Form x Content – COMPOSTING Feminisms and the Environmental Humanities

Djuke Veldhuis:

Hello everyone. It's my pleasure to be here at the MUMA Form x Content series. My name is Djuke Veldhuis. I am an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Science and director of the Global Challenges Program, but I have a hidden background as an archeology and anthropologist, and it is my pleasure today to be in conversation with Dr. Jennifer Hamilton and Associate Professor Astrida Neimanis for, again, the Form x Content series at the Monash Art, Design Architecture and programmed by the Monash University Museum of Art.

Before we begin, I would very much like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the traditional owners and Elders, past, present and emerging of the lands in which the university operates. We acknowledge the Aboriginal connection to material and creative practice on these lands for more than 60,000 years. I'm personally talking to you from the Wurundjeri lands and would like to pay my thanks as well for the inspiration that many of these conversations has given me, this land was never ceded.

As I mentioned, I'm in conversation today with Dr. Jennifer Hamilton. Jen has scholarly training in Literary and Gender Studies and professional experience in creative and community arts. And together with Astrida, who is a cultural theorist working at the intersection of feminism and environmental change, we are really looking forward to delving deep into their current project. And to that end, Astrida, I would like to invite you first to tell us a little bit more about yourself, and then we will get this fantastic conversation started.

Astrida Neimanis:

Sure. Thanks so much. And hello Djuke, it's wonderful to be here. Hi, Jen. I am Zooming in to you today from the unceded lands of the Syilx Okanagan people, which is in a place also known as Kelowna or Kelowna BC in the interior of the province of British Columbia in a place sometimes known as Canada. I work here at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus, teaching Gender Studies, and English and Cultural Studies with a focus on something that together with Jen I've begun to call Feminist Environmental Humanities. And I'll pass it over to Jen.

Jennifer Mae Hamilton:

Thanks, Astrida. And yes, thanks for having me as well. I'm Zooming today from Anēwan Country and the custodianship of the land up here shared with the Dhungutti, Gamilaraay, and Gumbaynggirr people. And I work at the University of New England, so I'm based in what's now known as Armidale in the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales. And I teach into the English program here and also engage in, I guess, research in Feminist Environmental Humanities, which is a disciplinary hodgepodge really.

Djuke Veldhuis:

And that might be a great point to start because for our listeners and for our viewers, could we get from each of you just your perspectives of what does that entail? Environmental Feminism—that might be the first time many people have heard of this term. Can you tell us a little bit more please?

Astrida Neimanis:

Sure. Maybe this will be a good time to maybe tell our listeners how Jen and I met and what brought us together in a project that we now know as COMPOSTING. Jen and I met on actually the southern coast of New South Wales in early 2015. I had just arrived from Canada and I had taken up a new job at the University of Sydney in the Gender and Cultural Studies department. Jen was finishing up, you say what you were doing at that time, Jen?

Jennifer Mae Hamilton:

I'd finished my PhD and I'd had a baby and I was tutoring into the Environmental Humanities Program at UNSW as a casual.

Astrida Neimanis:

And when I arrived in Australia, I was very much welcomed by the environmental humanities community there. And so, for those listeners who may not know, environmental humanities is a name for this relatively new convergence of disciplines, often including Literary Studies, Philosophy, History, also some social sciences that looks at environmental issues from perspectives of ethics and values and human behaviors and aesthetics and poetics.

And so Jen and I were both connected to this newly emergent field yet both of us also had a background and training in Feminist or Gender Studies. And so when we met, I don't think it's coincidental that there was also a baby involved, we were wondering like, where is the feminism in this newly emergent field? And that question became the seed of what grew into this multi-year project that we called COMPOSTING.

Djuke Veldhuis:

Fantastic. I mean, one of the things that really strikes me, as somebody who did four-field archeology and anthropology, back in the early 2000s with lessons and units that were called Sex and Gender is that these fields have really undergone a transformation. But what strikes me reading about both your work is, and based on my own experiences, that we've gone from really simplistic, opposing, binary language. And one of the things that I'm noticing is that, that is really involving in what you've just described Astrida. And Jen, speaking from your perspectives, can you tell us a little bit more about this idea, this convergence idea, how does that work in reality and what does that look like for listeners who've maybe not had familiarity with these fields?

Jennifer Mae Hamilton:

Thanks for that question. I was thinking about the reason why it felt like we needed to re-articulate something at this particular moment. And having both had training in Gender and Cultural Studies and sort of doing that really basic work of deconstructing the gender binary, both of us have, I guess training in critical theory, and for me, that post-structuralist critical theory.

There was a tradition sort of in parallel with the feminism and the post-structuralist feminism of the 1990s ecofeminism. And that didn't have that same, I guess really problematised sense of the gender binary or problematised sense of how sexuality works in the environment space. There was, I guess, an essentialism to a lot of early ecofeminist work. And some of it's really fantastic. I don't want to kind of write off the whole field.

But for me, I was really interested in work in the feminist theory that really challenged sort of coming out of Judith Butler and critiques of gender and sex in that post-structuralist way. How you actually then reconnect that with the material. And there was a tradition of feminism, which includes figures that appear in environmental humanities like Donna Haraway and Karen Barad and Vicki Kirby, that bring together the kind of, how do you reconnect the material with a post-structuralist kind of analysis of language. And we, I guess found ourselves ... I mean, I'm speaking for you a little bit here, Astrida, but I think it's possibly on the money.

We found ourselves in this place really wanting to be able to talk about environmental issues, but needing to somehow bring it all together. And so this is, I guess, why the composting metaphor really spoke to us because it was like you didn't have to necessarily participate in a very coherent tradition. You could bring scraps from post-structuralist feminism, from ecofeminism, from science and technology studies, from contemporary environmental humanities even as we have critiques of it, and think these things together. It wasn't... It is a radically anti-essentialist methodology for asking really grounded questions about the present.

And I think there's also, because it's about composting, it's about producing new things, but also respecting what goes into that. You can both engage in a practice of a strong politics of citation about what's come in the past, but not necessarily be totally beholden by some sort of scholarly reverence to actually treat it with, as gospel, I suppose that's-

Djuke Veldhuis:

And Jen, thank you so much for that. I mean, delving deep, which I really appreciate. Before I follow up with a question for Astrida based on what you've just said, for our viewers and listeners who have not had as much experience with this terminology, could you just provide a brief example or context? Couple of terms that you've mentioned several times now is 'post-structuralist' versus 'ecofeminism'.

And then you also mentioned the 'anti-essentialist methodology'. So for context, could you just provide maybe a brief example of each of those? So we get a sense of what the distinguishing features are. And I recognise that I'm doing the anti-COMPOSTING thing, where I'm asking you to define them. But I think that would be helpful to conceptualise in a little bit more detail what you're saying. So post-structuralist, ecofeminism-

Jennifer Mae Hamilton:

Do you want me to take that one Astrida, or?

Astrida Neimanis:

Yeah, go for it, and then I'll follow up maybe.

Jennifer Mae Hamilton:

Yeah, you can add to it. Well, I suppose Judith Butler is for me the most famous figure in post-structuralist feminism. And for Butler, we have this idea of sex and gender as different, like sex is the biological one and gender's the cultural one. And gender's the one you can kind of play with. Whereas sex is sort of something that's static and Butler kind of said that's not exactly the case. The way that we think about sex is actually gendered from the get go. And that we're constantly sort of reperforming norms in the way that we dress every day or the way that we relate to one another and that those things kind of can slowly change over time, that both the body, the way that the body expresses itself, the way that we think about bodies and bodily difference doesn't necessarily have to adhere to this rigid binary.

And so it's that tradition of feminism kind of rubbing up against an idea of mother earth. I'm thinking Mary Daly's "Gyn/ecology", where the female body as a kind of rigid, fixed, essentialist figure, is held up as something that needs to have a similarly straightforward relationship with nature. And that those things, as soon as you start to look at them really closely, I think start to dissolve. But that it's really hard to, I guess, get over those traditions. In academia where we are trained to read, engage in this history, respect it, which we should respect it, but also how do you actually then get out of these, I guess these traditions that have been laid down for us, and how do you think otherwise around them?

Djuke Veldhuis:

Yeah, and it is very strong. I mean, I remember in my undergraduate studies, it exactly entitled courses such as sex and gender. And I remember one of the lecturers saying, "Yeah, females are the default sex and then this and this needs to happen before, in the hormonal cascade, we get to males." And just that language, reading an article such as, "The Sperm and the Egg," and how we even in our textbooks have gendered language. But that was really in the early 2000s where we were at. And I'm sensing a much greater growth and interconnectedness between these fields now, which is a relief in many ways to hear. And Astrida, can I ask you to expand on anything you've heard there, please?

