Article ID: CBB215070697

Sensory politics: The tug-of-war between potability and palatability in municipal water production (June 2018)

unapi

Spackman, Christy C. W. (Author)
Burlingame, Gary A. (Author)


Social Studies of Science
Volume: 48
Issue: 3
Pages: 350-371


Publication Date: June 2018
Edition Details: Special Issue: Toxic Politics. Guest edited by Nerea Calvillo, Max Liboiron, Manuel Tironi and Nicole Nelson
Language: English

Sensory information signaled the acceptability of water for consumption for lay and professional people into the early twentieth century. Yet as the twentieth century progressed, professional efforts to standardize water-testing methods have increasingly excluded aesthetic information, preferring to rely on the objectivity of analytic information. Despite some highly publicized exceptions, consumer complaints remain peripheral to the making and regulating of drinking water. This exclusion is often attributed to the unreliability of the human senses in detecting danger. However, technical discussions among water professionals during the twentieth century suggest that this exclusion is actually due to sensory politics, the institutional and regulatory practices of inclusion or exclusion of sensory knowledge from systems of action. Water workers developed and turned to standardized analytical methods for detecting chemical and microbiological contaminants, and more recently sensory contaminants, a process that attempted to mitigate the unevenness of human sensing. In so doing, they created regimes of perception that categorized consumer sensory knowledge as aesthetic. By siloing consumers’ sensory knowledge about water quality into the realm of the aesthetic instead of accommodating it in the analytic, the regimes of perception implemented during the twentieth century to preserve health have marginalized subjective experiences. Discounting the human experience with municipal water as irrelevant to its quality, control and regulation is out of touch with its intended use as an ingestible, and calls for new practices that engage consumers as valuable participants.

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Article Max Liboiron; Manuel Tironi; Nerea Calvillo (June 2018) Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world. Social Studies of Science (pp. 331-349). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB215070697/

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Authors & Contributors
Colleen Lanier-Christensen
Spackman, Christy C. W.
Valentin Thomas
Luis Reyes-Galindo
Skelton, Leona J.
Richter, Lauren
Concepts
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Expertise
Citizen participation
Regulation
Pollution
Public policy
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
19th century
18th century
17th century
Places
United States
Virgin Islands (U.S.)
West Virginia (U.S.)
England
Peru
Oregon (U.S.)
Institutions
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
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