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Article ID: CBB938785365

Political airs: From monitoring to attuned sensing air pollution (June 2018)

Social Studies of Science
Volume: 48
Issue: 3
Pages: 372-388
Publication date: June 2018
Language: English

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312718784656

Publication Date: June 2018
Edition Details: Special Issue: Toxic Politics -- guest edited by Nerea Calvillo, Max Liboiron, Manuel Tironi and Nicole Nelson

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Legislative and administrative regulations Environmental monitoring Science and politics Air pollution Controversies and disputes 21st century Spain Madrid (Spain) European Union

In Madrid, as in many European cities, air pollution is known about and made accountable through techno-scientific monitoring processes based on data, and the toxicity of the air is defined through epidemiological studies and made political through policy. In 2009, Madrid’s City Council changed the location of its air quality monitoring stations without notice, reducing the average pollution of the city and therefore provoking a public scandal. This scandal challenged the monitoring process, as the data that used to be the evidence of pollution could not be relied on anymore. To identify the characteristics of some of the diverse forms of public’s participation that emerged, I route theories of environmental sensing from STS and feminist theory through the notion of attuned sensing. Reading environmental sensing through processes of attunement expands the ways in which toxicity can be sensed outside of quantitative data. This mode of sensing recognizes how the different spontaneous attunements to and with air pollution and the scandal acknowledged Madrid’s chemical infrastructure, rendering visible qualitative conditions of toxicity. This mode of sensing politicized the toxicity of the air not through management or policy making, nor only through established forms environmental activism, but through contagion and accumulation of the different forms of public participation. All together, they made air pollution a matter of public concern. They also redistributed the actors, practices and objects that make the toxicity not only knowable, but also accountable, and most importantly, they opened up spaces for citizen intervention.

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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

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