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Paper short abstract

By ethnographically tracing steel slags, by-products in steel production that engage with landscapes and people, this paper argues that a distribution of perplexity is required to form political collectives in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses the steel slag, a by-product in steel production, as an infrastructure that engages in physicochemical interactions with landscapes and people, causing scientific controversies and policy debates. Conceptually, the study contributes to STS research by introducing the notion of the ‘distribution of perplexity’. Empirically and ethnographically, the paper draws on a case of steel slag contamination in the Netherlands. In different municipalities in the Netherlands, dust from the slags caused irritation and nose bleeds and the leaching of heavy metals polluted the soil and ground water. Through these material transformations, the slags turned from objects into issues that demanded to be taken into account by residents, environmental supervisors and researchers. Therefore, this paper argues that the formation of political collectives in the Anthropocene depends on a distribution of perplexity: the acknowledgement of the existence of new actors outside of the collective. This acknowledgement is captured by Bruno Latour’s notion of perplexity. Using methods that are common in ethnography, like interviews and document analysis, this study traces how perplexity is distributed across concerned residents, environmental supervisors and researchers. The study presents research findings on what non-human political actors like steel slags do in order to become visible and what enables residents, researchers and environmental policy makers to see and acknowledge new actors and to rearrange political collectives.