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Short abstract

PFAS are anthropogenic persistant chemicals simultaneously sought-after as products and undesirable as residues. Their dual nature, asymmetrically considered, has allowed them to ubiquitously inhabit our world. Based on interviews, I argue that current Belgian responses are inadequate.

Long abstract

PFAS are sought-after chemicals for their incredible resistance properties. As they escape the confines of their intended uses they become reluctant residues. They are not only physical residues, but also infrastructural remnants of past activities. Sites of production, innovation or waste management have been permanently transfigured physically and epistemically by their presence. PFAS are simultaneously the results of industrial activity and sediments of political decisions and processes. Their ubiquitous presence is symptomatic of the inability for current regulatory chemical frameworks to address complex slow disasters (Knowles, 2020).

Companies knew of the pervasiveness and dangers of PFAS, but kept producing them while multiplying their uses, thoroughly embedding the material in modern industrial processes and society. I argue that asymmetric access to knowledge, specifically unseen science (Richter et al., 2018), combined with innovation imperatives and cost-benefits-based (Boudia, 2014) decision-making which consistently overlooks the externalities of the chemical economy, have allowed a worldwide problem to fester. Now publicly exposed (no pun intended), pressure for action is building.

Hence, Belgian authorities have launched waves of biomonitoring aimed at specific known hotspots offering limited insights on the extent of the pollution. Filters are being installed in water distribution facilities, addressing the consequences while the causes remain largely unattended. Simultaneously, carefully crafted uncertainty induced a lethargic regulatory response. From interviews with key actors (amongst which toxicologists, waterplant managers and contaminated citizens), I propose to examine the shortcomings of current responses and the inability to address the PFAS crisis under current normative and knowledge making practices.

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Short abstract

This paper examines how ubiquitous microplastics become sensible in the laboratory. Drawing on empirical vignettes, it argues that attending to the residual not only important to studying innovation societies but is critical to understanding how microplastics come to matter as scientific knowledge.

Long abstract

Innovations in everyday life and societies at large are made possible by the proliferation of plastics. Yet in recent years, the emergence of microplastics as a matter of concern has further complicated the already contentious material politics of plastics (De Wolff, 2017; Liboiron, 2016). The ubiquitous and indeterminate quality of these residues raises critical questions around how to monitor an environmental contaminant that is imperceptible and everywhere all at once, how scientific knowledge is produced when the distinction between sample and contamination becomes ontologically blurred but also how to care for these harmful yet inextricable entanglements.

This paper examines the laboratory practices of microplastic detection and analysis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted across two laboratories, interviews with microplastic scientists based in the UK and document analysis, it develops the notion of sensing (Gabrys, 2016, 2019) to analyse how researchers contend with the multitude of plastics that circulate through the laboratory and how embodied and algorithmic sensing regimes come together to transform microplastic matter into data. In an account that loosely follows the processes of sample extraction, material analysis and chemical characterisation, it argues that thinking with ‘left-behinds’ is not only critical to understanding processes of innovation but the very scientific practices mobilised to study this ubiquitous condition of plastic contamination. The paper tentatively concludes that the inevitability of contamination and the ‘residual-ity’ of plastics plays a constitutive and even generative role in the making of microplastic data and care.

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Short abstract

This paper examines the role of microplastics in Austria’s 2024 decision to ban the re-use of sewage sludge in agriculture. We conceptualize microplastics as “disturbances” – elements that trouble and open existing practices and infrastructures for managing and redistributing residues to scrutiny.

Long abstract

Sewage sludge occupies an ambiguous position between waste and resource. As by-product of wastewater treatment, it acts as a sink for many residues of contemporary life, including pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, PFAS, or microplastics. At the same time, sludge contains valuable nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, and is thus widely re-used as fertilizer in agriculture, thereby reintroducing pollutants previously removed from wastewater into soils.

This paper examines Austria’s 2024 decision to ban the agricultural re-use of sewage sludge, mandating incineration instead. Notably, the ban was largely framed as an intervention to keep microplastics out of soils – a contaminant that, in contrast to many of the other substances present in sludge, does not (yet) show clear evidence of harm. In the Austrian context, microplastics thus acquired political agency, becoming a catalyst accelerating longstanding controversies around sludge re-use.

