Decomposing Science

Catalog description

This seminar invites students into the multispecies muddle of soil to decompose disciplinary boundaries between the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. Beginning with an introduction to methods and theory shaping environmental science, this course explores topics related to soils, rot, waste, and pollution. We will turn piles of compost and sample soils to develop an understanding of soil formation processes and decomposition across environments. We will engage with a broad range of scholarship from the sciences and humanities to investigate how human-soil relations and conceptions of human, plant, and microbial labor have been shaped by agricultural productivity and capitalism. We will peer through microscopes and care for decomposers while reading literature on multispecies communication, attunement and togetherness by theorists and practitioners of composting and fermentation. We will keep journals tracing the pace of rotting organic matter and perform close readings of cracks in the sidewalk to consider theories of dirt, decay, preservation and pollution.