Paper short abstract

This paper examines how knowledge of chemical contamination is produced within marine monitoring programmes facing growing regulatory pressure to produce data and the persistence of low policy outputs – underlining how actors use seawater as a theory machine (Helmreich 2011).

Paper long abstract

This presentation advances understanding of water as a site for knowledge-making by examining how chemical pollution in marine environments is monitored. While modern science has long relied on chemistry to stabilize water as an object of knowledge (Linton 2006), seawater contamination poses specific challenges: dilution and salinity make water samples unstable and politically fragile objects of measurement.

Drawing on ethnographic and archival research into French Mussel Watch programmes, we trace the shift from water-based sampling to biota. Mussels filter seawater and concentrate contaminants, making chemical pollution perceptible through assemblages of their tissues, sampling protocols, laboratory techniques, extrapolation laws, and regulatory frameworks. But what happens when mussels lack “muscle”?

Our analysis focuses on two monitoring networks: one deploys transplanted mussels under standardized conditions, the other samples mussels from natural reefs. For two decades, these divergent approaches have generated disputes over methodological robustness, particularly regarding mussel condition indices. We explore how these sociomaterial assemblages respond to recent advances in mass spectrometry - enabling detection of an expanding array of chemical compounds in seawater - and to regulatory pressures to extend monitoring offshore. Rather than simply enhancing monitoring capacities, these developments rework the infrastructures and problem definitions of monitoring. Some scientists and environmental agencies contest, on economic and moral grounds, the implementation of a “starving mussel watch,” given the low nutrient levels of open-sea waters. By examining this controversy, we demonstrate how analytical sensitivity and regulatory expectations influence what constitutes significant contamination and relevant data at the intersection of science and policy.

Paper short abstract

Across mountain and coastal contexts of South Asia, water in its different material qualities resembles both a threat to, and source of, life. What can be gleaned about the nature of environmental knowledge by thinking with the changing affective ecologies of water across these geographies?

Paper long abstract

The waters that animate South Asia are increasingly not only a source of life but a threat to life. From the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, instances of extreme flooding are becoming more common, so are experiences of drought and water scarcity. Meanwhile, melting glaciers signal a broader environmental shift affecting billions of people who depend on their downstream flows. In Kochi, a port city on the southwest coast of India, water is a way of life as people have lived intimately with the sea, the rivers, the lakes and lagoons that animate this backwater city for centuries. Yet the affective dimensions of this envelopment in wetness have shifted in recent years, as the threat of the encroaching sea continues to haunt the city, and the backwaters continue to be filled with urban and industrial wastes. In the area of Gilgit, northern Pakistan, terraced valleys carved into an arid high-desert are sustained by meltwater irrigation, a lifeline that has imbued glaciers with spiritual significance. At the same time flash floods cascading down the steep mountain slopes have always carried danger. Lately, intense rainfall events and glacier lake outburst floods have amplified calls for climate adaptation. Across these contexts, through different watery affects, relations, and materialities, our guiding questions are: What does the ambivalent nature of water across its material differences teach us about the non/scalability of environmental knowledge in the anthropocene? How are the affective ecologies produced with water changing across different scales of precarity and encounter?

Paper short abstract

Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork with geobiologists and astrobiologists, this paper examines how scientists theorize, handle, and sample aqueous matter - mud, slime, microbial mats - as sites where the intersection between the geo- and the bio- becomes legible.

Paper long abstract

In the 1990s, two fields emerged in parallel at the intersection of microbiology and deep time: geobiology, investigating the co-evolution of life and Earth, and astrobiology, asking how life might arise and persist on other planets. Over the past three decades, these two disciplines have leveraged on water as the meeting point between life and planet, organic and inorganic matter, geological cycles and metabolic loops. “Planets like Mars and Venus,” wrote geologist Peter Westbroek (1991), “have loose, rocky covering, whereas the Earth has muds, mats, soils, peats and sedimentary rocks. Slime is the glue that holds the biosphere together.”

Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork with geobiologists and astrobiologists, this paper examines how scientists theorize, handle, and sample aqueous matter - mud, slime, microbial mats - as sites where the intersection between the geo- and the bio- becomes legible. The analysis combines ethnography, interviews, and archival materials to trace a genealogy of water-centered epistemic practices. Yet this paper also tells a counter-history: rather than exploring abstract and computational models of life, it follows scientists into muddy lagoons, hot springs, and intertidal zones on Earth. In doing so, it shows how the co-evolution of life and planets is imagined and experimentally grounded through the material politics of water and acqueous matter.

Paper short abstract

Submerged histories of the North Sea—Nehalennia’s altars and the lost landscape of Doggerland—show how knowledge emerges through extraction yet remains shaped by the sea’s opacity. Submergence becomes an aquatic epistemology that delays discovery and invites relational ways of knowing.

Paper long abstract

In 1970, fisherman K.J. Bout recovered fragments of altar stones dedicated to the pre-Christian sea goddess Nehalennia from the North Sea, initiating the rediscovery of hundreds of worship objects lost for nearly 1,700 years. This resurfacing of ritual artefacts unsettles the Netherlands’ cultural narrative of mastering water and exposes a striking absence of aquatic mythologies within Dutch cultural memory. At the same time, archaeological and geological discoveries beneath the North Sea have revealed Doggerland, a vast Mesolithic landscape that once connected Britain and continental Europe before being submerged by rising seas around 8,500 years ago.

This paper brings the rediscovery of Nehalennia into dialogue with the mapping of Doggerland to examine how submerged histories become legible. Both cases reveal that knowledge of the seabed emerges through the infrastructures of extraction—seismic surveys, dredging, and industrial marine mapping—while also remaining shaped by the opacity and instability of the sea itself. Rather than treating submergence as disappearance, the paper proposes it as an epistemological condition. The sea functions as a living archive that gathers, mutates, and delays evidence, challenging land-based archaeological methods oriented toward excavation and visibility.

Drawing on media theorist Melody Jue’s concept of seawater as a medium, the paper explores how submergence may offer an embodied and relational method for engaging with aquatic histories. Thinking with the sea foregrounds opacity, immersion, and entanglement as ways of learning from environments that resist capture.

Keywords: Doggerland, Nehalennia, submergence, aquatic archives, environmental humanities, maritime archaeology.

Paper short abstract

How can social science engage diverse, multiscalar yet deeply entangled global crises and their combined consequences? This paper reflects upon water's ethnographic and analytical potential to study global polycrisis, its situated forms, and manifold explanations, knowledges and meaning-making.

Paper long abstract

Water has always featured in my research, whether it be climate-related flooding in the Indian Himalaya, pathogen-control practices in Bangladesh’s small-scale shrimp farms, or widespread pollution of an economically-significant lagoon in Benin (West Africa). I am an anthropologist whose ethnographic breadth crosses global development, climate change, and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). It is unsurprising therefore that ‘water’ in its myriad forms should prominently feature given its concern for each of these domains. For science and policy, aquatic systems form literal and figurative ‘hotspot’ imaginaries shaping scientific knowledge (Helliwell et al. 2021), whilst for lay publics they form 'wetlands' where the simultaneous outcomes of multiple crises drain into an enduring reality. For me as an ethnographer, water in the form of aquatic bodies and/or weather events offers the ethnographic grip by which sociomaterial effects of multiple intractable crises are rendered observable and analysable.

I therefore consider the analytical possibilities water offers the social sciences to engage the diverse, multiscalar yet deeply entangled and contingent global crises and their localised forms. During fieldwork, aquatic systems manifested not only as catastrophic weather and places of environmental pollution and pathogenicity, but as sites of social imagination and collective meaning making—at once scientific artefact, moral epistemology, and more-than-human world of microbes, water spirits, and millenarian catastrophe. I share how I’ve come analytically to imagine ‘water’ as a conceptual and sociomaterial reservoir accumulating the detritus of capitalist ruins, and reflect upon its utility for ethnographic, STS, and interdisciplinary studies of an emerging global ‘polycrisis’.

