Fenna Smits
Biographic Data
| ID | 134379 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fenna Smits |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fenna |
| FAMILY NAME | Smits |
| SIGNATURE | SMITS F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7798-9668 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 6 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 6 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
“It Depends on the Dirt in Question”
When people clean their bodies, clothes, or kitchens, they dirty the water. In the Netherlands, that which is technologically impossible or too costly to remove from wastewater flows out from wastewater treatment plants with the effluent, where it can harm aquatic organisms. In an attempt to grapple with household emissions, the water sector is charged with increasing awareness about these harmful effects so that people can change their behavior.…
We are Part of Nature
In this article, we pursue a route for understanding the decentralisation of wastewater treatment that moves away from thinking in terms of individual responsibility and technical determinism and mobilises the analytical lens of care to articulate more-than-human relationality as an organising principle of governing environmental infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Dutch Flevopolder, we focus on the mundane practices of hand…
Knowing with Microalgae
In this article, we present a case study of an experimental set up of a microalgae-based wastewater treatment prototype in an ecovillage requiring many maintenance operations to function. Taking our cue from maintenance and repair studies, we focus on the embodied engagements by which caring for wastewater unfolds. We examine how aquatic ecologists, environmental engineers and villagers use their senses as instruments of inquiry when handling was…
Whose infrastructure, which commons? On the maintenance of an emergent health commons in the Netherlands
This article explores how and by what means an emergent health commons is (re)produced in practice. Drawing on recent studies that consider the materiality of citizens' struggles over the commons, it adopts a more-than-human approach to commoning. Employing ethnographic research on a communal healthcare cooperative in a region of the Netherlands that faces depopulation and institutional failure, I argue that the durability of an emergent health c…
The material politics of living in close proximity to our wastewaters
This paper investigates how decentralised wastewater treatment initiatives experiment with ways to live in close proximity to wastewater and their potentiality for a future with less polluting wastewater. In the Netherlands, there is a contested political debate about whether centralised or decentralised technologies are better. Rather than engaging in this deliberative political debate, we articulate a less visible and more material politics by …
Intimate standardisation
The activating welfare state often frames recruiting ordinary people as ‘local’ co-producers of residence-based welfare provisions as the antidote to standardised bureaucracy. This article demonstrates that their enrolment in the delivery of public services in the Netherlands constitutes not an antidote, but another variant of standardisation. To do so, it introduces the concept of ‘intimate standardisation’, a set of tactics and techniques that …
We are Part of Nature
In this article, we pursue a route for understanding the decentralisation of wastewater treatment that moves away from thinking in terms of individual responsibility and technical determinism and mobilises the analytical lens of care to articulate more-than-human relationality as an organising principle of governing environmental infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Dutch Flevopolder, we focus on the mundane practices of hand…
Whose infrastructure, which commons? On the maintenance of an emergent health commons in the Netherlands
This article explores how and by what means an emergent health commons is (re)produced in practice. Drawing on recent studies that consider the materiality of citizens' struggles over the commons, it adopts a more-than-human approach to commoning. Employing ethnographic research on a communal healthcare cooperative in a region of the Netherlands that faces depopulation and institutional failure, I argue that the durability of an emergent health c…
Intimate standardisation
The activating welfare state often frames recruiting ordinary people as ‘local’ co-producers of residence-based welfare provisions as the antidote to standardised bureaucracy. This article demonstrates that their enrolment in the delivery of public services in the Netherlands constitutes not an antidote, but another variant of standardisation. To do so, it introduces the concept of ‘intimate standardisation’, a set of tactics and techniques that …
Intimate standardisation
The activating welfare state often frames recruiting ordinary people as ‘local’ co-producers of residence-based welfare provisions as the antidote to standardised bureaucracy. This article demonstrates that their enrolment in the delivery of public services in the Netherlands constitutes not an antidote, but another variant of standardisation. To do so, it introduces the concept of ‘intimate standardisation’, a set of tactics and techniques that …
The material politics of living in close proximity to our wastewaters
This paper investigates how decentralised wastewater treatment initiatives experiment with ways to live in close proximity to wastewater and their potentiality for a future with less polluting wastewater. In the Netherlands, there is a contested political debate about whether centralised or decentralised technologies are better. Rather than engaging in this deliberative political debate, we articulate a less visible and more material politics by …
Knowing with Microalgae
In this article, we present a case study of an experimental set up of a microalgae-based wastewater treatment prototype in an ecovillage requiring many maintenance operations to function. Taking our cue from maintenance and repair studies, we focus on the embodied engagements by which caring for wastewater unfolds. We examine how aquatic ecologists, environmental engineers and villagers use their senses as instruments of inquiry when handling was…
Whose infrastructure, which commons? On the maintenance of an emergent health commons in the Netherlands
This article explores how and by what means an emergent health commons is (re)produced in practice. Drawing on recent studies that consider the materiality of citizens' struggles over the commons, it adopts a more-than-human approach to commoning. Employing ethnographic research on a communal healthcare cooperative in a region of the Netherlands that faces depopulation and institutional failure, I argue that the durability of an emergent health c…
“It Depends on the Dirt in Question”
When people clean their bodies, clothes, or kitchens, they dirty the water. In the Netherlands, that which is technologically impossible or too costly to remove from wastewater flows out from wastewater treatment plants with the effluent, where it can harm aquatic organisms. In an attempt to grapple with household emissions, the water sector is charged with increasing awareness about these harmful effects so that people can change their behavior.…
We are Part of Nature
In this article, we pursue a route for understanding the decentralisation of wastewater treatment that moves away from thinking in terms of individual responsibility and technical determinism and mobilises the analytical lens of care to articulate more-than-human relationality as an organising principle of governing environmental infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Dutch Flevopolder, we focus on the mundane practices of hand…
Water Governance and Infrastructure (5 works) · Law (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Wastewater (4 works) · Engineering (3 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (3 works) · Law (3 works) · Waste management (3 works) · Decentralization (2 works)