Paper short abstract:

Addressing my involvement in London's #OneLess refill water fountain experiment initiated by scientists at ZSL to reduce single use plastic water, this paper highlights the role and effects of ordinary social research methods and devices for producing transformations in knowledge practices.

Paper 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.