Political airs: From monitoring to attuned sensing air pollution:

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...