Drawing on interviews with policymakers, microplastics researchers, wastewater engineers, and composters, we trace how different actors problematize microplastics in sludge and how these perspectives relate to competing visions of environmental good, including efficient wastewater treatment, circular nutrient reuse, and incineration.

We conceptualize microplastics as “disturbances” – elements that trouble existing practices and infrastructures for managing and redistributing residues. By rendering visible the arrangements through which innovation societies contain and distribute environmental externalities, microplastics open space to question technosolutionist responses and reconsider alternative ways of living and dealing with residues.

This research is done together with Ulrike Felt (PI) as part of the ERC project Innovation Residues (GA 101054580).

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Short abstract

This study examines how different stakeholders narrate micro- and nanoplastic pollution and shape the discourse of the invisible. We aim to reveal how knowledge, power and discursive agency shape innovation societies, future imaginaries and policy pathways.

Long abstract

Micro- and nanoplastics (MNP), along with plastic-associated chemicals, are increasingly recognized as pervasive environmental pollutants remaining from innovation practices, adding a complex dimension to the global plastic pollution crisis. As plastics fragment into the environment, MNP generate diffuse and often unforeseen risks that challenge existing governance and spark growing discussions. Within this context, scientists – often portrayed as neutral informants – actively contextualize and narrate findings and, thereby, influence what is seen as pollution, what counts as evidence and what interventions appear legitimate. This raises the question of how other actors take on, reinterpret or adapt those framings, shaping how the topic is further problematized and what solutions gain traction. This paper examines how stakeholders construct the discourse on MNP and envision just strategies for mitigating MNP pollution.

Drawing on workshop transcripts, policy documents, and explorative interviews with NGOs, regulators, academia and industry representatives, the study explores how stakeholders negotiate uncertainties, risks, and responsibilities through narratives. We identify how MNP pollution and its management are discussed as well as which strategic practices are used to attain legitimacy, pave governance pathways and influence regulatory trajectories.

Examining MNP discourse reveals how stakeholders construct plastic waste not as inevitable byproduct of innovation, but as site of contested environmental future imaginaries. Policy trajectories emerge in the tension between calls for further research, often delaying regulatory interventions, and demands for decisive action applying precautionary measures. In this contested space, stakeholders play a decisive role in (re)shaping the terrain of innovation and policy pathways for MNP.

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Short abstract

This paper considers how anticipations of future material residues serve as ethical guides within regenerative material design. Makers attempt to build new materials as a foil to toxic petro-presents with guilt-free afterlives but remain concerned with known unknowns in their innovation's futures.

Long abstract

Regenerative material designers and makers are often obsessed with material residues - both inherited and those to come. In their everyday lives, they trace out toxic futures: clothes whose chemical treatments leech when washed, disposable cups which will linger for thousands of years, tyres which shed particles with every turn. This understanding of materiality as ethical and as future-focused forms the foundation for their broader project: the (re)making of themselves as responsible producers and the redesign of the material world in a responsive and responsible way. Against this backdrop, they imagine and prototype alternatives: materials that biodegrade, bio-assimilate, or otherwise promise benign disappearance.

This paper delves into how regenerative designers understand their work in relation to future traces; how they understand more positive wordings through disappearing, decomposable, bio-benign materials; but also how toxic material traces haunt new production methods. This is on two fronts. On one front, their efforts are constrained by legacy infrastructures: standards, supply chains, and fabrication processes calibrated for petrochemically derived materials. On another, uncertainty remains in even the most careful interventions as end-of-life questions linger and designers remain acutely aware that their materials’ futures can never be fully known. The “guilt-free” afterlife aspired to proves less a destination than an ongoing ethical negotiation, where goodness must be continually re-evaluated in light of potential residues.

Through this lens, regenerative material design appears as a site where innovation residues are active forces shaping how responsibility, foresight, and care are practiced under conditions of partial knowledge and material doubt.

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Short abstract

Dresden in East Germany is home to one of Europe’s largest semiconductor clusters. This paper reads “Silicon Saxony” as a memory project that turns socialist microelectronics into a usable past while disavowing rupture, devaluation, and lost futures that still shape the region.

Long abstract

Dresden, in East Germany, is today promoted as “Silicon Saxony,” one of Europe’s leading semiconductor regions. The phrase signals dynamism and technological promise, but it also performs historical work. In policy discourse and cluster branding, the region’s socialist microelectronics industry is recast as a precursor to chip success. The East German past is not simply rejected; it is selectively folded into a teleology of innovation.

