Paper short abstract:

This paper examines water quality monitoring in Jerusalem as an act of care, where the transgression of standards and regulations can nurture historical relations of care, forge new bonds, and crystallise forms of slow violence. What constitutes both care and transgression is brought into question.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, care is examined in the context of water infrastructure in Jerusalem, as a utility network which performs an act of public health for the city. The focus is water quality, where at the particulate scale levels of bacteria, chemicals and minerals are meticulously monitored in the Jerusalem water utility lab through daily tests, seen by those who enact them as manifestations of a strategy of prevention to keep residents healthy and safe. International water quality standards and national water regulations are the rules which govern these care practices. When moments of transgression are driven by residents in certain neighbourhoods, they can nurture a different kind of caring relation with water which challenges its centralisation, and its politics. When moments of transgression take place within the water utility, they expand lines of responsibility to include service provision beyond municipal boundaries, which simultaneously extends care through good quality water and consolidates an infrastructure seen by some as deeply troubling.

Based on ongoing doctoral ethnographic research, these rules and their transgressions are traced to complicate understandings of care in a time of climate crisis. What constitutes both care, and transgression, is brought into question.

Care here – and the crossing of its contours – is explored in a constellation of intimate relations that encompass questions of environmental justice and slow violence, and spans infrastructures, the materiality of water, and the visceral affective experiences of daily lives.