Rotterdam Intensive Workshop

Composting Transdisciplinarity

I compost my soul in this hot pile. The worms are not human; their undulating bodies ingest and reach, and their feces fertilize worlds.

Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures) (p. 34). Duke University Press. 2016.

With an eye on the worlds we are fertilising within the context of transdisciplinary teaching and learning, Sinéad McDonald, Renée Turner and Joost De Raeymaecker met for an intensive working session at an allotment garden situated in Rotterdam’s city centre. Once again, the group set about organising content, if not composting, from previous events and processing a wealth of insights from the interviews and readings. Through many hours of discussion, arranging related constellations of concepts, mapping and thinking through overlapping terminology, the Tuning Words were chosen. 

Operating from the perspective that form informs and is content generative, Sinéad McDonald and Renée Turner began designing the site, organising content, cross-referencing terminology and discovering and weaving relations through semantic tagging.