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Short abstract:

This paper compares two coastal water quality data dashboards in Los Angeles (USA). Findings show the dashboards’ data structures and design practices mirror other US initiatives in emphasizing bacteria count as an isolated variable, rather than part of an ecology including additional factors.

Long abstract:

Data curation practices concerning coastal water quality have significant impact on the decision-making processes related to fishing and recreation, but they are frequently characterized by poor availability and a lack of public outreach. This study examines two coastal water quality data curation initiatives in Los Angeles, California— one led by the Los Angeles Department of Public Health and another by the nonprofit Heal the Bay—to understand the prevailing information order governing the public’s relationship with coastal waterways in Southern California. Each organization collects water samples, tests for fecal indicator bacteria, and then makes select data available via an online dashboard. This study reverse-engineers the data platforms using an approach informed by digital forensics, in order to understand the digital tools and data structures that shape public knowledge of water quality.

Findings from the study are contextualized against the author’s previous research concerning similar data curation initiatives in New York City. Findings from both New York and Los Angeles show that data curation and public messaging emphasize fecal bacteria counts above all other forms of data. Although Los Angeles county places a greater emphasis on water quality’s relationship to topics such as air quality, illness prevention, and recent rainfall, their initiatives still reflect an epistemology that treats bacteria and human activity as isolated variables, rather than parts of an interrelated ecology.

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Short abstract:

Pharmaceuticals may heal human bodies, but become toxic downstream. Where is this problem tackled—in wastewater treatment plants, hospitals, households, or pharmaceutical laboratories? This paper traces what ‘cleaning’ is in different sites where pharmaceutical ecotoxicity is a matter of concern.

Long abstract:

While pharmaceuticals combat diseases in human bodies, when they are peed out and travel downstream, they might become toxic to aquatic life.

This paper traces attempts at cleaning pharmaceuticals from water, starting with wastewater treatment plants and moving up the stream to doctors’ practices and pharmaceutical labs. Based on multi-sited ethnography in the Netherlands, we attend to how caring for clean water is done differently at different points of the stream. In wastewater treatment, cleaning is a matter of removing through one technology or another, although ‘removal’ also displaces the matter into air or soil. For doctors, cleaning is primarily about prevention or moderation, prescribing less while simultaneously attending to the needs of the individual patient. In pharmaceutical research, cleaning is about (re)designing a compound that has the ability to clean itself away by breaking down, but also needs to work well in the body.

By contrasting various cleaning arrangements, the paper aims to challenge the idea of cleaning as a linear process, as the removal of a material that happens to be there, objectively present. Instead, we resituate 'cleaning' in a web of folded practices—removing, preventing, (re)designing—each of which comes with its own politics and clashing ‘goods.’ We propose that it is essential to foster attention to where problems to do with pollution are tackled and what practical/political limitations and affordances these ‘wheres’ bring.

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Short abstract:

This paper troubles the motivations of swimming for human wellness alongside accounts of ill-health at Windermere, England’s largest lake. It explores conflicting senses of ambivalence, adaptation, avoidance, and anthropocentrism within the outdoor swimming communities and wet ethnographic inquiry.

Long abstract:

Windermere, England’s largest lake in the Lake District National Park, attracts regular outdoor swimming practice across all four seasons, often motivated by exercise, competition, socialisation, restorative well-being, and joy. However, Windermere faces more-than-human health pressures from climate change, extreme weather, untreated sewage overflows and wastewater, agricultural and urban runoff, plastic pollution, algal blooms, and biosecurity concerns. Swimmer’s environmental health concerns at Windermere, significantly of wastewater pollution and algal blooms, are further conflicted and overwhelmed by corporate, institutional, activist, national press, social media, community, and individualised representations of human well-being and ill-health. Simultaneously, these human-centred accounts can significantly cloud other non-human species under pressure within these shared waters. This paper contributes to transdisciplinary understandings of outdoor swimming and environmental health within lacustrine environments by reflecting on my twelve-month wet ethnographic inquiry, including ‘lake hangouts’ and in-situ ‘swim-along interviews’ with swimmers at Windermere. The paper includes: (1) highlighting the oxymoronic motivations of swimming 'for' human wellness alongside accounts of ill-health at Windermere, attending to senses of ambivalence, adaptation, and avoidance; and (2) how notions of ‘taking care’ within Windermere’s troubled waters can generate empathetic consideration and practice, alongside further ambivalence and anthropocentric barriers within the swimming communities and my wet ethnographic research.