Paper short abstract

Algal blooms are a normal feature in any water body, with key ecological contributions to e.g. carbon cycling and the trophic web. Our presentation explores how different societal actors strive to know blooming cycles and explores the development of new sensory methods that attend to such dynamics.

Paper long abstract

The blooming of microalgae is a normal feature of both marine and freshwater ecosystems. The notion of algal blooms includes a variety of organisms, principally grouped into three categories: diatoms, dinoflagellates and cyanobacteria. All play key ecological roles, for example, carbon cycling or the trophic web. Because different species bloom at different times of the year, various actors become involved in sampling, recording, and monitoring the changing conditions of aquatic ecosystems.

In the Nordic regions, marine biologists researching carbon dynamics often focus on the spring bloom, which is typically dominated by diatoms. While environmental research institutes tend to adopt a broader perspective aimed at understanding changes in water composition, public health authorities and citizens are especially attentive to the toxic potential of summer cyanobacterial blooms.

In our research, we aim to make sense of these diverse attempts to produce knowledge about algal presence. This involves approaching relevant societal actors through traditional methods such as ethnography, while also developing our own capacity as researchers to know watery environments through sensory engagement in Finland’s coastal and lake regions. This experimental approach allows us to test and develop new methods capable to yield data that goes beyond traditional textual dominance of the social sciences, producing what Philip Steinberg and Kimberly Peters call wet ontologies.

Our findings show that algal blooms – especially when perceived as harmful – alter human perceptions of aquatic ecologies and everyday life around water bodies, leading to changes in knowledge practices towards water bodies among diverse communities and stakeholders.

Paper short abstract

This presentation explores wastewater as knowledge production and discusses findings from a focus-group study on public perceptions and social acceptance of drug related wastewater surveillance. The analysis reveals hopeful expectations alongside concerns about accuracy, ethics and policy use.

Paper long abstract

Wastewater is a complex material, often described as an all-encompassing mirror of society. Everything we consume, shed, and secrete ultimately ends up flowing through the sewer system. Therefore, for public health officials, wastewater carries valuable information as it represents the entire population in the catchment area. In addition to detecting disease rates, wastewater surveillance (WWS) is utilized in global drug surveillance. Compared to other methods relying on self-reporting or individual testing, collecting a collective sample from wastewater offers a more direct and timely insight into population-level drug use. The technology is recognized as an evolving field which calls for further discussion about the social sustainability of this data practice.

In this presentation, I will discuss findings from a focus-group study that examines the thus far underexplored public perceptions and social acceptance of wastewater surveillance. I approach wastewater as a site of knowledge production that informs public health officials and decision-making on a societally sensitive topic: the rising rates of drug use. The presentation covers ideas, visions, and notions people associate with drug-related WWS, as well as the justifications and expectations they express for this kind of water-based knowledge production. Preliminary findings indicate that participants perceive WWS as a revealing source of knowledge and call for its use as a tool for drug-related harm reduction. However, significant questions remain regarding the accuracy of the data, the ethics of reporting, and whether the produced statistics are effectively used in policymaking.

Keywords: wastewater, wastewater surveillance, knowledge production, drugs, social sustainability, public perceptions

Paper short abstract

This paper considers the recent (re-)emergence and consolidation of wastewater monitoring in public health governance. Methodologically, we draw on valuation studies and critical policy analysis and use empirical data from a case study in Austria.

