Paper 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.

Paper 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.