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FILTERING FUTURES: CONTAMINANT FLOWS, LANDSCAPE GOVERNANCE AND THE MAKING OF NEW ANTHROPOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE FOR PLANETARY HEALTH

Project description

A closer look at filtration for planetary health

Across the world’s rivers and wetlands, contamination shapes ecosystems and human health. Tackling it demands more than technical fixes. It requires new ways of thinking about how people, organisms, and infrastructures filter water. In this context, the ERC-funded FILTERSCAPE project aims to treat filtration as a social, ecological, and political process. By examining wetlands in Denmark, water systems in Mexico, and even the filtering work of kidneys and macroinvertebrates, the project seeks to demonstrate how filtering mediates flows of pollution. In doing so, it will reveal the histories, governance, and effects behind contamination. FILTERSCAPE brings medical and environmental anthropology together, offering policymakers, scientists and citizens a framework for building healthier, more resilient water ecologies.

Objective

Filtering contaminating flows in water ecologies is a critical problem for planetary health. Current approaches e.g. One Health, favour collaboration among disciplines, governmental bodies, citizens and ecological (more-than-human) actors, to innovate new thinking and sustain interventions. Despite aspirations, efforts to pull human and ecological forces into play remain obstructed by disciplinary silos, vested interests, epistemic uncertainty and a lack of a shared vocabulary.

FILTERSCAPE offers a groundbreaking research agenda for anthropology to address these limitations and drive new thinking in planetary health forward. It captures the overlooked human and more-than-human filtering work within water ecologies. Filtration is a mechanism that can mediate, exacerbate and ameliorate environmental contamination. Enacted in the relations between people, organisms and infrastructures, it works to separate and absorb wanted from unwanted matter. In doing so, it interrupts flows of contamination, to reveal their sources, effects and politics.

FILTERSCAPE will analyze ecological (wetland), infrastructural (waste and water treatment) and embodied (kidneys; macroinvertebrates) filtering relations in Danish and Mexican water ecologies. By studying their histories, diagnostic capacities, governance and embodiments, this project will produce groundbreaking theoretical, methodological and empirical knowledge. It will connect the distinct subfields of medical and environmental anthropology and offer valuable insights for policy makers, practitioners and citizens. It will do this by reconceptualizing planetary health as a filtering assemblage, excavating the role it must play in shaping liveable landscapes.

FILTERSCAPE provides a pluralistic, legible and collaborative platform. Anchored in an anthropology sensitive to space and time, it will ally with ecoscience, agroecology, engineering, environmental management and public health – fields where filtration is integral.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Keywords

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Topic(s)

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HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG

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Host institution

AARHUS UNIVERSITET
Net EU contribution

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€ 2 317 071,00
Address
NORDRE RINGGADE 1
8000 Aarhus C
Denmark

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Region
Danmark Midtjylland Østjylland
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

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Beneficiaries (1)

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