Wastewater treatment operators in the American Midwest wryly describe their job as “bacteria farming,” but they also insist that microbes are the ones who “do all the work” at treatment plants. Meanwhile, slum activists in Uganda suggest that they “work with microbes” to provide essential sanitation services where the state has failed to provide safe toilets. In this talk, we delve deeper into these observations about microbial laboring and human laboring with microbes in these two distinct contexts. First, we examine insights from wastewater treatment workers and soil scientists in Columbus, Ohio, to explore how microbes serve as key mediators that not only metabolize urban residents’ bodily excesses in wastewater treatment processing but also constitute the bulk of wastewater solids, which are increasingly used as a soil amendment applied on agricultural lands. Second, we turn attention to slum activists, waste scientists, and entrepreneurs in Kampala, Uganda, who are working to capture “anal resources” and advance container-based sanitation and community-scale composting. The diversion of human waste away from Lake Victoria is especially urgent as nutrients-out-of-place are driving eutrophication and the extinction of indigenous fish species. Through these two case studies, we show how the disruption of socio-ecological systems brought on by industrial capitalism—known in some scholarly circles as the “metabolic rift”—is not strictly characterized by a break in the cycling of nutrients back to the land but also a derangement of social relations with microbial life that requires remediation.

Nick Kawa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Ohio State University. His research relies primarily on qualitative approaches to understanding human cultural relationships to soils, plants, and bodily waste. He is the author of the forthcoming book After the Flush: Rethinking the Future of Human Waste (University of California Press), based on nearly a decade of research on the modern sanitation system in the U.S. as well as the growing call for alternative models that can enact more sustainable futures.

Alisa Keesey is a PhD candidate in the Dept. of Anthropology at UCSC. Her research explores the global sanitation crisis, the water pollution crisis impacting Lake Victoria’s fishing communities, “nutrients-out-of-place,” and soil politics. As the director of GiveLove, a WASH sector (water, sanitation and hygiene) non-profit, she has worked in eight countries with a wide range of diverse stakeholders and environmental activists to promote composting, sustainable land use, food security, and local resiliency in the context of climate change. Alisa also worked for over a decade with women farming groups to lead on-farm biodiversity initiatives in Uganda aimed at protecting shea trees and establishing the first fair trade shea cooperative. Alisa holds a B.A. in International Relations from San Francisco State University, a M.S. in International Agricultural Development from University of California, Davis, and a M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from UCSC.

This event is presented by the THI More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory Research Cluster.