Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This presentation explores how microbial water toxicity becomes a public issue shaped by relations among bacteria, infrastructures and regulations. It analyses how safe and risky water are defined and disputed, and what unequal forms of human–bacterial cohabitation emerge in damaged aquatic settings

Paper long abstract

The aim of this presentation is to explore how microbial water toxicity is configured as a public problem at the intersection of bacteria, infrastructures and regulations. Drawing on an ongoing PhD project in three sites of contaminated water management (a public research institution, a rural queer community space and a municipal wastewater management in a large Spanish city), toxicity is approached not as a biochemical given but as a disputed effect of situated human–microbial–environmental relations.

Building on scholarship on the hydrosocial cycle and environmental justice, biocultural ethics and work on toxicity as atmosphere and relational field, the proposal analyses regulatory documents, water-quality reports and technical materials that define “acceptable” bacterial thresholds in water. These devices produce multiple situated waters (laboratory, normative, well, network) and authorise particular institutions to decide which waters are toxic or safe, and for whom, often reinforcing socio-environmental inequalities.

The communication focuses on two of the three empirical niches. In urban treatment plants, bacteria, sludge, pipes and aeration tanks form alliances to “eat” contamination, reconfiguring microbial life as both risk and allied resource within large-scale aquatic infrastructures. In a rural queer community space, filters, wells and municipal fountains organise infrastructures of care around potentially contaminated waters, redistributing exposure through everyday practices of fetching, filtering and sharing. Following Haraway (1994), this presentation asks which microbial and human lives become sacrificial in the name of water safety, and what respons-abilities emerge when co-habiting with damaged aquatic environments without the promise of purity.