Astrida Neimanis:

Sure. I would love to. And Jen has done such a great job of telling one way the story of COMPOSTING started. And to add another layer, let's remember, we are both academics, we're working for a university. And one of the things we were also talking about at the time was the unsustainability, in a way, of academic life. And this shows up in so many different ways, both its demands on one's time, but also things like reading is not something that's really looked at as something we're supposed to take work time to do. It's supposed to just magically happen.

We were thinking a lot about how do we make time to read together and in community. Another moment about sustainability was this idea that academia wants us to always be producing something shiny and new, a new concept that we can brand, a new idea that we can claim as new knowledge. COMPOSTING was also a way to sort of pick up on everything that Jen just said to do the work, both of honouring all of this great knowledge that had come before, but perhaps by putting it into different kinds of relationships with other questions, something new might grow.

Jen mentioned that ecofeminism sometimes held too strongly to an essentialised idea of woman as nature. But on the other hand, a lot of ecofeminism was doing really important work to look at the relationship between gendered labour and care for environments, or connections between females and non-human animals that is also racialised. And that is also parsed through a disability studies lens. There was important work here happening. So we're thinking, how do we take those important insights? And as Jen said, rub them with the contemporary moment of climate catastrophe that is also a crisis of colonialism and capitalism and heteropatriarchy. How do we put all of those things together?

COMPOSTING became both the metaphor, but also the method, taking scraps from those things and seeing how they can work together. And then we did that initially in the form of a reading group. We brought people together and we read things, we read classic feminist texts alongside more contemporary, environmental humanities texts. And we looked for, "Where is the feminism in the contemporary work? If it's not there, how could we maybe weave it back in? If it is there, how is it being discussed? How is it being acknowledged?" And one of the really interesting things we found was that oftentimes key feminist figures such as Donna Haraway were being invoked in an environmental humanities context. But as a science and technology study scholar, or as an evolutionary biologist turned philosopher-

Djuke Veldhuis:

Why do you think that is, Astrida? Sorry to interrupt you, that's a really interesting point. Why were they being evoked? And Donna Haraway is a great example here. Why do you think that is?

Astrida Neimanis:

Well, this was the project of COMPOSTING, "Why was it?" And one of the things we found, or let's say we proposed was that in order to do justice, to say for example, Donna Haraway, as a feminist scholar, you need to do justice to the feminist project. So that, in fact, means that to work on environmental questions, you have to understand them simultaneously as related to questions of heteropatriarchy. So that's where that post-structuralist work of understanding how the environment is also gendered as a concept, environmental activism is gendered as a practice, environmental relations are gendered in terms of structures of power. Then you start to see all that and you have to take it all on and not just the gender, but the race, the colonialism, the ability related stuff. And frankly, that makes a lot of people's heads explode, right?

Jennifer Mae Hamilton:

Yeah. I mean, that's the point I think is it's really hard work and it's emotional work. I think for a lot of people the word feminism, I mean, I think, I don't know, it keeps moving in and out of fashion I suppose. But for some people it's just like, "I can't go there. I don't want to go there. I don't want to think about it or it's not my business." Or it's everybody's businesses, as bell hooks told us. It's difficult work because it's like, "How do the pieces all fit?"

But then there's also a kind of personal element to it too, which is something that if you've been trained in feminist theory, you're sort of trained at from the get go as an academic, that you are present in your work that it's issuing, not only from this place of sort of knowledge in the library and in the lecture hall, but you, as a human being, who is able to think, this idea of using the first person in some disciplines in the university anathema, like you're not allowed to write I think, you have to sort of depersonalise everything. And sometimes I guess for people reconnecting with all of that stuff is hard, you don't really want to bring that into your workplace.

Astrida Neimanis:

Its personally hard and I would just add as well, it's conceptually hard. I would tell people, "I'm teaching a course on gender and environment." They would think, "Oh, you mean the fact that women have to carry the water from the well in 'African town.'" And it's like, well, not that it's not that, but it's actually about the way that gender is a structure of power in our society, that structures our language, that structures our relationships, that structures how we interact with both humans and non-human things in the world.

