Human Biomonitoring: Constituting Collectives and Imaginaries in the Anthropocene

 Human biomonitoring registers traces of environmental chemical pollution in the human body. It mobilizes many human volunteers to give samples (e.g. blood or urine), and it requires a complex infrastructure involving public authorities, scientific experts, citizens and other stakeholders. In this project, I will analyze how such infrastructures are currently being implemented in different countries, under EU coordination. Questions as to which pollutants are to be measured, which expertise is relevant, and how to involve citizens, turn biomonitoring into a challenging real-time experiment in environmental justice and democracy. My project analyzes the infrastructures that make measurements possible, while engaging with fundamental questions about what exposure levels actually mean. The question "what have we measured" may be answered with “mercury”, but mercury refers back to its own past in fossil fuel burning; its unequal impact across human populations and other species in the present; and its endemic risks for the future. It is here, this project argues, that the challenge of biomonitoring is at its sharpest: to what extent will it offer an avenue for active citizen engagement to re-imagine the environment and new collective futures? Taking cue from social studies of science and contemporary debates on the Anthropocene, my project aims to develop an innovative approach to chemical environments and the role of imagined futures in defining the meaning of exposure.