Com‐Passionate Composting: Excrement Management as Matter of Care

Natalia Picaroni-Sobrado
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Natalia Picaroni-Sobrado: Departamento de Antropología, Universidad Católica de Temuco, Chile

Social Inclusion, 2026, vol. 14

Abstract: This article examines composting toilets as multispecies infrastructures composed of relations among excrement, microbes, worms, plants, water, air, people, things, and politics, and as matters of care. It inquires into how people reimagine naturecultural relations through composting their excrement, arguing that this practice can be understood as com‐passionate care insofar as it involves feeling with others through doings, affections, and sensibilities. Drawing on autoethnographic and ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2026 in Chile, and complemented by fieldwork in France and Austria in 2024, the article discusses how people rework relationships to excrement amid persistent social inequalities that reinforce the disposability and denial ethos characterizing modern subjectivities and waste practices. It concludes that caring for and taking care of one’s excrement involve profound affective and ethical transformations when not experienced as reinforcing social inequalities. The embodied experience of integration into metabolic cycles that this care entails remains fragile in the absence of political collectives capable of deciding which forms of care and technologies sustain collective flourishing for com‐passionate presents and futures.

Keywords: care; composting toilets; human waste; infrastructural justice; more‐than‐human worlds (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:socinc:v14:y:2026:a:12061

DOI: 10.17645/si.12061

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