Living with contamination: The emotional geographies of PFAS in urban allotment gardens

• Applicant: Dr. Melike Peterson
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 579947562

This project explores the emotional geographies of PFAS-contaminated urban allotment gardens in close proximity to Bremen Airport and along the river Ochtum, asking how gardeners emotionally experience and navigate the impacts of long-term exposure to invisible toxins such as PFAS. Using creative, arts-based and participatory methods, the project aims to visualise and critically discuss these geographies. The three main objectives are: 1. Bringing emotional and chemical geographies into dialogue using PFAS as an example to explore the social life of enduring toxic chemicals and the micropolitics of their emotional and spatial experiences. 2. Developing creative methodologies for exploring and visualising the emotional geographies of PFAS contamination. These include feminist, embodied and relational approaches to knowledge-creation and mapping that emphasise situated, everyday experiences in chemically entangled spaces. 3. Co-producing research outputs in collaboration with participants, artists and communities, to foster public engagement, empowerment and awareness of life in contaminated urban environments through shared storytelling, mapping and visual practices. The project frames PFAS exposure as a form of emotional trauma which is experienced not only individually, but also as part of broader socio-political and ecological violence. It explores (1) what emotions emerge in response to PFAS contamination, how these emotions are expressed or suppressed, and how they shape the everyday spaces that people (have to) use and live in, and how these emotions are shaped by these everyday spaces. Methodologically, the project employs (2) feminist and creative geographical approaches, such as critical mapping, to capture the complexity and intimacy of living with slow-moving, invisible pollutants like PFAS. By mapping and narrating the emotional geographies of PFAS exposure, the project (3) fosters recognition and resistance, as well as a slow and intimate form of activism, by making invisible chemical harms visible and actionable. In doing so, the project (3) responds to calls for committed and collaborative research that values local knowledges and co-produces understanding through affective, creative and participatory methods. Through its collaboration with the Bremen-based artist collective D.O.C.H., the project also takes seriously the necessity of creative responses to deal with the complex socio-chemical challenges of PFAS.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants