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Paper short abstract

The paper explores invisible nonhuman labour in everyday water infrastructures, focusing on freshwater mussels used in urban biomonitoring. It examines how care, invisibility, and epistemic tensions shape infrastructures in a polarised world.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines everyday water infrastructures through the lens of nonhuman participation, focusing on freshwater mussels incorporated into urban biomonitoring systems in Poland. Rather than analysing infrastructure solely as a technical system or a site of governance, I approach it as a lived, relational, and more-than-human arrangement that quietly organises everyday life while remaining largely invisible.

Building on ethnographic research on urban water infrastructures, I explore how nonhuman organisms function simultaneously as infrastructure, labour, and indicators of environmental risk. Their role is framed institutionally as neutral and instrumental, yet in practice it produces epistemic/moral tensions: between care and exploitation, protection and extraction, visibility and erasure. These tensions become especially salient in a polarised world where infrastructures are increasingly mobilised as symbols of security and efficiency.

The paper situates biomonitoring within broader debates on the “infrastructural turn”, engaging concepts such as nonhuman beings as infrastructure, care infrastructures, and people—and organisms—as infrastructure. By foregrounding everyday interactions between engineers, technicians, water flows, and nonhuman actors, I show how infrastructures are not merely imposed from above but are co-produced through mundane routines, embodied practices, and multispecies relations.

Methodologically, the paper draws on para-site ethnography and slow, infrastructure-adjacent fieldwork to make visible forms of infrastructural life that escape dominant geopolitical or technocratic narratives. I argue that attending to nonhuman care within everyday infrastructures opens anthropology to new possibilities of connection and critique, challenging understandings of infrastructure as either purely technical or purely political, and instead revealing it as a fragile, relational achievement.