transition.”