It's not easy conceptually, but that's been the work to try to articulate that. And maybe just one final comment on that. While COMPOSTING began, let's say to evoke Eve Sedgwick who was another one of the people who was very present when we were ... No, sorry. She was not present. Sadly she was already deceased, but her work was very present. Sedgwick's idea of the 'reparative' and the 'paranoid.' The paranoid critique being, when you're critical of something and you're trying to reject it, and the reparative moment where you're looking at something that's maybe problematic and trying to find a way back through it.

COMPOSTING maybe began more as the paranoid, the critical, we wanted to ask, "Why aren't those environmental humanities scholars adequately addressing feminism?" But then it also varies quickly moved into much more of a reparative project where we're thinking, how can all of this amazing work coming out of feminist and related studies around work care and difference and erotics and pleasure and labour, and more and more. How can we use this amazing stuff to think about environmental questions in more nuanced, sophisticated ways.

Djuke Veldhuis:

Beautiful summary. Thank you both. A couple of things that I would pick up on as somebody who sits now in a Faculty of Science, has come from anthropology and has moved across actually a lot of those structures and across and within in an awkward way. And one of the things that strikes me as I'm thinking here going, "Okay, well, if there are prospective researchers or current students listening to the both of you talk, think about how ... there's so many different angles coming together and Jen and Astrida have now met and they're producing this great work."

But how would we engage with this? What on earth would I take as a subject? Because you're moving across so many areas. And one of the challenges there, and one of the things I certainly found going through the university structure. Admittedly for the viewer's context, I was in a western university structural context, but there's this real tension between going deep and doing the research and being able to connect fields can be very hard because again, there's this assumption of, "Okay, well, you need to take the interdisciplinary route. You need to bring it together."

But for example, that's not something that a lot of academics are rewarded for. This COMPOSTING, this engaged and interconnectedness from the get go is also structurally, I think, harder to achieve. And you spoke Astrida also very notably about how conceptually hard this is. I think it's also structurally hard. And thinking about if you were looking at a generation of people, both from academic and perhaps also non-academic backgrounds, how would they get involved in this line. And thinking about your COMPOSTING, it strikes me that there's a need to open the perhaps traditional doors that make it actually quite hard to engage at this level holistically. Have you got any thoughts or advice for our listeners?

Jennifer Mae Hamilton:

I can speak from my own experience to this question. And also I think there's two answers, or there's probably many answers. But there's the university answer, the answer for undergraduate or HDR, postgraduate master's doctoral students and people who are not pursuing an academic path. In Australia and I guess globally, the university sector is in crisis. I have an ongoing academic job. And I think the only reason I have that is because I had a very disciplined PhD. I was in English Literature and I could tell a really coherent story about why I could be hired into a discipline and teach undergraduate students.

I do have some colleagues who finished their PhD around the same time as me who did a PhD in an interdisciplinary space, and haven't been able to find a job. I think that there are really pragmatic questions that need to be asked about how we integrate our methodologies into HDR and postgraduate programs. And I think that there's an ethics of supervision. This is for non-academic audiences, as a tenured academic, we supervise Masters and Post-Grad students who are using this research to do something with their lives. And historically that would've been to become an academic, but that is just not realistic for every single PhD student today.

I think it's important for supervisors to have a question about ... a conversation with students, almost at every step of the way, is like, "What are you wanting to do with this work? What is your aspiration for it?" And to integrate that really carefully into that process with the student. For me, it was sort of an after thought. In my PhD I was actually co-enrolled in a Women's Studies program and an English program, but the Women's Studies department literally disappeared under me. And I was the last person who was enrolled in that co-code. And I thought, "Oh, it seems too hard. I don't have a supervisor who's guiding me properly. I'm just going to drop that and graduate with English."

But I think that these questions are also like a life ethos. And it's something that we've talked a lot about in COMPOSTING, because we do have people who attended the reading group who weren't on an academic path. It's like about an ethics of orientation to the world and the work that you do, that you can kind of take anywhere.

And for me, maybe we'll get to this later and I should throw to Astrida to answer the question. But for me, this thinking is in all of the research I do even if I'm not actively saying this is a COMPOSTING project, because it is just an ethics of approach to my research questions that filters through my work even as it's separate from Astrida.

Djuke Veldhuis:

Thank you for that clarification. Astrida, throwing over to you then.

Astrida Neimanis:

Yeah, sure. I mean, seconding everything Jen said, I was one of those PhD students who did an interdisciplinary degree and struggled to find a job. But I mean, my story is happy in the sense that I did eventually find a place in academia where I could explicitly draw on the very different and explicit skills that this kind of integrative thinking gives you.