This paper asks what such stories leave behind. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic as well as discourse-analytic material, I examine Silicon Saxony not only as an industrial cluster but as a memory project that shapes how the past becomes available to the present. Official narratives turn a fractured post-socialist history into a coherent account of continuity. Yet they remain haunted by what they cannot fully absorb: the collapse of industrial worlds after 1989 and the devaluation of socialist expertise, both bound up with attachments to futures that never arrived.

A hauntological approach makes these tensions legible. It shifts attention from innovation’s promises to its temporal politics by asking how regions are assembled through selective remembrance as much as through future-oriented visions. Innovation residues, in this sense, are not only material leftovers. They also persist as affective and political traces within stories about progress and worth. Thinking with such residues helps disrupt the apparent coherence of innovation societies and opens space to reassemble them around lost futures and unresolved claims to recognition in the region today.

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Short abstract

This paper explores the growing contestations around data centers in Ireland and France. It argues that these contestations allow us to understand the material, yet often unacknowledged left-behinds of digital innovation, making data centers a focal point for pressing technopolitical questions.

Long abstract

What we commonly call 'the digital' – often evoked through metaphors such as 'the cloud' or 'the virtual' which suggest the opposite – is anything but immaterial or placeless. Data centres, key nodes in the "global assemblage of digital flows" (Graham, 2014), demonstrate this realization. As the material infrastructures of digitalization and Aritifical Intelligence, they become one of the foremost sites for observing and experiencing the heterogeneous materialities of ‘the digital’. They require large amounts of energy and water, rely on rare earths used in servers, generate waste heat and e-waste, and store ever-growing volumes of partially unused data. As such, they are deeply material, locally embedded — and increasingly become sites and objects of contestation.

This paper takes contestations around data centres in Ireland and France as an entry point for examining the diverse left-behinds of digital innovation (Felt, 2025). Rather than treating such contestation merely as opposition, I approach it as a lens for understanding how the materialities and consequences of digital infrastructures become (technopolitical) problems (Callon, 2009). How are data centres problematized by those who contest them? What kinds of solutions are proposed? What publics emerge, and through which channels do they articulate their concerns? By examining different forms of contestation, the paper explores what they reveal about how questions of sustainability, the climate crisis, democracy, and justice become articulated around infrastructures of 'the digital'.

The analysis draws on fieldwork conducted with Ulrike Felt (PI) in the ERC-funded project Innovation Residues(GA 1010545).

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Short abstract

The paper examines how, in the current frenzy for scale in the AI sector, specialized architectures and chips co-create a material-epistemic assemblage that raises major concerns over AI's ecological footprint. We trace contrasting framings and valuation registers in this field of tensions.

Long abstract

Recent STS scholarship has called for renewed critical engagement with the logics and politics of scaling, suggesting that contemporary innovation cultures are underpinned by a "scalability zeitgeist" (Pfotenhauer et al., 2022) that prioritizes expansion and exponential growth. This "imperative to scale" (MacKenzie, 2026) is also embedded in current AI culture, where – since the paradigm shift to massive parallel processing (see Vaswani et al., 2017) – a dominant logic has prevailed: "the more compute and data you put in, the more intelligence you get out" (Patel, 2025). Driven by expectations of vast future returns, this brute-force approach to AI has triggered an infrastructure arms race, with unprecedented capital investments in data centers promising ever more potent iterations of foundation models.

This paper problematizes the current frenzy for scale in the AI sector by investigating the environmental overflows and externalities (Callon, 1998; Felt, 2025) of the "bigger is better" doctrine. More specifically, we show how the co-evolution of a certain way of 'doing AI' (transformer architecture) and specialized high-performance AI chips has given rise to a material-epistemic assemblage whose production, reliance on critical minerals, energy- and water-intensive operation, and short service life generate significant ecological pressures. Drawing on extensive document analysis and stakeholder interviews, the paper highlights contrasting framings of this assemblage, unpacking the registers of valuation that underlie controversies over the AI industry's escalating environmental footprint and attendant residues.

This research is carried out in collaboration with Ulrike Felt in the framework of her ERC-funded project Innovation Residues (GA 101054580).

