I found the readings this week on shit to be very interesting, as I never previously thought about shit as something that is so entangled in concepts of political economy and power structures; rather, I tended to look at shit as mainly just the waste that we produce. The fact that shit can be studied through political, economic, and social lenses was quite eye-opening for me. While I was familiar with the use of human waste for fertilizer, many of the other possible functions of human waste – such as the use of semen for scorpion stings – were completely unfamiliar to me until now. I especially liked the ideas we discussed regarding the move away from wage labor, and the significance of the potentially self-sustaining “circular process” where human waste holds the highest value, and manure offers an alternative to finance capital. This week also made me reflect on the fact that we really do not talk about shit much at all, almost as if there is a sense of shame in our producing it. Of course, we are disgusted by it, and we try to get it away from us as quickly as possible, but I liked our reflections on how shit might not actually be something we avoid due to an innate tendency, but rather due to societal norms and cultural stories that are centered around avoiding shit because of its potential to make one sick and unclean. After this week, I certainly will look at shit in new ways, seeing it as a valuable object of study from a variety of different perspectives, rather than something that we are simply to avoid discussing and analyzing.