I've come to be able to narrate my Gender Studies background, for example, as learning how to do integration. Learning how to find resonances between things. Learning how to be the sort of dinner party host for a lot of different ideas. That's what interdisciplinary training gives us that those more disciplinary pathways don't always focus on. But the work of the university, which is in crisis, then is to recognise that work, to train people in it, whether they're going academic or other pathways, those are good life skills or good skills for any career.

But then also it's structural as you as well said, where the hire is happening. How can we do more of this sort of celebration and promotion of integrative thinking? And then I would also definitely second what Jen said about this extending beyond the academic world. Part of it is in an orientation to life as Jen said. Part of it is also about tactics and strategies and methods. I think one of the basic methods that we use in COMPOSTING is this, explicitly putting things together to see how they resonate and rub up against each other, so that each thing looks different afterwards.

That's something we can do when we read, for example, a poem by Audre Lorde next to an IPCC, that's an International Panel of Climate Change report. They can rub up against each other in super fascinating ways as an academic exercise. But we can also do that in life when we approach something that is unfamiliar to us, and maybe a worldview or a person who has different values that we don't share. How can we find resonance when we actually take the time to be curious about the other. COMPOSTING has always had an ethics of difference, of understanding difference, not as an obstacle or a barrier, but as something that we can be curious about and that can broaden and expand how we look at any one given thing.

Djuke Veldhuis:

That's really resonated with me, Astrida. I work in a Faculty of Science, but I'm an anthropologist. And I always say to the students, "The magic is where disciplines and people meet." And it's everywhere. And again, for our listeners, one example I would give, just last week we were doing a biology course and we're talking about biotic factors, so living trees, animals, and so forth, and abiotic factors, and often examples that are given there are water and soil and so forth.

And immediately the discussion came up, in many cultural contexts, including Indigenous Australians, for example, that water is not an abiotic, unliving, an agent that does not have agency. It's not just sitting there. When you look closer at a biological level, you could argue, well, there's so much that happens in water that is actually very much living and that is influenced. And so, as you say, when those areas meet, that is really where you get that greater understanding. And I think that is something really wholesome to take forward. But also thinking about how do we then integrate that, when our students, if one of my students said, "Well, actually from this and this cultural perspective, the soil is abiotic factor," they would technically get that answer wrong. Whereas if they wrote that in an essay in the humanities, that there might be a very good quality mark that came out of that. And therefore, there's both this tension and this growth that I think you're describing Astrida.

Astrida Neimanis:

If I may just augment that with one further comment, which Jen hasn't heard me say this before, but I've started to think it, that COMPOSTING is a matter of chance, but it's also a matter of choice. So in the sense that it's chance, as in two things will sort of be in the same field and what happens when they get mulched together, that's one way of thinking about interdisciplinarity as well.

But I think what is specific about COMPOSTING that we've always held strong to, despite temptations to let it go, COMPOSTING is a feminist project. So even it's not enough just to say things get mulched together. It's also a matter of choice in that we're always choosing to ask, "Where is the feminism here? Where are the gendered power structures here?" It's very amazing to us how as soon as we get talking about interdisciplinary and multiple perspective sorts of things, the feminism floats away again.

Djuke Veldhuis:

Why is that, Astrida?

Astrida Neimanis:

The same reasons we've already discussed. It's sometimes awkward to us to have to look at our own personal implication in that. It's political. It's sometimes seen as aggressive. It's sometimes seen as being too ... what's the word? What's that phrase people use? Too politically correct. Whatever. But it's awkward. I mean, if feminism weren't awkward, we would've solved the gender issue by now. It's awkward because it's so personal and so pervasive. One of the projects of COMPOSTING was, "Can we hold this space as a place where feminism can always be asked about?" It doesn't mean it always ends up in the centre, but we always ask the question, "Where is it? And how could thinking through a feminist lens enrich or enhanced, whatever it is we're doing here."

Jennifer Mae Hamilton:

But just to clarify as well I guess the feminism of COMPOSTING, the feminism we choose. I love that, I really love that, it's chance and choice. I think I'll start using that too. It's just a really great way of justifying the accidents that do happen that are actually valuable and your intentions and that they coexist. But the feminism that is at the heart of COMPOSTING is an inclusive feminism. It's an anti-racist feminism, it's anticolonial feminism. I would say it's an anti-capitalist feminism. An anti-essentialist feminism.

