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- Convenors:
-
Eline van Oosten
(University of Amsterdam)
Tullio Maia (University of Amsterdam)
Herre de Bondt (University of Roehampton)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
At its core, metabolism is about exchange and transformation of energy and matter, traditionally known as stoffwechsel. How can the concept of metabolism help us understand more-than-human relations spanning from the internal workings of guts and bodies to broader urban, rural and planetary scales?
Long Abstract:
Bacteria aid mammalian digestion, while plants, fungi, and earthworms alter and transform soil chemistry. Grazing mammals' manure revitalizes plants elsewhere. These interactions operate and are transformed through metabolic systems at various scales. At its core, metabolism is about the exchange and transformation of energy and matter resulting from biochemical processes, traditionally known as stoffwechsel. While rooted in biology, the concept of metabolism and metabolic thinking in recent years inspired philosophical and social scientific thought (Landecker, 2013) to consider spaces as systems whose homeostasis is constantly being produced and destabilized by complex more-than-human networks. Human agency is inherently situated in these networks and any agentive action can be understood as a metabolic agency interfering in the exchange of energy and matter (Broto, Allen and Rapoport, 2012).
We propose the concept of metabolism as a framework to explore more-than-human relations because of (1) its focus on systems of interlinked processes (Landecker, 2019), (2) its exploration of the exchange of matter and energy between various human and more-than-human actors (3) its attention to bodily processes. In this panel, we welcome discussants to think how metabolism can help us understand more-than-human relations spanning from the internal workings of guts and bodies to broader urban, rural and planetary scales. We highly encourage contributions that engage with the concept of metabolism through various disciplines and perspectives in a dialogue with the following themes:
- How metabolic more-than-human flows and transformations co-produce space such as farms, cities, forests and so on.
- Metabolic perspectives on global environmental challenges and their local manifestations.
- Political metabolisms of life and death/ (bio and/or necro)political metabolisms.
- Methodologies for studying metabolism through fieldwork and empirical research that showcase examples of metabolism as an effective analytic tool to look at multispecies encounters or unravel novel or underrepresented forms of metabolism
Accepted papers:
Session 1Molly MacVeagh (Wake Forest University)
Short abstract:
Metabolism offers a surprising narrative resource for telling more-than-human stories. Through a case study of Aminatta Forna’s 2018 novel Happiness, this paper argues for the trans-scalar and trans-species affordances of metabolic description.
Long abstract:
The problem of environmental storytelling is a problem of scale. Stories, after all, are “grounded in and adapted to a human-scale lifeworld” (Herman 258). We are good at telling stories about people falling in love, about the drama of a dinner party, even about intergenerational family trauma. It is harder to tell stories that happen at temporalities beyond the scale of the human: about mayflies, or climate change, or fungal fruiting. This paper looks to metabolism as a surprising narrative resource for telling more-than-human stories. Using Aminatta Forna’s 2018 Happiness as a case study, I turn to the novel’s careful attention to ingestion, disintegration, and excretion of matter as model of metabolic description. Happiness, which centers a Ghanaian trauma psychologist and an American wildlife biologist, is frequently read as a fantasy of liberal cosmopolitanism—the kind of story where smooth global exchange is enabled by exceptional individuals. But attending to Forna’s depictions of photosynthesizing plants, pigeons eating meat pies, and London’s complex waste and energy infrastructure reveals a profoundly anti-individualist materialism. Metabolism’s conceptual affordances, in other words—its ability to mediate scales, link species, and foreground the dynamism in apparently static contexts—provide a mechanism for narrating beyond the scale of the human. As such, critical metabolism studies might be put in productive dialogue with the emergent and overlapping fields of climate fiction and the environmental humanities.
Eline van Oosten (University of Amsterdam)
Long abstract:
The increasing recognition of the city as a “living environment” (Hinchliffe & Whatmore 2006) or “ecological formation” (Barua & Sinha 2022), suggests a need to study the formation of urban inequalities in the city beyond a focus on either humans or human-made structures alone. My project studies the enactment of urban inequalities in the city of Amsterdam through the lens of metabolism, by focusing on the metabolic relations between rats, humans and waste infrastructures. Rats throughout history have become symbols of disease, disorder and larger community problems, even though they pose no significant physical health risks for humans today in Amsterdam. They tend to thrive in urban areas with ample dwelling space and food waste making them synanthropic; benefitting from and in human-made environments. Metabolism here figures as an interesting concept to explore the city as a large circulatory organism produced through more-than-human relationality as well as a lens for more-than-human scholars in the broader social sciences studying ‘natural-cultural borderlands’ to emphasize the interdependence and transformatory relations between lively beings and their environments (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010). In my presentation I will present ethnographic fieldwork excerpts on more-than-human relationality in the city through three metabolic urban entry points that link rats, waste and humans together: bread bins, rodenticides and sewage networks.
Adam Searle (University of Nottingham)
Short abstract:
How is the movement and metamorphosis of matter is governed through, with, and in bovine bodies? How are bovine metabolisms problematised and governed in relation to different cycles and scales, namely, the 'global' carbon cycle, the 'local' nitrogen cycle, and the 'individual' reproductive cycle?
Long abstract:
New advances in science and technology are now making it possible to govern material flows and alterations within finer precision at a range of scales, which could fundamentally alter both individual and collective existence. In this paper, we focus on cattle within a range of environmental crises to unpack how the movement and metamorphosis of matter is governed through, with, and in bovine bodies. We ask: how are bovine metabolisms problematised and governed in relation to different cycles and scales, namely, the 'global' carbon cycle, the 'local' nitrogen cycle, and the 'individual' reproductive cycle? And, how are these three bovine cycles enacted through forms of bovine governance? In an epoch defined by environmental risk and planetary thought, cows are positioned as climatic actors, whereby technofix solutions to methane emissions are presented at the bodily scale to intervene in the climate-at-large. In the Netherlands context, cattle farming increasingly scrutinised for its pollution impact on the nitrogen cycle. At the same time, bovine bodies circulate as a range of protein—dairy and meat—products, and gametes are traded openly in husbandry markets, aided by genomic infrastructures. We invoke metabopolitics as a conceptual tool to question how such material flows are governed across these geographical scales, and to question how this mode of biopower fundamentally creates opportunities and challenges for life across more-than-human assemblages. Metabopolitics applies to situations in which molecular flows and circulations of materials are subject to measurement, calculation, intervention, and modulation that carry consequences extending beyond bodies and across scales.