Compost to Compostables: Now, What Other Figurations?

• In Event: Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities Panel - I

Abstract

In “Composting Settler Nationalisms” (2017) we figured compost as a way of thinking about multispecies relations, implicatedness, and responsibility as non-Indigenous theorists working and writing on Indigenous territories. We made connections between colonial agricultural histories, the regenerative ontologies and operations of composting, and feminist STS material semiotics. Compost, we argued, cannot be thought separately from the habits and cultural codings of waste and recycling—urban and industrial practices enmeshed firmly in histories of nation-building and liberal ecological sensibilities. Now, in the midst of pandemic, we find ourselves surrounded by compostables: bioplastic cups and takeaway trays, markers of our sustained waste-making habits, stamped with recycling logos. In this paper, we wonder what other figurations might be put in kinship with compost, acknowledging that, as a method, compost has its risks: its political grammar of culpable posthumanism can become amenable to colonial and capitalist logics. Thinking with compost and its industrialization can sensitize us to the hazards of our methods, however angled at multispecies justice, being conscripted into institutionalizing circulations. This work extends our theorization of compost as a form of citationality: how knowledge practices are recomposed or decay in the specificities of a constituent mix, how sites of regeneration and failure trouble notions of authorship and attribution. So, like Haraway, we are keen to craft a motley kinship of accompanying figures that might work in, with, and through compost—to further enrich and complexify the soil of STS multispecies thinking, to open generative inroads to non-institutional forms of STS literacy, and to remain responsive to the shifting attachments and desires that surround the compost pile.

Authors

• Mathew Arthur, Simon Fraser University

• Reuben Jentink, Simon Fraser Univeristy