Regulation and Revulsion: Towards a Metabolic Geography of Sewage Pollution in England

Keywords: pollution, water, sewage, emotion, metabolism, London, natural language processing
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 21

Abstract

In England, lockdown brought renewed attention to the continuity of material and physiological metabolisms: chronic sewage pollution of rivers became an object of public scorn due to its health risks for people enjoying their local water environment. This paper presents computational and qualitative evidence to argue that longstanding interest by urban political ecologists in the circulation of water and waste may benefit from incorporating digital data about how emotion mediates the experience of material flows. Qualitative and computational methods register this mediation across local and national scales, respectively, and illuminate how emotion animates struggles around water and sewerage infrastructure: locally, London residents enlist the revulsion provoked by the sensory experience of sewage pollution in their struggle for resources for blue and green infrastructure. In contrast, natural language processing of a large number of social media posts reveals how disgust operates as a political emotion at the national scale. Public disgust at sewage pollution was compounded by media reports revealing how water utilities pay dividends rather than preventing spills, while the environmental regulator had been deprived of funds for monitoring and enforcement. Grounding the demand for stronger regulatory action at the national scale in the local and embodied experience of contamination, civic expressions of disgust lend corporeal intensity to public condemnations of a financialized water sector. The paper concludes by reflecting on the potential of hybrid computational-qualitative methods to contribute to an embodied metabolic geography that attends to the shaping of metabolisms by affective intensities.