Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on deadly air pollution in Sarajevo and practices through which this fluid phenomenon comes to be (un)known. Striving to know air pollution can simultaneously enable the struggle for environmental justice and perpetuate neo-imperial power structures and naturalize air pollution.

Paper long abstract:

Sarajevo Valley, home of the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, struggles with deadly air pollution. Winterly inversion blocks airflow through the valley and traps toxic pollutants from several decentralized sources, suffocating inhabitants and causing every fifth premature death in the region. Despite systematic efforts of civil society to tackle air pollution over the past two decades, the situation is worsening. Based on four-months of ethnographic research in Sarajevo and conceptually building on Shapiro’s (2015) ‘atmospheric attunement’, this paper explores what kind of air pollution is made (in)visible through techniques and technologies of knowledge-making in the context of post-Dayton Bosnia and their socio-political ramifications.

I identify two main sets of practices of knowing that stabilize otherwise fluid and slippery air pollution and render it discursively visible - 1. everyday bodily encounters in the moments of differentiation, changes of perception of air characteristics, embedded in personal bodily memories and seasonality of pollution and 2. techno-scientific measurements that grasp air pollution as a thresholded air particle concentration. I follow how people reconcile these practices and through them (un)naturalize air pollution and (un)make it a burning political topic. Simultaneously, I trace how international organizations harness some of those knowledge practices to perpetuate their epistemic and moral high-ground in relation to the inhabitants of Sarajevo.

Thus, inspired by Murphy (2008) and Davies (2022), I demonstrate how knowledge practices not only enable political struggle for environmental justice, but also help to perpetuate neo-imperial power structures, and reinforce the feeling of disempowerment among affected communities.