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Short abstract

This paper thinks with residues of semiconductor production. It focuses on 'green' chip design in Silicon Saxony, where Germany is defending its digital sovereignty. Conceptually, it explores the concept of 'responsible electronics' asking how greener materials relocate accountability for residues.

Long abstract

“Semiconductors are often referred to as the oil of the 21st century, […] the raw material on which almost everything else depends,” explained the then German Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz in May 2023 celebrating the construction of an Infineon Smart Power Fab in Dresden, the centre of ‘Silicon Saxony’. [1]

Like oil, semiconductors produce residues. The electronic industry is extremely resource-intensive and pollutes the planet with greenhouse gas emissions and toxic by-products from raw material extraction and chip production. Aware of these environmental impacts, EU governments, science and industry are pushing research and development towards more sustainable 'responsible electronics' (cf. RE2 at TU Dresden).

Taking the concept of 'responsible electronics' as a starting point, this paper explores how scientists in Silicon Saxony think with residues to change the material basis of semiconductor chip production. With an empirical focus on 'green and sustainable design' in the form of new thin films and material platforms, I will conceptually discuss how "green design" (Kokai et al. 2021) might redistribute responsibilities in research and innovation (cf. Owen et al. 2021), "relocate accountability" along the electronics production chain (Suchman 2002) and reorganise "organised irresponsibility" (Beck, 1988). In conclusion, I will speculate with residues on potential blind spots of 'responsible electronics'. For example, will we still care about the residues of the ‘future past’? If green design succeeded, who will be held accountable for the permanently polluted worlds (Liboiron et al. 2018) that 'irresponsible' electronic production has left behind?

[1] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/service/archiv-bundesregierung/halbleiter-deutschland-2187370, accessed 2026-03-09, my translation.

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Short abstract

Based on interviews with PEC experts and an analysis of European hydrogen initiatives, this article shows how epistemic residues inherited from fossil based logics shape which solar hydrogen futures are deemed viable, relegating more alternative pathways to the background.

Long abstract

Hydrogen has recently attracted strong political and industrial interest as a key solution for decarbonizing energy systems. While electrolysis‑based hydrogen remains embedded in infrastructures and economic logics inherited from fossil fuel systems, emerging solar‑based pathways - such as photoelectrochemical (PEC) technologies - may be associated by some actors with alternative imaginaries of autonomy and decentralization. Drawing on work on innovation residues (Felt, 2025), our fieldwork shows that these speculative possibilities are often absorbed into dominant discourses, revealing epistemic residues that shape which futures are considered viable.

Based on interviews and observations with PEC experts and actors involved in European hydrogen initiatives, this paper examines how such residues constrain possible trajectories for solar hydrogen. Our findings show that PEC technologies tend to inherit fossil‑based logics: market dynamics and expectations of large‑scale deployment, echoing how inherited configurations can shape present choices (Pottin and Felt, 2025). As a result, alternative imaginaries are overshadowed by standardized visions of innovation.

The European consortium SUNER‑C illustrates this dynamic. By prioritizing solar fuels as the main future of solar hydrogen, it sidelines other plausible pathways, such as solar chemicals, despite expert support. These exclusions reflect not only explicit strategic decisions but also accreted epistemic residues (Boudia et al., 2018) that shape how innovation is framed and valued, making some futures appear more aligned with dominant logics while others become residual or difficult to articulate.

By foregrounding these residues, the paper shows how certain energy futures become obscured or dismissed and argues for rethinking innovation through sidelined possibilities.

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Short abstract

SMRs are promoted as low-carbon solutions to rising energy demand from digital transformations. Focusing on Austria and Ireland, this paper examines how SMR promises enter debates in non-nuclear states and how nuclear residues are addressed to make nuclear futures politically plausible.

Long abstract

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are increasingly promoted as innovative, flexible, low-carbon technologies capable of supporting climate goals while responding to rising electricity demand. A key driver behind these promises is the rapid expansion of digital infrastructures –particularly data centres and Artificial Intelligence applications– which will require vast and stable energy supplies. As a result, nuclear options such as SMRs enter policy discussions even in countries that have historically positioned themselves as non-nuclear energy states –in my case Austria and Ireland. Yet nuclear innovation inevitably raises a persistent question: what kinds of radioactive residues accompany these technologies, and how are they addressed in these debates?

