Paper short abstract:

I discuss the long-term consequences of the flooding in 2021 in the Netherlands through the prism of river sludge. By turning my gaze towards a substance that is part of the river and how it interacts with other lifeworlds, I adopt a posthumanist perspective in the study of disasters.

Paper long abstract:

In July 2021 the Midwest of Europe was terrified by torrential rains, resulting in severe floodings that killed 220 people. In this paper, I discuss the less visible, long-term social and ecological consequences of these devastating floodings that hit Belgium and the Netherlands through the prism of river sludge. By taking river sludge as point of entry I adopt a post-humanist perspective, concentrating on how non-human elements, like rivers and sludge, impact human life and vice versa (Cohn and Lynch 2017:285). I perceive rivers here as ‘non-human’ living creatures and turn the gaze towards a substance that is part of the river, as something that a river absorbs and secretes, and how it interacts with socioecological life worlds. Sludge is considered here an active agent with consequences in the world.

By looking at its composition and the way sludge is entangled with human and non-human entities I unravel not only narratives about contemporary and past ways of living, but also bring together different temporalities and inform critical debates about industrial histories, contemporary pollution, and the way these impact the ecology and social life along riverbanks. Reckoning with these multiple encounters, seeing the way they are (partly) linked to each other, and how they impact current and future lifeworlds can help to make “political sense of the Anthropocene” (Mathews 2018: 387), and gives deeper insights into the way the human and non-human are intertwined (Tsing, Mathews and Brubandt 2019) and can no longer be separated in studies on natural disasters.