Adventurous homemaking : exploring collaborations toward agroecological probabilities

Abstract

This research investigates how attending to the basic needs of human bodily existence, is mobilising transpersonal abilities toward integrative flourishing. Rearranging human-environment relations through the self-contracted crafting of daily life, requires courage, bodily engagement, and failure tolerance. Such adventurousness is the crux for inhabiting the world in ways that nurture the biophysical foundation of human existence. Through contemporising the coregulating exchanges of fermentation, this study engages peoples' bodyminds as biophysical agent in socionatural ecologies which starts with their digestive byproducts-human 'waste'. Advancement in wicked problems depends on confronting challenges deliberately for suspending the operational logic behind them. In response, this study evaluates self-mobilisation strategies and social buffering dynamics that assist people in committing to and prospering vis-a-vis adverse situations. A series of provocative human 'waste' upgrading events formulated a collective domesticity study where 22 participants implicated themselves in fermenting urine for growing edible plants and entering (biological) circulations of wellbeing. When technical breakdown made it futile to grow anything, participants persevered remarkably in an all-hands-on-deck collaboration. The dynamic tension of jointly encountered ambiguity together with the integrative goal, created a failure-friendliness that was conducive to sociality, inventiveness, and rich emergence of meaning. To visualise the participants experiential journeys, a rendering model was developed for correlating self-support and societal internalisation with adeptness to the turbulent situation. The psychodynamic tracking indicates how the vibrant work alliance provided ample social porosity and multidimensional impetus to participants. Human 'waste' became an integral element inside a self-contracted goal pursuit. Close attention to mutual ephemerality became the catalyst for deeper insight, solidarity and greater choices through engaging in body-aware exchanges with their environment.