Sensing ubiquity: encountering microplastic (science) in the laboratory

The emergence of microplastics as environmental matters of concern has complicated the already contentious material politics of plastics. Microplastic materiality disrupt and evade dominant strategies and discourses surrounding the management of plastics from the ‘reuse, reduce, recycle’ waste hierarchy to systems-scale lifecycle assessments. This strangely ubiquitous and indeterminate form of plastic materiality thus raises critical questions around how to monitor an environmental contaminant that is imperceptible and everywhere all at once, how scientific knowledge is produced when the distinction between sample and contamination becomes ontologically blurred but also how to respond to these harmful yet inextricable entanglements.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted across two laboratories, interviews with microplastic scientists across the UK and document analysis, this talk examines how microplastics become sensible in the laboratory. In an account that loosely follows the processes of sample extraction, material analysis and chemical characterisation, it shows how researchers contend with the multitude of plastics that circulate through the laboratory and how embodied and algorithmic modes of sensing come together to transform microplastic matter into data. In doing so, it aims to extend geographical understandings of ubiquity through an empirical focus on how these sensing regimes interface and are challenged by different materialisations of ubiquity in practice. The talk tentatively concludes that the inevitability of contamination and the ‘irony’ of plastics plays a constitutive and even generative role in the making of microplastic data.

Venue: Byrne House, University of Exeter (spaces limited)

Virtual: via Zoom

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