Seite - 21 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

Problematizing the speculative ecologies of microplastics BERGMANN, Sven University of Bremen, Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research Bremen, Germany Introduction The idea of organizing a panel with my colleague Franziska Klaas arose from discussions about the particularities of collaborative work within ethnographic research in fields of pollution, contamination and toxicity. In this paper, I will focus on the necessary conditions for potential collaborations in ambiguous fields where multiple representations of a phenomenon and rather unpredictable research findings complicate decisions. I will introduce the notion of speculation and ambivalence in my field of research: the problematisation of plastics in the ocean and other environments.1 Therefore, my research contributes to an anthropology of quite speculative futures and ecologies, analysing our on-going experiment with plastics and its afterlives in emerging naturecultures. I am interested in how the notion of the speculative and the unpredictable do shape knowledge production and emerging politics in this field. Following media representations, it seems that plastics in the ocean are rather easy to manage and technological solutions are heavily promoted. However, during my research it became evident that neither the problem is that simple nor its solutions. As I will show, via propagating big solutions, still a modern separation between nature and culture is at work – which is part of the problem, too. Speculative ecologies of plastics in the ocean Anthropogenic marine litter, such as plastics, has become a novel environmental challenge. In retrospect, the introduction of plastics and its unexpected trajectories can be understood as an experiment with a still unknown outcome. Synthetic polymers as a historically rather young mate- rial have become yet an anthropogenic marker with long-term effects for global environments. Plastic’s short life span (for example as a packaging material or as a single-use product) stands in contrast to its long afterlife: In the water, plastics do not mineralize; they degrade into tiny fragments, so-called microplastics (particles below five millimetres). The invention of the term microplastics has dramatically changed the perception of plastics in the ocean and even on land. In water, plastic loses its form, degrades and therefore, be it buoy- ant or not, flows with the water currents. It becomes an errant fluid form: a dispersion of tiny particles in the ocean that resembles and reassembles the marine snow in the water column. According to estimates there are 5,25 trillion (1012) plastic particles in the ocean, of which 92,4% can be considered as microplastics (Eriksen et al. 2014). Beyond that, particles from syn- thetic fibres recently monitored in an atmospheric study in the centre of Paris (Dris et al. 2017) 1 Over the last two years, I have focused both on (scientific) knowledge production on plastic marine litter, as well as on the politics and policies that have emerged because of the existence of these new entities. I have followed these practices via multi-sited ethnography in different fields such as marine science, environmental activism, citizen science and new forms of management and governance, for example the German “Round Table on Marine Litter” that was initiated in 2016 or the development of one of the largest marine protection areas in the Pacific off the coast of Rapa Nui. 21