It's a holistic vision of what feminism is. I think that in the popular imagination, feminism is often reduced to what we would know in academic circles as liberal feminism, which is equality in the workplace and equal representations on boards. And sure, that's an important step perhaps in some trajectory, but I think what we're aiming for is something far more holistic. And so I think that's an important qualification because I'm not choosing to ask ... I don't want more, I guess, women on the board of some organic organisation, that's not the goal. The goal is something more.

Astrida Neimanis:

It would be okay.

Jennifer Mae Hamilton:

It would be fine. But also-

Astrida Neimanis:

But COMPOSTING is more than that. And I think that's 100% important to stress and thanks Jen for bringing that on. And again, we get back to one of your first questions Djuke about the inadequacy of certain language. For us it has meant saying over and over again that for us feminism is anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, queer, crip, trans-inclusive, all of those things because our feminism can hold that even though sometimes it does so tensely, it's not always easy. But unless you keep insisting on that, things get reduced again very easily and very quickly.

Djuke Veldhuis:

And I think that's a really poignant point, forgive the alliteration, because it is that reductionist, a tendency. And that goes straight back to our first point about the dichotomy that we try and the polarisation and the categorisation in a lot of language, especially academic language in a very traditional sense. I mean, even when you think about the separation of disciplines. And even in a relatively short and human context, 15–20 years looking at the language you are both using, versus the language that I was exposed to in my undergraduate spaces in and around Feminist Anthropology, Linguistics, and so forth.

There's this development, which is very clearly happening and it's such a joy to hear you both talk about that. And I love the COMPOSTING concept in terms of bringing this all together. And therein, I lead to my final thought and question for you both. And that really is around what ... and I'm conscious that what I'm asking is, "What is next?" And I realise that I'm falling into that trap of academia and producing the next thing and I don't actually want to do that now. But, what is the journey from here? Perhaps is a more appropriate question to ask. And Jen, maybe I start with you and then hand over to Astrida afterwards.

Jennifer Mae Hamilton:

Well, I think next is also not next, it's sort of maybe a couple of years in the past. We were talking about this before we started recording how Astrida and I no longer live in the same place and that this project was very much, we talk about. Oh, I don't know, we feel like we've written about this somewhere, but it was partly so successful to the extent that it was successful, because we were in offices next door to each other. And we were able to really develop this community through that shared space.

And we have Zoom, but it's just different. And I think that that relates to what I'm about to say, which is for me moving to Armidale in 2018, I really made a choice to commit to this place. I think I can say this, but I think some people come to smaller regional universities as a stepping stone to get back to somewhere like a group of eight or the Australian Ivy League, or even the fancy universities in other parts of the world.

But for me, I really wanted to put down roots and not be moving to the next thing. And I think this is an interesting thing in academia, we do have to be kind of international scholars and having international communities. But also, being an academic in a town of 25,000 people, if you think about, "What does that mean, how does my research sit in place?" It actually is very different to what it feels like in a city.

What's happened for me, I guess, is I have maybe too many projects on the go, but projects that are really grounded in place and bringing the ethics of COMPOSTING to environmental and anti-colonial projects in Armidale. I ran with a local GP, the Armidale Climate and Health Project. And this was a government funded project where we just said we were going to do six workshops in a small festival, but the process that we went through to bring it all together was guided by some of these ethics.

We wanted to think about the local concerns, the global concerns, how we can centre Indigenous knowledge, how we can think about how the embodied experience of day to day life in a home relates to climate change. How does health relate to family? How can we queer family? It ended up being quite a straightforward project, but the process or the method was guided by COMPOSTING, but it was very much grounded here.

And then I have an ongoing interest in domesticity and environment. And one of the final things I guess I did when I was in Sydney was develop a piece for Australian Feminist Studies called the future of housework, which was basically thinking about how you can start to ecologise the home and start to decolonise the home. But how difficult that is if people are kind of resentful about the basic practices of maintaining the home in the first place.

And that kind of is ongoing in a range of different ways. And obviously the feminist question around domesticity and housework has a long tradition. But the way that it kind of comes together with all of these contemporary concerns around the fact that the land in Australia is stolen. The fact that we all have to kind of work a lot more outside of the home in order to just be able to keep a roof over our head, because the cost of living is soaring. The cost of mortgages are astronomical. How that then rubs against the fact that we're also in a state of ecological crisis. That's a lot to hold together, but that's one of my main interests at the moment as well.

