Location Doctoral School - 272 High Holborn, Second floor, London WC1V 7EY
Overview
We are pleased to invite you to Composting Knowledge: A Convivial Gathering, taking place on 16–17 June 2025, 11:00–19:00, at the Doctoral School, UAL – Social Space, 2nd floor, High Holborn.
Through collective acts of sharing, sensing, attuning and intra-acting, the gathering invites participants to compost knowledge together — nurturing slower, relational ways of being and doing.
Day 1 — Composting Day
Monday 16 June
11:00 – 11:30
Welcome & Opening Circle / Breakfast
Introduction to the gathering, the rhythm of the days, and each other.
11:30 – 13:00
Workshop: Rooting Practices
with Compost Collective
A hands-on workshop about entanglements in research and practice. We will work with soil, seeds, cuttings and conversation to explore gestures of rooting and co-nourishment. Each participant will be invited to plant and take home a seedling — as a small, living trace of the gathering.
As part of the workshop, Compost Collective will support the creation of a windowsill garden, a temporary ecosystem that will accompany the two-day gathering. They will also provide compost and guidance in caring for the living materials throughout the event.
13:00 – 14:00
Soft break—Time to rest, reflect, draw, or be together.
14:30 – 16:30
Speculative Reading Group: Theory of Waters
with Elisa Adami
A compost pile needs water to facilitate decomposition. Water can help compost our knowledge too, washing away useless barriers or harmful legacies, and bringing life back to discredited ways of knowing, thinking and living. As the climate crisis intensifies conflicts over water worldwide, Indigenous writers and poets have turned to water not only as a precious resource to defend, but also as teacher and mentor, method and muse. Water teaches us a theory and political praxis that is embodied and kinetic, cyclical and interconnected, permeable and life-generating.
This reading group will centre around a collective reading of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s latest book Theory of Water (2025). Alongside Simpson, our compost pile will also include water poems by Brandy Nālani McDougall, Natalie Diaz and Patrycja Humienik. Come along and bring your water musings and questions!
Suggested reading for grounding and opening the session: Reading list
16:30 – 17:00
Quiet transition—Setup for the evening session in the convivial room.
17:00 – 19:00
Convivial Table with Fritto Misto
Fritto Misto is a roaming kitchen and collective practice exploring fermentation, conviviality, and food as a method of relation and reflection. For this session, they will host a convivial table rooted in fermentation as a social and spatial practice.
Together, we will prepare and taste non-alcoholic fermented drinks (mocktails) made with spices, herbs, and seasonal ingredients. Through this shared preparation and sensory encounter, the session opens space to think-with fermentation: not just as metaphor, but as a way of attending to slowness, microbial coexistence, digestion, and transformation.
To take part in Day 1 of Composting Knowledge: A Convivial Gathering, please confirm your attendance by registering here.
Day 2 — Harvesting Day
Tuesday 17 June
11:00 – 11:30
Welcome & Returning Circle
A gentle reconvening and shared reflection on what emerged the previous day, opening space for attunement and direction.
11:30 – 13:00
Speculative Fiction Reading Group with More-than-human Interest Group
A slow and attentive reading of Texts by Ursula K. Le Guin and Amnesty (The Communities) by Octavia E. Butler. Through these stories of more-than-human understanding, interspecies translation and alien encounter, we’ll explore speculative kinships and uneasy solidarities.
The reading will unfold into a collective mapping/drawing/writing session, where participants are invited to respond to the story through mark-making and embodied interpretation.
13:00 – 14:00
Soft break—Eat, rest, draw, and reconnect.
14:00 – 16:00
Cat’s Cradle: Tentacular Mapping
Inspired by Donna Haraway’s cat’s cradle, this collective session invites participants to trace connections through gesture, storytelling, and situated practices. The cat’s cradle becomes both method and metaphor—a way of passing, holding, and entangling thoughts across difference.
You're invited to bring the thing you never had time for — a dormant idea, a marginal thought, a fragment of research, a hesitation, a leftover. These materials, gestures and resonances will be woven into a living constellation of relations through shared mapping.
As we pass, knot and narrate, we experiment with ways of making kin—tracing entanglements across bodies, disciplines and more-than-human presences.
16:00 – 16:30
Quiet transition—Setting the space for the final session.
16:30 – 18:00
Convivial Table (Part 2): Harvest & Living Archive
A moment to gather what the event might leave behind: fragments, texts, whispers, microbes, residues, memories. Through shared reflection and collective writing, we will assemble a living archive of what still resonates — and what still needs care. What do we carry forward?
To take part in Day 2 of Composting Knowledge: A Convivial Gathering, please confirm your attendance by registering here.
Composting Knowledge unfolds over two days. To join us, please register separately for each day you’d like to attend:
Day 1 Registration – Friday, 16 June
Day 2 Registration – Saturday, 17 June
We’re grateful for your attention and care, and we look forward to being in good company.
Warmly,
The organising team
Agnese & Lucy
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Visual: © Lucy Jane MacAllister Dukes
In collaboration with
Afterall Research Centre
Living Systems Lab Research Group
More-than-human Interest Group
With the support of
The Doctoral School Catalyst Fund and Arts SU