Focusing on Austria and Ireland, this paper examines how SMR promises travel into national discussions and reopen debates about nuclear futures. It asks: how are nuclear residues assembled –or not– as matters of concern and care within these narratives? Drawing on a comparative analysis of governmental communications, regulatory documents, and media framings, the paper explores how nuclear residues are problematized, minimized, deferred, or reframed in SMR debates and how this is balanced against the promises of innovation. Particular attention is paid to how existing nuclear waste is framed as a legacy issue, while the residues associated with SMRs are repositioned as manageable through technological innovation or future solutions.

The analysis forms part of the ERC Advanced Grant project *Innovation Residues* (GA 10105480; PI: Ulrike Felt) and highlights the regimes of (in)visibility through which nuclear residues are reconfigured in efforts to make new nuclear futures politically plausible.

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Short abstract

This talk is unearthing the ShelterBox. Ten years ago, this humanitarian innovation was given to flood victims in southern Malawi. My ethnographic engagement with its remnants reveals what recovery entails, how material aid does (not) work, and what it means to live from and despite floods.

Long abstract

Humanitarian aid relies on a growing variety of relief supplies to provide shelter for the increasing number of people displaced by conflicts and natural disasters (Scott-Smith 2019). Since the paradigm shift towards innovation (Müller and Sou 2019), new items should make aid more efficient, secure funding, and offer technical solutions to crises. Design processes and early application of the Ikea Better Shelter (Brownell 2020), the Lifestraw (Redfield 2016), and solar lamps (Cross 2013) have been critically discussed. However, what happens to humanitarian innovations after they are invented or deployed in disaster relief? This talk is unearthing the ShelterBox. Ten years ago, this humanitarian innovation from a British charity was given to flood victims in southern Malawi. For those who lost their homes, the ShelterBox, filled with family tents, blankets, buckets, sleeping mats, and kitchen sets, was meant to provide temporary shelter. My ethnographic engagement with the remnants of these items reveals their own stories about material aid in flood relief. Never-used goods, never-rebuilt houses, or goods that are used far beyond their expiration date disrupt the notion of a disaster relief cycle. Remnants of aid items woven into soils obscure the intention of providing aid with doing environmental harm caused by non-degradable materials. Repurposed goods blur the boundaries between humanitarian and development aid in disaster-prone communities. Looking at the residues of humanitarian innovations shows controversies about the memories of the relief supplies received, wondering about the whereabouts of missing goods, and everyday uses of the found aid items.

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Short abstract

This contribution reframes innovation through technoscientific heritage-making, where residues are produced, sorted, and governed. It traces how classification, conservation, and storage practices render some leftovers “heritage” while obscuring others, and what this means for care.

Long abstract

The objective of this contribution is to think innovation through its left-behinds by analysing technoscientific heritage-making as a key site where “innovation residues” are produced, sorted, and governed. Technoscientific heritage-making involves collecting, selecting, interpreting, preserving, restoring, and exhibiting material and immaterial traces of technoscience (e.g., scientific instruments, models, mundane technological objects, infrastructures, and software) together with the narratives and classifications that render them durable as “heritage” across institutional and non-institutional venues. Building on STS approaches to care (Mol 2008; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), we discuss the concept of a “regime of caring” to trace how these arrangements make some leftovers legible while obscuring others.

Empirically, we draw on 14 semi-structured interviews with museum professionals, private collectors, and grassroots museums in contemporary Italy, where technoscientific heritage has only recently been institutionalised. We show how residues persist as (a) material “leftovers” (obsolete artefacts), (b) infrastructural burdens (donation logistics, storage scarcity, maintenance labour), and (c) epistemic residues embedded in cataloguing standards, conservation protocols, and institutional hierarchies that sort remains into “heritage” or “rubbish” and stabilise progress-centred imaginaries.

We identify two interlaced registers within this regime: a civic register oriented to accountability, documentation, and public stewardship, and a biographical register oriented to attachment, repair, and experiential engagement. Their frictions surface in restoration disputes (functionality versus non-intervention) and in the practical politics of “saving” objects under chronic resource constraints. We argue that innovation can be reassembled from the governance of residues, recognising vernacular expertise and repair communities as central to caring for innovation’s afterlives.