Paper long abstract

This paper considers the recent (re-)emergence and consolidation of wastewater monitoring in public health governance. Specifically, this project studies the (1) (re)emergence of the use of wastewater monitoring in the context of COVID-19, (2) the political and techno-scientific challenges that spokespeople of wastewater epidemiology have encountered, including regulation of data collection and its use for public health monitoring as well as political decision making, and (3) current ambitions to expand its use in the context of a largely unregulated field. Using what we call a multi-sited policy valuography, the analysis is based on an Austrian case study, using élite interviews to examine the ways in which scientists, public health officials, and decisionmakers have come to value wastewater in new ways during the COVID19 pandemic. Specifically, I examine how wastewater epidemiology and practices of sampling, measurement, prediction, and monitoring became “the right tool for the job” and what “jobs” are being envisioned for the future, including bioindicators related to what are considered healthy lifestyles. Finally, I explore the recent EU Directive and how, if at all, it invokes environmental, political, and social issues as matters of (European) concern.

Paper short abstract

Wastewater surveillance (WWS) produces specific kind of knowledge to be used in governance and public health. This presentation addresses WWS as knowledge production through discussing some of its key characteristics, for example, concerning the population it speaks of.

Paper long abstract

Covid19-pandemic brought wastewater surveillance to the foreground in a new way. As a method of public health surveillance it has expanded and developed rapidly and it is now increasingly used to track spread of disease, to find emerging new pathogens and to inform public health policy. Still, it is not a new method. It has been used in the surveillance of polio and drug use already for decades. Even though wastewater might be easy substance to get, it is a complex substance to work with and analyse. In the presentation I ask what kind of knowledge practice wastewater analytics is by addressing some of the key characteristics of the practice. These relate to the population wastewater speaks of, normalisation of the sample as well as the trend wastewater communicates instead of specific, meaningful numbers. The presentation is based on qualitative analysis of interviews and publicly available materials on the topic (e.g., scientific articles and webinars). As wastewater surveillance is increasingly used for pandemic preparedness and monitoring of public health, it is crucial to understand the kind of knowledge it actually is and how it fits with the existing governance regimes.

Paper short abstract

Wastewater-based epidemiology has re-formulated drugs as an ecological concern. This paper asks what thinking at the scale of planetary ecology does for understandings of health, attending to the frictions that emerge as this concept entangles with the evidence-making practices of public health.

Paper long abstract

In 2001, environmental chemists at the US Office of Research and Development in the Environmental Protection Agency proposed the use of a “nonintrusive tool to heighten public awareness of societal use of illicit-abused drugs and their potential for ecological consequences.” Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has since become an important adjunct to established drug monitoring tools. Through its move from environmental science to drug policy, WBE has demanded renewed attention to the biotic dimensions of drugs as they entangle in their different environments, thus re-formulating the problem of drugs not only as a problem of human health, but as an ecological concern. This paper traces this move, attending to the frictions in ecological thought that emerge when concepts such as ‘the planetary’ and ‘the environment’ entangle in new ways through the evidence-making practices of the public health field, and highlighting tensions between the idiosyncrasies of situated knowledge practices and the scale of planetary ecological concerns. As ecological thinking breaks into drug policy via WBE technologies, what kind of idea of ‘ecology’ is being mobilised and upon what conceptual logics does it rely? How do particular understandings of ‘environment, ‘ecology’ and ‘the planetary’ entangle with – and, at times, become perversely transformed by – the conceptual logics at work in different sites? This paper opens up questions about the apparent transferability (and limits) of ecological thought, and how its translations through situated evidence-making technologies may work to curtail (rather than enable) genuine engagement with the urgent questions posed by our present planetary condition.

Paper short abstract

When water moves outside its expected flow, it exposes not only infrastructural vulnerabilities but also relational and contested aspects of care. The entangled fluidity of water and care highlights the ongoing work of coordinating knowledge, values, and practices in socio-environmental crises.

Paper long abstract

Extreme rainfall events, such as those in July 2021 in the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium, disrupt hydro-social systems designed to steer water through engineering, monitoring, and forecasting. We argue that these “watery crisis encounters” co-constitute what good care is. When water moves outside its expected flow, it exposes not only infrastructural vulnerabilities but also relational and contested aspects of care.

