This course investigates the scientific idea of metabolism through the lens of technoscience. Metabolism is a flexible and mobile scientific idea, one that has been applied at the micro-level of analysis within biological organisms, at the meso-level of social collectivities, and at the macro-level of global ecologies. Metabolism encompasses all of the technoscientific processes through which multispecies bodies and entire societies create and use nutrients, medicines, toxins, and fuels. The lens of technoscience enables us to investigate the technological and scientific practices that define and drive metabolic processes within sciences, cultures, and political economies. These processes implicate forces of surveillance, production, consumption, labor, absorption, medicalization, nutritionalization, pharmaceuticalization, and regulation. Metabolism is also a profoundly political process that is inextricably linked to systems that create structural and symbolic violence as well as modes of resistance and struggle. In these contexts, the course will investigate some of the most pressing metabolic crises facing human societies, including ecological disaster, industrialized food regimes, metabolic health problems, and industrial-scale pollution. |