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Short abstract:

We all want clean water, but what is clean water? In this paper, I follow water engineers in the Netherlands whose job it is to ensure ecologically ‘clean water’. By analyzing their efforts to determine whether surface water is clean, I argue that what ‘clean water’ is comes in different versions.

Long abstract:

When it comes to surface water protection, clean is not simply a ‘matter of fact’ but a situated appreciation, a diagnosis: it's about determining whether the water is clean enough for the organisms dependent on it. By following engineers on their quest to find good ways to determine whether this or that water is ‘clean enough’, I've learned that what clean water is, varies according to the type of water being measured (effluent or surface water), the entities under examination (chemical substances or biological responses in organisms), the methodology employed (quantifying different biological entities or calculating the toxic pressure of biochemical reactions), and the purpose of the measurement (to optimize the local ecosystem or to meet standards that can travel). For water engineers, navigating these diverse versions of clean poses a challenge that surpasses mere assessment of water cleanliness; it entails the intricate task of coordinating these versions of clean, to pinpoint where and how improvement measures should be implemented to enhance ecological cleanliness. While this presents a complex and indeterminate problem space, for water engineers, failing to address its challenges, however fragmented, leads to dirty water one way or another. This prompts STS scholars to consider which stories to tell and how to tell them in ways that contribute to fostering good care for water and its troubles, without restoring fragmented knowledge and valuing practices into coherent problem-solving accounts.

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Short abstract:

This paper examines interlinkages between environmental contamination and health in traumatized water ecologies in Mexico, providing opportunities to rethink the epistemic relations causality and care.

Long abstract:

Water ecologies (rivers, lakes, wetlands, marshes, ground water wells and boreholes) are critical contexts of and for health. They are at the nexus of late-industrial nature-cultures and their contaminating pathways. They coalesce the forces of climate change, infrastructural degradation, obsolescence and waste (Fortune 2011). Nutrient leaching, heavy metal accumulations, chemical seepage and plastic residues bring into relief histories of industrial and agricultural extractions, traumatized ecologies and species survival. Their embodied consequences matter in new and challenging ways. Increasing rates of unexplained kidney failure as instances of climate change and environmental harms pull the multiple problematics of water contamination into view. The paper discusses the Chapala-Lerma River basin in Mexico as site for reframing the epistemic ground of causality and care in the context of contamination.

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Short abstract:

This paper delves into interdisciplinary chemical research, examining the mediation process for integrating and conceptually 'sealing off' water. The resulting 'sealed' water concept shapes societal norms through nomological and material sealing, impacting nature-society relations.

Long abstract:

In the context of our own research on interdisciplinary, predominantly chemical research projects, this paper focusses on the mediation process through which water is integrated into the research while concurrently ‘sealed of’ from its specific materiality. The resulting 'sealed' conceptualization of water subsequently assumes social significance as a pivotal reference point for transforming water sites, a process examined in three distinct steps.

Firstly, the nomological sealing of water within the research process unifies the socio-material hybridity and diversity of empirical water realities through their specific abstractions. Findings from diverse research projects are compared, and related to the contexts and goals of each project, presupposing pragmatic decisions about which abstraction gains validity.

Secondly, the fabrication of 'model water' (as opposed to 'real water') for chemical investigations in the laboratory is explored alongside the guidelines for proper sampling and sample transport from sources such as a river, lake, or the sea to the laboratory. This analysis illustrates that scientific reference to water necessitates not only nomological sealing but also ongoing material sealing practices to maintain the modern, sealed concept of water in contact with empirical reality.

Subsequently, through observations at a wastewater treatment plant where clarified water is described as 'optically pure,' the practice of norming the boundaries of water sealing against 'contaminations' outside the laboratory is examined. The ongoing European debate on establishing a fourth purification stage for trace substances further underscores the role of scientific knowledge in societal negotiation processes, highlighting conflicts of interest surrounding the definition of 'water.'

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Short abstract:

Wastewater is often portrayed as a mirror of society, its analysis promising insights on the spread of pathogens, illicit drug use, and increasingly also microplastics. I look at efforts to monitor microplastics in wastewater to explore how societies know, make sense of, and care for its residues.

Long abstract:

Over the past two decades, microplastics have emerged as an environmental concern, attracting increasing attention in scientific research as well as the political and legal realm. My paper, which is part of an ERC Advanced Grant project “Innovation Residues: Modes and infrastructures of caring for our longue-durée environmental futures” (PI: Ulrike Felt, GA 1010545), examines how societies know, make sense of, and care for innovation residues, in particular microplastics.

Wastewater is a key research site to investigate this question. It is often portrayed as a mirror of contemporary societies, promising real time and accurate knowledge about chemical pollution, the spread of pathogens, or patterns of illicit drug consumption. The EU, in its revision of the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, has now proposed to utilize the affordances of wastewater to govern microplastics pollution, tackling the issue through a mandatory monitoring.

Drawing on interviews with wastewater experts, this paper explores how the monitoring of microplastics is put into practice. Specifically, I investigate the frictions arising when microplastics, a previously unregulated, ambiguously defined, and materially heterogenous substance, is turned into a monitoring object. Doing so, I engage with the politics of monitoring, showing how this practice renders some aspects of microplastics pollution visible and others invisible. This shapes not only how microplastics become a problem but also possible ways to govern them, enabling some responses at the expense of others.

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Short abstract:

Interacting with Water as an entity, resource, and threat produces different interpretations of knowledge globally. Differences between Indigenous and Western ontologies can both hinder and support knowledge production depending on the power structures that control access to and care for such sites.

Long abstract:

The materiality of Water in militarized areas such as the fishponds of Hawai’i, the Flint River in Michigan, and other heavily polluted sites of knowledge, leads us to critically engage with how relationships to Water dictate our ontologies. Relationships with Water can affect the way it is viewed causing it to become an entity, resource, or threat. Commodification is one primary way Water is conceptualized: how it can be objectified, used, and fetishized. This understanding of Water is co-produced with settler colonization and empire expansion. These constructions limit what types of knowledge can be produced and how Water is made to be a site of knowledge. Drawing from Applied Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, and Decolonial Science and Technology Studies, we analyze approaches to Water as a site of knowledge from both colonial and Indigenous lenses. Indigenous epistemologies are frequently in direct opposition with Western epistemologies and speak to Oceanic ontological constructions of Water beyond it being a static molecule or site. This presentation will think through Indigenous epistemologies of Water as a mobile site of knowledge and knowledge production. Analysis through the oppositional utilizations of Water via US militarism and tourism to further empire building demonstrate that these two projects are not only inextricably linked but also depend on Water as a site of learning. Anchored through Water, this presentation offers discussions to escape this ontological reaffirming of empire while simultaneously looking towards Indigenous futurities that attempt to respond to pressing questions of ecological catastrophe and colonial violence.

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Short abstract:

Is there potential for a rapprochement between conceiving water as a natural resource to be exploited and understanding it for its socio-cultural value? While water remains fertile ground for rigid and incommensurable forms of expertise, could it also be the catalyst for new alliances between them?

Long abstract:

Perhaps because of the multi-disciplinary history of its technocratic expertise, or for being a solvent for toxic solutes while remaining indispensable for life, water is known to be fertile ground for knowledge conflicts. This presentation turns the tables by probing instead into one of the potential alliances that can result from water, that between social scientists of technology and technologists of water purification. Which interactions can result from these engagements, and how can they be mutually productive? As scientists, we are often interested in the point of view of our knowledge-holder interlocutors, whether we share or not their political and ethical tenets. At the same time, we also realize our potential to serve as interpreters and knowledge mediators for citizens, as well as their wet ecology, when they are trapped in between technologies, bureaucrats, businesses, authorities, and even academics. And yet, we social scientists are often still seen as the least useful participants in decision-making processes when not simply unwanted guests. This presentation will introduce the Water Justice and Adaptation project and its theoretical tenets for soliciting conversations on water as a space that is as conflict-prone as it is ripe with alliance potential. As a sequela, water purification technicians will also be included in the conversation.

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Long abstract:

In research on water, scholars have made explicit the relevance and role of STS for opening up the empirical analysis of taken for granted materials, devices, practices and infrastructures of knowledge making by experts and non-experts. This involves a range of techniques including the sensory science of smell and taste, and the ethnographic methods of coding, visualisation, interviewing and observation (Spackman 2023, Ballestero 2019, de Laet & Mol 2000). In drawing attention to experiments with knowledge making on water, this paper seeks to open up the question of what STS has to offer for engaging, challenging and transforming the process of making, doing, and describing what is known. In order to make explicit how different disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge practices generate insights for reconfiguring the problem space of water, the paper focuses on my participation in the #OneLess refill water fountain experiment initiated by scientists at London Zoo to reduce single use plastic water consumption. Following Law and Rupert (2013) and Michael’s (2013,2022) inquiring into the effects and consequences of social scientists’ ordinary research methods, professional techniques and everyday objects to slow down thinking and intervene in knowledge, the paper addresses the role of the audio recorder as a device that provided an entry point into collaborations with scientists and publics. In so doing, the paper offers not an ethnography of scientific practice but an inquiry on how the non-human comes to mediate an interdisciplinary space to conceptualise, trouble and transform relational processes of knowledge making.