In this paper, we explore these dynamics by examining how smaller tributaries respond rapidly to localized rainfall and resist precise modelling, while larger rivers change in “character,” challenging monitoring practices and cross-border coordination. Crisis management assemblages translate uncertainty into structured tools such as alert levels and thresholds. Yet responses depend not solely on technical forecasts. Recollections of past floods, embodied understandings of river behavior, and tacit judgments about landscapes, infrastructures, and patient care interact with formal models to guide decisions.

In these moments, we argue that care flows like water: relational, context-dependent, and adaptive. (Forecasts of) overflowing rivers prompt responsive forms of care, while practices in hospitals, long-term care facilities, and communities mediate and respond to water’s flows. Water and care thus co-constitute each other, shaping affective and relational dynamics across organizational levels.

Drawing on ethnographic research within an interdisciplinary consortium, we discuss how flood knowledge circulated among hydrologists, crisis managers, healthcare professionals, and residents, revealing the hydro-social politics through which water, risk, and care are collectively negotiated. The entangled fluidity of water and care highlights the ongoing work of coordinating knowledge, values, and practices in socio-environmental crises.

Paper short abstract

Scholars approach bottled water consumption from four analytical vantage points: political economy, semiotics and lifestyle, political ecology, and materiality-centered. Bottled water may be also approached as a bottled ecology, defined by complex biological, chemical, and legal processes.

Paper long abstract

Since the 2000s, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and STS scholars produced fascinating accounts of the steady rise of bottled water consumption in many countries across the globe. One potential analytic extension is to approach bottled water as a contained, bottled ecology. Despite low concentrations of dissolved organic matter and despite commercial slogans of “purity”, bottled waters are complex ecologies, containing indigenous bacteria characteristic of each spring source, minerals, microplastics, Oxygen18 isotopes, micro-planktonic organisms, and geological footprints. Bottled and packaged waters are vital ecologies, legally bound by expiration dates and standards, and subject to microbiopolitical interventions. The biochemical qualities of water are sometimes highly engineered, as bottlers operate intentional interventions, such as microbiopolitical efforts to remove bacteria in purified bottled water. At other times, bottlers are legally forced to refrain from intervening on water, as is the case with natural mineral bottled water, which is a regulated as a local product, whose alteration during bottling is legally prohibited, thus forcing bottlers to maintain the biochemical composition as it was at the source. Additionally, an emerging trend in the beverage industry, linked to the gut health fad, is the production of "prebiotic" and "probiotic" waters and sodas. Bottled ecologies thus take many forms that require scholars to think with more complex notions of “nature.” That requires scholars to pay increased analytic attention to how production, storage, frequent sipping, and diverse regulatory frameworks transform bottled waters, with what effects, and how scientific facts are translated into public understanding of water purity.

Paper short abstract

This paper shows how drought risk and water contamination co‑emerge in Punjab's Green Revolution aftermath. It argues that planetary health in Punjab demands remedial justice‑centered water governance, redistributing expertise to communities and enforcing toxic liability for corporate/state actors.

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that drought risk from severe groundwater depletion and the proliferation of contaminated waters co-emerge in Punjab from the layered afterlives of colonial canal irrigation and the Green Revolution’s paddy–wheat monocropping regime. Based on nine months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in northern Punjab, I track water’s movements across: (1) laboratories and field trials at a state agricultural university and an extension centre; (2) the political life of the water intensive paddy crop; and (3) a water justice movement, Kale Pani Da Morcha (“Movement Against Black Water”), contesting pollution in the Buddha Nala canal tributary. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, scientific protocols, litigation files, and media coverage, I map a contested hydroscape in which water-extractive agrarian capitalism, industrial and agricultural effluents, infrastructural decay, state neglect, and undone/contested science converge. In this hydroscape, water is at once scarce, toxic, and—during extreme events—dangerously abundant as flood risks intensify. I show how technocratic fixes (deeper tubewells, treatment plants) redistribute harm while consolidating authority, leaving toxic accountability diffuse and expertise centralised. I propose a reparative, justice centered water governance that repositions farmers, affected communities, and activists as knowledge holders; links liability to polluting firms and state agencies; and attends to more than human ecologies of crop–water relations. The paper contributes to STS and anthropologies of environment and science, demonstrating how planetary health in Punjab hinges on redistributing expertise and enforcing accountability rather than scaling technosolutions.

