Alana Lajoie O’Malley is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Ottawa, a member of UOttawa’s Science and Society Collective, and a Visiting Fellow (2020-21) in the Science, Technology and Society Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Her current research on techno-scientific controversies at the intersection of climate change, resource extraction, and settler colonialism follows a decade working as a sustainability professional and community organizer engaging with universities, grassroots community groups, NGOs, and several orders of government.

In her dissertation, Alana is exploring the place and identities of ‘workers’ in competing sociotechnical imaginaries about fossil fuel infrastructure in what is now called Canada. She is also a researcher and coauthor on the knowledge synthesis project Meaningful participation in Canadian impact assessments: Lessons from environmental justice frameworks.

Alana earned a BA (Hons) and BSc. from the University of Winnipeg, completing a student-designed major combining courses in history of science, politics, and physics. She wrote her undergraduate thesis on the shared intellectual history of the Newtonian Revolution and John Locke’s liberalism. She went on to complete a dissertation on scientific authority in 16^thC Indian astronomy at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, earning an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies. Alana was born into a settler Franco-Manitoban family and has spent most of her life living and working in Anishinaabe Aki.