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Short abstract:

In Vietnam, diverse fisheries concentrate along interconnected waterways. Exploring how people perceive water as polluted by upstream communities, outshore fishers, or aquaculture farmers, this paper illustrates the entanglement of people and waterways through the movement of pollutants.

Long abstract:

Our study aims to understand the impact of plastics and other environmental pressures on different aquaculture and fishery communities in coastal Vietnam. With diverse fisheries activities concentrated along interconnected waterways, the livelihoods of local communities are intricately tied to water quality. However, increasing industrialisation and intensification of farming and fishing, including the observable “catch fish – dump trash” practice have led to serious environmental pressures and water pollution. Following the Red River and Mekong River to the sea, we explore people’s perceptions about how waterways are troubled and trouble those who depend on them – through the plastics, chemicals, antibiotics, and other organic pollutants they carry. We illustrate the entanglement and dependencies of people, waterways, plants, and animals through the movement of plastics and other pollutants in terms of cycles: the movement cycle from upstream to estuaries and from the ocean back to the coast; the seasonal cycle of wind and rain, summer and winter; the farming and fishing cycle; and the cycle of blame. The paper also shows that even when the ‘water problem’ is tackled through filtration and closed systems of intensive farming, these new water infrastructures are never fully isolated and create new relationships between people and places based on water quality and blame. By unravelling these complex intertwining cycles, the paper offers insights into the intensification and effects of water pollution on coastal people and ecosystems, and into the tensions between linear solutions and the perceptions and experiences of cyclical connections between pollution’s sources and pathways.

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Short abstract:

The ubiquity of Forever Chemicals materializes in different places and ways. Water acts both as enabling contamination through mobility and as accumulating the molecules itself. This tension inhabits infrastructures of Forever Chemicals, indicating the entanglements within larger societal systems.

Long abstract:

“Forever Chemicals“ have permeated into ecosystems and human bodies alike. They are ubiquitous in a variety of consumer products and producing facilities due to their grease-resistant and water-soluble properties. This, in turn, makes them mobile in travelling with and through water(s). One exemplary case lies in the seawater-land-drinking water connection on the Danish Westcoast. Here, contaminated seafoam blows onto the land and seeps through the ground, into the drinking water. In following the ways of diluted contaminations, I investigate the making of pollution and contamination. In this sense, water acts as a means to think with – as a medium for enabling Forever Chemicals to travel and distribute, dissolve and dilute over large distances. Taking dilution as a starting point allows the exploration of the interconnectedness between and within different media enabling the mobility of molecules. Part of these entanglements are infrastructures: they create, enable and distribute contaminations and pollutions, but are also altered and impacted by the molecules themselves. Centering this relation allows me to look beyond the molecular to more societal relations with these molecules and substances and their embeddedness in societal systems.

Beyond the travels of Forever Chemicals with and through water, the materialization of the molecules within drinking water shows the ways in which contamination and pollution are known. This includes the entanglement of thresholds, knowledge-making and the conceptualization of pollution and harm. Thinking beyond the embodied knowledge of pollution through embodied experiences of toxicity and harm, I investigate how pollution beyond toxicity can be conceptualized.

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Short abstract:

Decisions on how to handle and lock eternal burdens are based on partial predictions and models. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork on different kinds of landfill projects this presentation traces the un/making of hydrogeological knowledge in specific locations and contexts.