Paper short abstract

In Lusatia’s post-mining landscape future water scarcity is often framed as a hydrological problem. We show how water governance becomes a contested site of knowledge production, where four narratives—technisation, prioritisation, justice, and localisation—shape visions of regional transformation.

Paper long abstract

Lusatia, a lignite mining region in eastern Germany, is profoundly shaped by decades of mine dewatering and hydrological engineering. Large-scale open-pit mining has transformed the region’s ecosystems and livelihoods through lowered groundwater tables and the relocation or creation of surface water bodies. Amid climate change and the national coal-phase out, however, projections of increasing water scarcity are often framed as primarily hydrological challenges. Yet decisions about which risks become visible and which management options are considered viable are not determined by hydrological conditions and knowledge alone. Rather, they emerge from broader political narratives that articulate societal norms, priorities, and regional futures (Bilalova et al., 2025; Whaley, 2022).

In this paper, we conceptualize water governance as a contested site of knowledge formation in which pathways for regional transformation are co-produced through the everyday making of scenarios and management strategies. As both a material substance and a political object, water mediates relations among (more-than) human actors, institutions, and infrastructures in the region (Barnes and Alatout 2012). We argue that water governance is shaped by different value-laden storylines that mobilize techno-infrastructural, politico-administrative, scalar, and justice-related visions of the future. Empirically, the paper draws on interdisciplinary research combining hydrological modelling with discursive analysis and narrative-led dialogue formats on future water management (including interviews, co-design workshops, and participant observation). By bringing technical planning into dialogue with narrative-informed analysis, our research responds to recent calls to make hydrological research more reflexive, inclusive, and attentive to socio-ecological complexity and existing power relations (Rusca et al. 2026).

Paper short abstract

This paper explores how illegal water practices emerge from socio-economic, institutional, and postcolonial power asymmetries, reconceptualising ‘water theft’ to highlight the informal practices and inequities that shape knowledge, technology, and policy in global water governance.

Paper long abstract

Unregulated water abstractions account for a large share of global water supplies. Despite presenting a substantial challenge, there is no universal definition of water theft. The absence of clarity on what constitutes theft has important governance implications, as how theft is defined could result in inappropriate, ineffective, and/or contextually insensitive enforcement strategies. This paper presents a systematic review of existing definitions of illegal water use to examine how water theft is conceptualised across academic literature, and how these understandings shape policy responses.

The review finds that water theft is rarely explicitly defined; instead, it is implicitly constructed through debates around scarcity, governance failure, property rights, and informality. The paper reveals that unauthorised abstractions arise through competing lenses of greed-driven over-extraction and elite capture, and grievance-based responses to drought, infrastructural exclusion, and inequity. Informal water markets are frequently deemed illegal, despite functioning as essential supply systems where formal provision is absent.

How water theft is defined is also shaped by broader shifts toward privatisation and economic regulation. When water is treated as private property, theft becomes an economic crime. Monitoring, metering, and enforcement act as technoscientific practices that reinforce commodified notions of legality by making certain flows measurable and enforceable while disregarding other ‘criminal’ practices.

By tracing how water theft is asymmetrically defined, normalised, and criminalised, the paper positions water as a site where knowledge, governance, and power intersect. Examining these definitional practices reveals how water governance strategies actively produce the conditions that make water use visible, legitimate, or punishable.