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.
The defense for the second dissertation is slated to take place in the Religion department, April 2025.
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 (work in progress)
My theory is that by using the example of shit to examine foundational definitions of religion and religious activity, shit registers as sacred, and shitting as a ritual activity. This counters the placement of shit as profane, and shitting as unceremonial. As an essential part of life, wellness, vulnerability, rites of passage (e.g. potty training and entering elderhood), social structures, and ecological connection, why has shitting been so disregarded in the literature of Religion? 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 toxify rivers and lakes? Why is addressing the global sanitation crisis one of the most underfunded collective initiatives? How is the treatment of shit, when it is rendered disposable, replicated in the treatment of people, when they are rendered disposable? What possibilities of literal and metaphorical (re)integration are there, for materials and populations rendered expendable?
My methods are a literature review, enriched by an ethnography of Salt City Harvest Farm, an organization serving refugee farmers in upstate New York (unceded Onondaga land, United States [US]), who are making a collective decision regarding which ExIT system is ideal to construct at their farm site, in the future.
The implication of this theory and method is that if the definition of religion and religious activity cannot accommodate shit and shitting as sacred and ritual activity, or at least render them ambiguous (rather than profane and unceremonial) then those definitions of religion and religious activity are inadequate to describe religion as a fundamental aspect of life, since shit and shitting are inextricable from organic life processes of all beings, human and more than human. If the examination of shit and shitting enhances the extant definition of religion and religious activity, then those definitions will continue to be helpful for understanding human elimination behavior. Given projections of peak phosphorus, chemical fertilizer shortages, and freshwater scarcity, the “(re)turn toward shit and shitting” will eventually happen in environmental, economic, and embodiment scenarios that demand we deal with shit and shitting, whether we want to or not.
Though this dissertation makes a contribution to discard studies, it does not take up anything more broadly than excreta as to the questions of what we discard and how, which are central questions of discard studies. Though they receive a mention, for purposes of scope of this paper, only the material of shit is extensively discussed (diminishing even the aforementioned shitting aspect) and sidelines urine, menstrual blood and other bodily excreta, though all are deeply interconnected.
This dissertation concludes that 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 dominant social paradigm (DSP), which has come to prominence in its ability to enforce its categorizations and classifications, not in the least upon “shithole countries” from whence refugees come.
Dangerously, perhaps none of the pure theories will hold. Perhaps a complete composting of the DSP’s understandings of religion and religious behavior will reveal the elemental forms of religious life, in order to spiral around to new/ancient understandings of the holy. Feeding and being fed: neither end of the digestive tube need be neglected in forming an embodied awareness of the gift of being consciously, wholly, reciprocally, interconnected. Deeper than interpolated, we are inter-polluted. In life and death, we keep the cycle going. The choice to embrace shit, and voluntarily orient to this involuntary offering, can realize this revolution from the biome up!