Djuke Veldhuis:

That's a beautiful summary and I couldn't agree more and I know many of my students would connect with that too. Astrida, how about you?

Astrida Neimanis:

Sure. I mean, COMPOSTING in its essence was this reading group that included some workshops and things like that, and a paper that Jen and I wrote together. But as it has branched off from there, I've been amazed and delighted when people who have attended our group have said things to us like, so I use the COMPOSTING methodology in my dissertation and we're like, "COMPOSTING is a methodology?" And sort of seeing the way it travels into the world and it's oh yeah, it's like when I'm taking this and this and putting it together, but that I'm having conversations with people.

This was one of the surprising things to me that people said, "Oh, this idea that we have this amazingly held space, different people where we can just have conversation. Talk about things and talk through things as a way of coming to knowledge." Someone told me, "Well, that's the COMPOSTING method." Wow, okay. Not necessarily entirely true, but you start to see how it starts to ignite things. And in my own work, what it's ignited is working on this method in other places, so I've tried to incorporate it more into my own pedagogy.

And I recently wrote an article with Laura McLauchlan, who's in Sydney as well, on COMPOSTING as pedagogy for teaching climate change. How you bring in the feminist, the anti-colonial, the queer, into the classroom and how do you sort of conduct the classroom through a COMPOSTING ethos as well? And then here in BC, I've started something called the FEELed Lab. That's F-E-E-L-E-D. So like feelings, the FEELed Lab, where we call this a feminist anti-colonial, queer, disability positive space.

And we just had a meeting yesterday where one of the participants said, "Well, you know what, I wondered about the question, how do we know these activities that we're doing?" Which might be a listening walk around a local pond or a cultural safety training about the Syilx Okanagan land that we are on. How do we know that these activities that we're doing are feminist? And the participants said, "It's just the feeling in these spaces, they feel feminist because," and then there were examples about, they're being accessible, difference being welcomed and celebrated, the way the space is hosted and held.

And these things were really interesting to me that it's not just an intellectual or an academic sort of knowledge, but it's also a way of doing things, even an aesthetics, if you will, sort of a feeling of things, that COMPOSTING is certainly carrying over into my other work. And then finally what I wanted to say is, I don't know if this is a direct product of COMPOSTING and working with Jen specifically, or if it's also just my own age, I'm not so young anymore. But I feel confident to ask the question, "Where is the feminism here all the time?"

I'm now that person in the room, in the meeting, that will say, "That's really interesting that you're trying to sell me this leadership training module that was developed by all the Harvard Business School people. But I'm asking why should I listen to that as a leadership model for sustainability? You've mentioned no female theorists, you've basically celebrated the capitalist sort of mentality." I guess what I'm trying to say is, COMPOSTING also kind of ... I carry it in my back pocket. It's the reminder to always ask, where is the feminism here? Where is that? If there is feminism, is it anti-colonial? Is it queer? Is it trans-inclusive? Et cetera.

Where could the feminism be here to make what you are suggesting better, and more essentially also more sustainable, more environmentally sound, more environmentally healthy, more environmentally just. It's the ongoing research project. It's the aesthetics of how things happen. And it's just the confidence to continue asking the COMPOSTING question.

Djuke Veldhuis:

Thank you so much to both of you for a wonderful summary. And if you've seen me looking down it's because I'm busily writing notes, because I'm taking away so many fantastic ideas. I really feel that I was thinking about the difference between knowledge and understanding. And for me, understanding includes that feeling and that holistic connected nature that goes beyond just technical information, which we sometimes hold so highly, in our field is held so highly in our society, especially in capitalist terms.

I have probably another 10 questions I would like to ask, but in the interest of time, I'm going to wrap it up there and say huge thanks to the two wonderful people, for me, either side of my screen, Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Hamilton. Thank you for joining us in the semester two program "On Care" as part of the Form x Content series presented by Monash Art, Design Architecture, and programmed by the Monash University Museum of Art.

It's been an absolute pleasure to hear more about your work on COMPOSTING. And I know that, myself and I imagine many of our listeners, will be taking this forward in their back pocket as they move forward. Thank you for your time and taking the time to share your ideas and your work with us today.