From the Trashcan to the Chicken Bucket: towards an ideology of composting

My thesis aims to unobscure the ideology of wasting through embodied storytelling, philosophical inquiry, and sociopolitical history. In particular, I take the trashcan as a material representation of an "edge of externalization" --a concept I explore throughout this thesis to describe the edges beyond which waste management networks, strategies, and failures become visible. These edges offer spaces to critically engage with the inevitabilities backed into a wasting ideology that necessitates the disconnection between nature/society. Therefore, these edges offer spaces to understand and transform the alienation of our human nature. The human relationship to waste and to the trashcans in our homes is a familiar story hidden by strategic pedagogies of obfuscation. This project seeks to replace dominant behaviorist pedagogies with an alternative "compost pedagogy," which emphasizes a process of becoming through the transformation of the trashcan. Through a reflexive and creative process, the thesis explores my personal experiences with waste in the hope that my stories will not only unobscure global systems of wasting, but that my stories of unlearning, mending, and reimagining wasting will resonate with many lived experiences.