Rescaling the Metabolic: Food, Technology, Ecology Network

Created:	2020-12-18 10:00
Institution:	Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Editors' group:	Editors group for "Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities".
Description:	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. Administrative assistance: networks@crassh.cam.ac.uk
Website:	http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/rescaling-the-metabolic-food-technology-ecology-2020-21