Long abstract:

Eternal burdens will challenge future human-environment systems forever. Current decisions how to handle and lock them are often based on partial and incomplete predictions and models – yet there is a need to organize, plan, implement and manage an increasing number of remnants, leftovers and waste produced by modern lifestyles. Although the complexity of such decisions is widely recognized, in practice the central question is often: Is it safe (enough); is the ground or surrounding solid enough to hold its content or will it crack and put groundwater at risk? This presentation is based on ongoing fieldwork among a network of citizens’ initiatives across Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, and their campaigns against different landfill projects – above and underground, already operating and being planned. Ethnographically unraveling these projects, I trace how hydrogeological knowledge is being made and remade and unmade in and through authorization processes, expert surveys, consultations, monitoring, scientists, legal regulations, and critical publics. I contend that a thorough understanding of how hydrogeologies are known, and un/safety about them is established in specific places is crucial to discuss path dependencies, the difficulties of reorienting such processes once they are launched and the im/possibility of ‘correcting’ once-made mistakes, while taking the need to act in the wake of uncertainty seriously.

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Short abstract:

This paper investigates the focus on individual practices around water, sanitation and hygiene of a global health research project that makes evidence on AMR. This focus allows the collaboration to disregard the web of historically grown factors that contribute to contamination of which AMR is one.

Long abstract:

Unclean water causes illness and disease, and access to clean water has long been a proclaimed goal of global health. Yet, within global health there is strong focus on interventions targeting the practices and behaviours of individuals instead of the infrastructures that could bring them clean water. In this paper, I attend to the case of one global health research collaboration, here called D-Lab, to shed light on this focus on individual behaviour in contexts of contamination. D-Lab investigates residents’ practices around Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) in their quest to find out what drives the development and spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). AMR is known to relate to its ecological environment, where bacteria are responding to e.g. metals and other residues in soil and water. Through my ethnographic engagement with D-Lab’s researchers as well as with water and sanitation specialists who work in the region, I draw out a space that is subject to registers of contamination, through a historically grown web of ecological, social, economic, and regulatory factors. By investigating the practices of individuals, e.g. whether or not they are washing their hands before preparing food, D-Lab shifts the focus away from the context in which the residents’ behaviours occur. In so doing, the project, and the wider global health community, stabilises not only frameworks of inquiry, but also the very landscape including its physical infrastructures and biological compositions from which contaminated water emerges.

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Short abstract:

Known as the “City of Water,” Martinsville, Indiana, both overlays and draws its water from a groundwater body contaminated with multiple toxic chemical plumes. The highly volatile nature of these contaminants troubles efforts to manage and mitigate risks associated with toxic exposures there.

Long abstract:

Known as the “City of Water,” Martinsville, Indiana, USA is an almost exclusively white community of about 11,500 residents located on the east bank of the so-called White River. Still recognized throughout the region as a stronghold of the KKK, Martinsville was once famous for the healing powers of its mineral artesian spring waters. Today, the city both overlays and draws its water from a groundwater body contaminated with at least four plumes of tetrachloroethylene (also known as PCE or perc), a toxic and highly volatile organic compound released by now defunct and still operating industries. Martinsville’s residents experience the highest rates of cancer incidence in the state of Indiana as a whole and their city’s mascot is still a literal well. Based on several years of ethnographic and historical research alongside residents and in conversation with state and federal agencies in and about these particular plumes and their potential health effects, this paper examines how the highly volatile nature of PCE (which, amongst much else, may transform into even more toxic substances when exposed to oxygen) troubles efforts to manage the health and reputational risks associated with exposures to these plumes and their byproducts. Differently situated plumes, residents, and agencies enact distinct conceptual and material versions of toxic plumes in Martinsville. Focusing on efforts to conceal and contain the realities of PCE – a chemical almost impossible to apprehend by the senses – this paper concludes with contemporary efforts to heal toxic harms there (for both better and worse).