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Paper short abstract

Our contribution examines how pollution in Bitterfeld-Wolfen is sensed, made, and negotiated through entwined technical practices and everyday encounters. As a late-industrial palimpsest, the region reveals how contaminants haunt communities and shape practices of care, memory, and future-making.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on medium-term ethnographic fieldwork in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, we examine how pollution is sensed, lived with, and temporally negotiated in a late-industrial, postsocialist town shaped by dense historical overlappings. As a paradigmatic Just Transition area, Bitterfeld-Wolfen embodies a palimpsest of historical lignite mining and chemical production, socio-cultural ruptures of the reunification, contemporary pressures of remediation and processes of structural change towards sustainable chemistry. These layers do not simply coexist: they entangle in everyday socio-spatial and embodied practices within local communities underlain by one of the world's largest groundwater contaminations.

By combining human geography with media studies and STS, we understand underground pollution as a situated object of knowledge on the surface through the interaction of technical remediation practices and residents’ affective, sensory engagements with their environment. Groundwater contamination is not merely measured; it is made — as a technoscientific object produced through sensors and maps; instrumented through pumps and underground protection walls; encountered as an everyday phenomenon through smells, gas in cellars, obtrusive infrastructures, or stories and specters of past contamination. While scientific representations mirror the heterogeneous distribution of chemicals underground, residents above experience them as ghostly afterlives of socialist industrialism haunting the neighbourhood.

We conceptualise Bitterfeld-Wolfen’s groundwater contamination as a sensor media milieu in which sciences, infrastructure, and the socio-spatial entwine. This perspective highlights how polluted environments act as archives of socio-ecological history and how sustainable futures may emerge when pollution is approached not only as a perpetual threat but as an iterative practice of remediation, negotiation, and community endurance.