About our name 

COMPOST – The term ‘compost’ has several different meanings that all tie in nicely with the varied methods, topics, and aims of our team. For example, it can be read as an acronym in multiple ways: 

• Caring/Careful, Organic and Messy Practices of Situated Thinking 

• Community for Philosophies Of Staying with the Trouble 

• Critical, Organic and Messy Practices of Social Transformation 

It can also stand more literally for compost(ing) in its different meanings. We compost and compose thoughts in our efforts to work in truly inter- and transdisciplinary ways that give us time to let our thoughts change and transform into fertile work.  

Collective – Our group is characterized by a multiplicity of collaborations, opportunities for reciprocal inspiration and instances of mutual aid. We collectively chose the name ‘COMPOST Collective’ to emphasize our engaged commitments as a group.  

Issues our team members are interested in include links and relationships between health and environment, mind and body, biology and normativity (e.g. in relation to procreation and parenthood), (critical) disability theory and neurodiversity thinking, critical theory and embodied cognition, more-than-human life, the ethics of various developments in medicine and healthcare, ethics of prediction, and bioethics-in-science.

Find out more about the projects our members are working on here.

Among many other projects and research endeavours, the COMPOST Collective has grown out of the ERC-funded project NeuroEpigenEthics (2019-2023), which was led by Kristien Hens and brought together many researchers who are still part of our team today. Find out more about this project and its results on this page.