Quantifying quality: Practices of drinking water quality knowledge-making in Kaolack, Senegal

This paper examines the production of drinking water quality knowledge in Kaolack, Senegal, showing that the state apparatus of scientific knowledge production can struggle to incorporate consumer perceptions and preferences. The article builds on contributions from geography and science and technology studies which show that environmental knowledges emerge through heterogeneous social and biophysical interactions, with political consequences. Relying on eight months of ethnographic field work in Kaolack including observation, participation, and interviews, I develop a qualitative case study of four state knowledge production practices. These practices include: quantifying quality, judging sources of water, locating possible sites of knowledge-making, and attributing responsibility. Each of these practices produces boundaries around what kind of knowledge about drinking water quality is allowed to be influential and obscure elements including embodied consumer perceptions, change after delivery, heterogeneity within households and over time, and long-term effects. I argue that these processes have important implications for the inclusion and exclusion of consumers from the Senegalese state's processes of knowledge-making about drinking water quality, with consequences for how people experience access to drinking water and exposure to potentially harmful substances in water in Kaolack