Sep 20, 2015
My guest today is Dara Blumenthal (@thisisdara), a management consultant who did her PhD on the critical theory of public toilet spaces. If you’re like me, and totally confused but interested to learn what this means and how it came to be, stay tuned.
We explore Dara’s upbringing and how she was taught as a young girl to ask probing questions. We discuss how the combined study of somatics and the academic discipline of critical theory together led her to ask hundreds, if not thousands of people, to share their stories about public toilets. We examine how that led Dara to study of guilt, shame and humiliation, and how now Dara is part of a new organization which seeks to remove those, and increase collaboration and creativity, within large companies.
Dara and I dive pretty deep into some academic theory, but there are gems in this episode about cross-culture communication, the future of work, and the stories people tell of public toilet spaces.