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Paper short abstract

The paper explores how formal and informal monitoring infrastructures around the “Żelazny Most” tailing pond shape safety, risk, and knowledge. It shows safety as a dynamic sociotechnical process negotiated between experts, citizens, and technologies.

Paper long abstract

The "Żelazny Most" tailings pond is the largest and best-monitored facility in Europe and one of the largest in the world (Świdziński & Janicki 2016). It is a key element in the stable copper production in Poland. Continuous monitoring of the facility - including numerous sensors, technical systems, the expertise of engineers and scientists - encompasses a range of processes that determine the safe operation of the facility and potential threats to adjacent areas and the environment.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and document analyses (in. risk management strategies), the paper examines the monitoring infrastructures (formal and informal) as a key element of the sociotechnical process of producing safety in the industrial region. The tailing pond is simultaneously an object of engineering and citizens' control, a source of social tensions over safety, responsibility, and exposure to potential disasters. Formal infrastructures meet with informal, as the knowledge about potential danger and ways to mitigate/govern it is produced in different circuits, and represents various social interests. I ask: What tensions, (re)negotiations, and forms of knowledge arise in these processes and how do the infrastructures (re)define the boundaries between safety, risk, and (un)certainty in the study area?

Research combines perspectives from social anthropology and STS, showing how locality shapes technoscientific processes, the role of civic knowledge, and how infrastructures of safety are in continuous changes (they are being negotiated, repaired, modernized, and maintained) and in relation to other infrastructures. Safety is, in this perspective, a state emerging from dynamic sociotechnical processes.