- About
- Convenors
- Programme 2020-21
- Blogs
About
This research network interrogates the concept of metabolism and evaluates its potential for understanding the politics and governance of the living and material world. It explores the metabolic from molecular to global scales, across a broad range of geographical and cultural contexts. Metabolism draws attention to new forms of industrial agriculture: the global population of 23 billion broiler chicken, accounting for 70% of the biomass of all birds in the world, and which has resulted in the creature becoming a signature of the Anthropocene’s stratigraphy, is a case in point. Metabolism is at the forefront of contemporary capitalist intensification: interventions at cellular levels and along biochemical pathways are opening up new molecular frontiers of accumulation. This harnessing of the metabolic is closely entwined with a vast infrastructure of storage, cold chains and just-in-time logistics: techno-metabolic systems, with their own demands for energy and resources, and their own effluvia in the form of carbon emissions and toxic chemicals are generating new zones of governance and loci of environmental politics. Health risks emerging from metabolic intensification, marked by virulent events including avian influenza in sites of industrialised livestock production, are prompting new forms of biopolitical surveillance and intervention.
Rescaling the Metabolic explores new understandings of the politics and governance of life, materials and processes. Through a programme featuring talks by leading thinking on metabolism, readings groups focusing on classic and contemporary texts, and discussions between scholars across the social and ecological sciences, this research network seeks to develop provocative ways of conceptualising the relations between food production, capitalism, technology, bodies, and the environment.
Download the Lent 2021 poster here
Administrative assistance: networks@crassh.cam.ac.uk
Convenors
Convenors
Thomas White (Lecturer, Department of Social Anthropology)
Maan Barua (Lecturer, Department of Geography)
David Nally (Department of Geography)
Faculty Advisors
Dr Andrew Sanchez (Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Professor Matthew Gandy (Chair in Cultural and Historical Geography, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge)
Programme 2020-21
All online events are scheduled at UK time. Please check time for individual events.
Easter Term 2021
| Rescaling the Metabolic |
|---|
|
Technology and Social Metabolism. Reading Group 17 May 2021 5:00pm - 7:00pm, ONLINE SESSION (UK Time) |
|
Agrarian Metabolism | Reading Group 31 May 2021 5:00pm - 7:00pm, ONLINE SESSION (UK Time) |
|
CANCELLED: Metabolic Pathways: Where Next? 14 Jun 2021 5:00pm - 7:00pm, ONLINE SESSION (UK Time) |
Lent term 2021
(Download the term poster here)
| Rescaling the Metabolic |
|---|
|
Rescaling the Metabolic (Internal meeting) 25 Jan 2021 5:00pm - 7:00pm, ONLINE SESSION (UK Time) |
|
The Circular Economy and the Urban Metabolism 8 Feb 2021 5:00pm - 7:00pm, ONLINE SESSION (UK Time) Amy Zhang (New York) |
|
From Metabolism to Chemistry 22 Feb 2021 5:00pm - 7:00pm, ONLINE SESSION (UK Time) Andrew Barry (University College London) |
|
Urban Metabolism 8 Mar 2021 5:00pm - 7:00pm, ONLINE SESSION (UK Time) Matthew Gandy (Cambridge) – Rescaling the Metabolic Network |
Michaelmas 2020
| Rescaling the Metabolic |
|---|
|
Inflammatory Remarks: The Metabolic Turn in Bioscience and Beyond 12 Oct 2020 5:00pm - 7:00pm, ONLINE SESSION (UK Time) Hannah Landecker (UCLA) |
|
Rescaling the Metabolic Reading Group 26 Oct 2020 5:00pm - 7:00pm, ONLINE SESSION (UK Time) |
|
Microbiopolitics Now, in Food Safety and Beyond 9 Nov 2020 5:00pm - 7:00pm, ONLINE SESSION (UK Time) Heather Paxson (MIT) |
|
Climate, Class & Capitalism’s Metabolisms: A Ridiculously Brief History 23 Nov 2020 5:00pm - 7:00pm, ONLINE SESSION (UK Time) Jason Moore (Binghamton, NY) |
Blogs
Author: Raúl Acosta
This blog is authored by Raúl Acosta, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, LMU Munich. Raúl Acosta is an invited contributor with the Rescaling the Metabolic: Food, Technology, Ecology Research Network at CRASSH.
“A new vision of biocontrol beyond what had been possible earlier … points to what I call a ‘technomolecular city’, understood as a use of new technologies and scientific advances to harness the various microscopic processes at play in urban metabolic biochemical flows. … It is an innovative governance design to use information about flows in the microscopic scale in cities either for private profit or public good”.
Authors: Catherine Oliver and Jonathon Turnbull
Blog essay authored by Catherine Oliver (Postdoctoral Research Associate, ERC Urban Ecologies project, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge) and Jonathon Turnbull (PhD Scholar, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge). Both are invited contributors with the Rescaling the Metabolic: Food, Technology, Ecology Research Network at CRASSH.
“In this essay, we … attend to how chicken metabolisms are manipulated at a range of scales in pursuit of profit and human nutrition … The chicken is conceptualised as a ‘singular inward laboratory’ where metabolism forms a process to be controlled, monitored, and manipulated … to become a conduit for, and synthesiser of, nutritional value for humans.”
Authors: Jonathon Turnbull and Catherine Oliver
Blog essay authored by Jonathon Turnbull (PhD Scholar, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge) and Catherine Oliver (Postdoctoral Research Associate, ERC Urban Ecologies project, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge). Both are invited contributors with the Rescaling the Metabolic: Food, Technology, Ecology Research Network at CRASSH.
“Interventions in the climate-at-large being realised through bovine bodies allows us to conceptualise a metabo-politics of more-than-human life. We define this more-than-human metabo-politics as specific to the Anthropocene, where nonhuman metabolisms are subject to interventions, aims, and consequences that extend beyond bodies themselves. The portmanteau brings metabolism and politics together in a vein similar to bio- and anatamo-politics to signify the governance of metabolic flows.”
