I successfully defended my first dissertation, in Environmental Studies, entitled Dealing with Our Crap, Literally and Metaphorically: Ecological Sanitation in the Context of Environmental Studies and Religion on September 27, 2024.
On April 4, 2025 I successfully defended my second dissertation the Religion department, entitled Fertile, Social, Dangerous, Sacred, Gift, and System: Religion, Salt City Harvest Farm, and the Future of Human Shit.
First Dissertation Abstract
Over 3.5 billion people do not have access to dignified facilities to urinate and defecate. The lack of functioning Excreta Infrastructure Systems (ExIS) cause disease that is a leading cause of death of children worldwide. Furthermore, in areas where freshwater-flush ExIS exist, large financial and environmental costs threaten massive breakdowns of the system. Interplaying the academic fields of religion and environmental studies, this dissertation contends that solutions to this dual sanitation crisis are not just technical, but socio-technical, involving giving attention to the worldviews, values, and experiences of ExIS users. Through the lens of defecatory and excretory justice it argues the positive potential of religious community involvement in the environmental justice (EJ) movement broadly, and in efforts to address the global sanitation crisis specifically. Histories of colonial European Christianity, experiences of marginalization, as well as linguistic, administrative, and psychosocial factors impact which ExIS people are now willing to use. In the case of ecological sanitation (ecosan) the numerous barriers are countered by increasing environmental constraints (Chapter 1). International mechanisms in the Sustainable Development Goals also contribute to global activity toward improving excretory justice, encouraging local governance of any sanitation system. These mechanisms will be stronger if advocates are thoughtful about centering human rights, gender awareness, and ecosan options in their approach (Chapter 2). In addition to those considerations, examining religious taboos and layering an analysis of material, metaphorical, and structural oppression that influence ExIS’s user perceptions is key to success (Chapter 3). The EJ movement is one place in society where the sanitation crisis has received some attention, though more is needed. Religious moral suasion and material support functionally promote EJ and make space in the movement for such discussions (Chapter 4). In the context of the climate crisis, religious community leadership to challenge carceral and expendability logics concerning people, and reconceptualize excreta as 'discarded resource' rather than 'waste', advance a politics of indispensability wherein the conditions for excretory justice can exist (Chapter 5). As worldviews are embedded in our systems and processes, to put it simply: if we come up with systems that stop treating shit like shit, we can also stop treating people like shit.
Keywords: excreta, ecological sanitation, environmental justice, religious communities, indispensability
Second Dissertation Abstract
Shit, the taboo term for the human excreta that exits the anus, can be understood as sacred. Shitting, the vulgar verb to describe the act of discarding solid excreta, can likewise be understood as religious ritual activity. This counters the Dominant Social Paradigm’s (DSP) in the United States (US) of the placement of shit as profane, and shitting as unceremonial. This dissertation aims to reclaim the word shit from the realm of what the DSP has rendered invisible and unspeakable, and spark rigorous academic discussion about it in the context of Religion and Environmental Studies in the US.
The DSP is the set of widely held values, practices, and frameworks that shape a society's worldview and influence its institutions. In the current US, the genealogy of the DSP comes from the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (DoCD), manifesting as the societal hegemony of cisheteronormative white Christian supremacist patriarchy. Never uncontested, but never defeated, this DSP views humans as superior to all other species, seeks to enlarge and protect an extraction-powered economy, sees progress as inherent in human history, and relies on technological solutions to address chronic and acute environmental and social problems.
In addition to analyzing three deceased scholars whose scholarship is foundational to the academic study of Religion, This dissertation features key offerings of leading scholar-activists living in this era, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Joanna Macy. Kimmerer’s writing on the gift economy and grammar of animacy, and Macy’s on general systems theory and the Work That Reconnects are theorized in light of shit and shitting. The result is an examination of the gift of shit, and the systemic nature of shit.
But first, this dissertation uses the phenomena of shit to examine definitions of the sacred and religious activity in the work of Émile Durkheim, Mary Douglas, and Rudolf Otto. In their theories, a focus on shit exposes gaps or ambiguities in the categories they created. As an essential aspect of human life as material beings, why have shit and shitting been so disregarded in the central literature of Religion? The shit we produce has implications for both us as individuals and for our collective life on planet earth, especially in a time of increasing climate chaos. From awe to disgust to neutrality to quiet curiosity, apprehension of its production and presence is evocative but inexact.
Why the silence and intricate social conventions that render shit as inaudible and invisible as possible? In areas where freshwater flush toilets are the main excreta infrastructure technology (ExIT), why is there so much resistance to ExIT system transformation, even as water-based sanitation is known to be financially costly as well as to toxify rivers and lakes? Why is addressing the worldwide sanitation crisis one of the most underfunded global initiatives? How is the treatment of shit, labeled a disposable material, replicated in the treatment of people, when they are labeled disposable? As in, who is being treated like shit by this society? What is happening to them? What possibilities of literal and metaphorical (re)integration are there, for materials and populations designated expendable? How does the word shit function linguistically in US American English, and what’s at stake in its use?
This literature review is enriched by an ethnography of Salt City Harvest Farm (SCHF), an organization serving refugee farmers in upstate New York (unceded Onondaga land), who are in the process of making a collective decision regarding which excreta infrastructure technology (ExIT) system is ideal to construct at their farm site, in the future. The farm currently has one port-a-potty, which is not a sustainable solution. In anticipation of building a more permanent structure, they are going through a process of discerning between a wide range of ExIT options. These include decisions about the toilet interface (pedestal style or squat style), cleaning materials for the intergluteal cleft (toilet paper and/or water cleanse) as well as collection, processing, and disposal options (water-based or compost-based). This dissertation accompanied the first part of SCHF’s process, which involved participant observation, individual interviews, and facilitated group-discussion.
The choice of ethnographic field study was intentional as refugee farmers are treated like shit by US society, partially because they are ambiguous in citizenship, legal status, racialization, and cultural de/assimilation practices, and cannot be neatly categorized. This parallels shit’s ambiguity. In being both alive and dead, fertilizer and poison, attractive and repulsive, shit also cannot be neatly categorized. This causes great discomfort in the DSP which has come to prominence in its ability to enforce its categorizations and classifications, not in the least upon places perceived as “shithole countries,” from whence refugees come. In examining marginal material, from the context on the margins, by a scholar from and associated with historically marginalized communities, this dissertation makes a unique contribution to the emergent interdisciplinary field of discard studies (through Religion and Environmental Studies). Central to that field are the questions of who and what is discarded, and the systems of wasting and power therein. While only shit is extensively discussed throughout this text–urine, menstrual blood and other bodily excreta are sidelined as is any focus on shitting, the questions of integrative ways to discard as humans, and think about our discard as communities, are central.