You are invited to join us at the second biennial
SOAS
SHIT CONFERENCE
An interdisciplinary conference on
excrement, past, present and
future *
Photo: Paradiso perduto restaurant,
to be hosted
at Senate House,
Tuesday 18
to Wednesday 19 November 2025
VENUE: Room 403, Senate House,
DATE: Tuesday 18 to Wednesday 19 November
2025
[The dates are, respectively, World Shit Day and the UN’s World
Toilet Day]
FORMAT: In-person conference, with possible distance presentations.
ADMISSION: Free, and open to the general public.
You are requested to register in advance [see below].
Conference Prospectus
The starting point for our 2023 conference was the collecting and
trading of human and animal excrement as an organic fertiliser,
both solid and liquid, throughout the ages.
However, this is one of those commodities that dares
not speak its name, due to taboos that surround the topic. The widespread
euphemism “nightsoil” is one of many that obscures the subject.
We therefore felt it necessary to work within an interdisciplinary
frame of reference, and to extend our brief into a wider terrain, probing the
social, psychological, and cultural issues arising out of this most human of
topics.
The 2025 conference continues that interdisciplinary vein.
However, this year we shall also continue work that we began in
2023 – to work towards the drafting of a Shit Manifesto that can provide
a framework for future campaigning and activism.
Please note that, in today’s parlance, we shall deal with both
poop and pee.
You can find the published Proceedings of our 2023 conference
at the following URL. The printed version of the book can be obtained by
writing to the address below.
www.geocities.ws/soasshitreader
We invite all persons who are interested to join us at our 2025
conference.
REGISTRATION: To register for the
conference, please write to:
We also request that you circulate this conference invitation
to colleagues who may be interested.
This year’s conference is hosted by the Bartlett Development
Planning Unit at UCL, and we are grateful for their support.
Conference chair: William
Clarence-Smith [SOAS]
Conference organiser: Ed Emery [SOAS]
_____________________________________________________
LIST OF
SPEAKERS
[listed in alphabetical order]
_____________________________________________________
1. On Peruvian guano and its
contradictions
John Barker [Independent
researcher]
2. An ethnography of
toilet practices at the School of Oriental and African Studies,
Ed Emery [SOAS,
3. A
proposition for faecal typologies in archaeology
Eleanor
Green [
4. From infrastructure to inclusion:
gendered and intersectional insights for sustainable sanitation
Pascale
Hofmann [
5. Stoma: Reviewing the literature
David Kent [Independent researcher]
6. From valuable fertiliser to disgusting trash (and back?): a German city
history of shit and the social construction of value
Lina Kieseritzky [
7. Sketching the genealogy of contemporary dry
toilets
Marine Legrand [Research fellow, LEESU (ENPC, France)]
8. The significance of excrements in
Early Modern vernacular print culture
Veronika Lahodinski [
9. “Our
condition is most close to the joyous redemptions of shit” – Scatopolitical fragments
Cy Lecerf Maulpoix [EHESS/CEMS, Paris]
10. Poo
constellations: systematic therapy for human excreta management
Marieke Meesters
[
11. Caught short on the
stressful streets: the lack of public toilets in Kilburn, north
John Miles [Kilburn Older Voices Exchange (KOVE)]
12. Beyond the sewer: the stable
assumptions yet unstable future of the freshwater-flush toilet
Sarah Nahar and Nick Kawa [The
13. Moving bowels and the moving image: faeces on film in the age of mechanical reproduction
Benjin Pollock
[Independent researcher]
14. Blood and shit: what
public toilets tell us about periods
Lauren Powdrell
[SOAS,
15. The
campaign to save the public toilet in Ashburton,
Sarah Prince [Independent
researcher]
16. Bad investments and the enshittification of
Matt Schneider [
17. To
pee or not to pee: youth navigation of shared sanitation in Mumbai’s informal
settlements
Hoang Tran [Independent
researcher]
Riddhi Khandhar [Independent
researcher]
_______
Ends
_______
* Website for World Toilet Day:
www.un.org/en/observances/toilet-day
* aka
“Merde Alors!”
** Trans: “Toilet paper is a bourgeois luxury”
Web design: Universitas
adversitatis
Last updated: 29.x.2025