Seminar by Fenna Smits on Tuesday 23.9.2025

The Department of Ecological Anthropology invites you to the upcoming seminar talk 'Clean Enough? On measuring ecological cleanliness in Dutch surface waters‘ by Fenna Smits, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.

The lecture will take place on Tuesday 23.9.2025 at 14:00 (CET) in the seminar room of the Institute of Ethnology CAS, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1. To attend in person or online, please register.

Abstract: In anthropology, the adage that ‘dirt is matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1966) helps explain why sand on a floor or shoes on a table violate cultural boundaries. But when synthetic chemicals enter rivers, more is at stake than a disruption of socio-spatial order: such substances disrupt biological functioning and threaten the vitality of aquatic life. How, then, is ecological pollution assessed? Or, put differently, what counts as ecologically clean, healthy water? In this talk, I take the evaluation of more-than-human health as an empirical conundrum. Drawing on fieldwork with Dutch water practitioners, I explore how different modes of measuring - ranging from bio-indicators and chemical concentrations to field assays - yield different answers to that same question. While ecological flourishing is a shared goal, what to count, and what counts, turns out to be a matter of internal contestation.

Bio: Fenna Smits is a postdoctoral researcher in Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Her work explores how care for the environment is taken up in practice, with previous ethnographic work in healthcare, experimental wastewater treatment, and saline water management. Her current project examines how Dutch water professionals seek to realise ‘cleanliness’ in their care for surface water.

Pdf here.