Olga Gershenson: Transgender Rights to Toilets, Internet Trolls, and the Secret Language of Nerds
SHHH: The Poopcast (aka S**t and Shame with Shawn)
Release Date: 12/27/2016
Here We Go “Around the Toilet” with Charlotte Jones and Jen Slater
SHHH: The Poopcast (aka S**t and Shame with Shawn)
Disability, gender and sexuality, politics of public space, and intersectional accessibility. Shawn Shafner (The Puru) sits down with Sheffield Hallam University academics Charlotte Jones and Jen Slater to go “Around the Toilet,” collaborative arts-based research on bathrooms as places of inclusion and/or exclusion because of age, gender, ability, religion, profession and more. Pushing past the "one-stall-fits-all" model, we imagine a compassionate world where every deuce can be dropped with dignity.
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Oh, SuSanA: Oxfam’s Esther Shaylor and the Online Sanitation Portal
SHHH: The Poopcast (aka S**t and Shame with Shawn)
Human-centered design, dignified aid, and internet innovation for water / sanitation. Engineer, mother and communications expert Esther Shaylor introduces Shawn Shafner (The Puru) to the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA), a network of WASH stakeholders and online resources for all. Esther explains how market-based solutions are changing development practices, and we discuss the perils and virtues of Wikipedia, storytelling’s primal power, and why a batch of tasty biscuits is worth its weight in gol
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POOP TALK Director Aaron Feldman Brings Fecal Matters to Film
SHHH: The Poopcast (aka S**t and Shame with Shawn)
Taboo-breaking comedy, toilet knives, wiping stones & Jewish poop. Director Aaron Feldman’s new film POOP TALK proves celebrities are just like us, as Kumail Nanjiani, Eric Stonestreet, Dr. Drew and more divulge the contents of their colons. Talking to Shawn Shafner (The Puru), Feldman explains how his own sensitive stomach inspired the film, why colon cancer specialists are praising its creation, and how a silly film about poop might also be a profound meditation on our common humanity. pooptalkthemovie.
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Muck Makes Brass: Scaling Social Impact with Andy Narracott
SHHH: The Poopcast (aka S**t and Shame with Shawn)
Business for social change, avoiding burnout, effective altruism, ineffective development practices, and the UK’s first luxury mobile toilet. The average person spends 80,000 hours working. Water/sanitation engineer Andy Narracott tells how a near-death experience shifted his career goals from making money to making change. Andy hands out tips for social entrepreneurs and everybody from his podcast Finding Impact. To start: find out your “why.” Hint: it’s probably not to buy the latest phone.
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Shame on Who? Jennifer Barr Researches Development with Dignity
SHHH: The Poopcast (aka S**t and Shame with Shawn)
Do current international development practices put human dignity and wellbeing at the center of their work? Anthropologist Jennifer Barr spent 13 months in Delhi writing case studies of NGOs including Sulabh, India’s toilet-building monolith, and Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA), grassroots empowerment of those who manually scavenge. This hour with Jennifer and Shawn "The Puru" Shafner covers Community Led Total Sanitation as colonial hangover, sector shoehorning of sanitation & the importance of sunblock.
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Wee My Valentine: An Hour with Wastewater Expert Nancy Love
SHHH: The Poopcast (aka S**t and Shame with Shawn)
Building infrastructure in Addis Ababa, filtering Flint’s taps, and tackling traditional paradigms of where to pee. Shawn Shafner (The Puru) sits down with Nancy Love--professor, pioneer, engineer & expert who literally wrote the book on Biological Wastewater Treatment. We’ll tour a centralized Wastewater Treatment Plant, appreciate decentralized sanitation systems, and learn why the National Science Foundation has given her a lot of money to study how urine could fertilize our amber waves of grain.
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Art Monastery Project: Creativity, Community, Contemplation and a Compost Toilet
SHHH: The Poopcast (aka S**t and Shame with Shawn)
Put artists together in rural Vermont with a shared schedule dedicated to creativity; get the Art Monastery Project. While in-residence, Shawn Shafner (The Puru) hosts a roundtable of “Artmonks”. Co-founder Betsy McCall passes on a blessing for peeing on the planet. Core member Raphael Sacks explains why he's been sprinkling coyote urine on the garden. Voice doula Kaitlin June sings the blessings of our odor-free dry toilet, and chef Emma Wyman pitches in to thank the Muse. Holy sh*t? You bet your art.
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Designing Out of the Pot: Mathew Lippincott
SHHH: The Poopcast (aka S**t and Shame with Shawn)
Legalizing green sanitation, kite safety through cartwheels, coming back from serious crisis, and all the ways your shower can kill you. In this special live episode, polymath Mathew Lippincott enlightens Shawn Shafner (The Puru) with his encyclopedic knowledge of everything. A designer who creates future technologies influenced by history, Mathew tells us how he helped create Portland’s emergency sanitation protocol, worked with to make compost toilets a legal option, and takes us under the leach field to see why most septic tank users are pooping straight into their aquifers. PLUS Shawn...
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Empowered by Plastic Crotch Devices: Krista Eickmann from The pStyle Company
SHHH: The Poopcast (aka S**t and Shame with Shawn)
Sustainable menstruation management, exploding the privilege to pee standing up, queering the country through relocation, and how to make money with minimal misery. In this episode, Shawn Shafner (The Puru) communes with Krista Eickmann, whose passion for menstrual cups and urine diverters once had her proselytizing these products straight from her purse to friends, family, and strangers on the bus. Reduce waste, remove the threat of toxic shock, and pee through your pants’ fly without removing layers of clothes or dropping full trou in the middle of the woods? They practically sold...
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Food Waste Wizard: Composting with WeRadiate’s Sashti Balasundaram
SHHH: The Poopcast (aka S**t and Shame with Shawn)
Got some peanut shells, banana peels, and old newspapers? Then you might also have the power to generate renewable enegy, fight coastal erosion, control heavy metals, increase civic participation, create nourishing soil, and much more. That’s the magic of compost! Join Shawn Shafner (The Puru) and Sashti Balasundaram, eco-educator and entrepreneur behind , for a bewitching episode that explains how recycling our food scraps can reduce landfill loads, create green jobs, and save all of us money. Just in time for International Compost Awareness Week (May 7-13), this episode offers everything...
info_outlineIn 2005, Professor Olga Gershenson sent out a call for academic papers on public toilets--"the holy of holy for nerds." Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender, the book that resulted, virtually created the toilet studies field. But along with the nerds, geeks and dweebs who answered the call came bigots who slandered the premise and Gershenson personally via internet, mail and fax machine (remember 2005?). In this hour, Shawn Shafner (The Puru) chats with Gershenson about this experience and her work documenting Restroom Revolution, a student group on the UMass Amherst Campus fighting for transgender-friendly unisex bathrooms in 2001. We'll break down how this incident was a bellwether of things to come, why unisex restrooms would make all our lives better, and what you can do to help usher in a new era of life, liberty, and single stalls for all.
Also mentioned: Cultural Studies, discourse analyst, alt-right, kulturkampf, academic policing, homophobia, glory hole, university politics, Bridgewater State University, University of Massachusetts UMass Amherst, Restroom Revolution, Transparent, Jill Soloway, Jeffrey Tambor, bathroom, Harvey Molotch, Laura Noren, campus, unisex, gender neutral, gender non-conforming, buddhist mantra, Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Erving Goffman, backstage, urinal, potty parity, civil rights, disability, bladder, plumbing code, glass ceiling, Simone de Beauvoir, Manneken Pis, Standing Up, Alexander Kira, Reginald Reynolds, Donald Trump