As a creative and wanna-be speculative theorizer, I am compelled to answer Adrian Downey's call to attend to the current movement toward waste-power, as mentioned in Pedagogies of Attending and Mourning (2022). And I'm really gung-ho about diffracting active and obsolete pedagogies by using waste to teach us all sorts of things about our unconscious habits and biases through a sort of defamiliarization of our discard practices.
As an educator, this envisionment of new curricula, which has a strong potential for environmental direction, has me wet—recording underwater sounds and videos. The Long Island Sound and Dead Horse Bay are my two primary locations for creative waste-based explorations thus far. In addition, I've been collecting, organizing, and building with beach trash, horseshoe crab exoskeletons, and shells. I'm attracted to making art with and around the water not only because of its proximity and the joy it brings me but I'm intrigued by water's spiritual nature which also parallels waste's ability to disrupt the category of the human.
