Talk by Veera Kinnunen, Bokashi as multispecies waste care

In her talk, Veera examines bokashi composting, a trending method of fermenting organic waste, as an example of alternative urban waste practice. Drawing from her ethnographic fieldwork among bokashi practitioners in Finland, she explores stories that bokashi practitioners tell about relating with often overlooked non-human-others such as waste, dirt, and microbes. Veera proposes that bokashi is more than just a funky way of producing soil from leftovers; in all its mundane everydayness, making bokashi has a capacity to transform human-environmental relations in a more profound, even ontological sense.

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Tellus Backstage

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Title

Bokashi as multispecies waste care

Abstract

In her talk, Veera examines bokashi composting, a trending method of fermenting organic waste, as an example of alternative urban waste practice. Drawing from her ethnographic fieldwork among bokashi practitioners in Finland, she explores stories that bokashi practitioners tell about relating with often overlooked non-human-others such as waste, dirt, and microbes. Veera proposes that bokashi is more than just a funky way of producing soil from leftovers; in all its mundane everydayness, making bokashi has a capacity to transform human-environmental relations in a more profound, even ontological sense.

Bio

Veera Kinnunen (D. Soc. Sc., University of Lapland, Bachelor of Design, Kuopio Academy of Design) is a sociologist and a cultural historian working on a threshold of more-than-human sociology, environmental humanities, and feminist ethics. Her research interests cover material culture of everyday life, dwelling, and waste. Her ongoing post-doc project is an ethnographic inquiry into experimental waste practices, which has evolved into a multi-species ethnography of sharing our lives with microbes. Throughout her research projects, she has been developing and experimenting with more-than-human ethnographic methodology.

In her spare time, Kinnunen experiments with her microbial companions; Bokashi composts and Kombucha jars, and dreams of a garden of her own.

Kinnunen will be employed as a Post-Doc by Biodiverse Anthropocenes at UOulu from June 1, 2022 for three years.

Last updated: 21.3.2022