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CS92PROD
Metabolism and Technoscience

SISP 215
Spring 2019 not offered
Course Cluster: Health Studies, Sustainability and Environmental Justice

This course will investigate 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 biological and technosocial processes through which bodies (both human and not human) and societies (again, human and not) 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 production, consumption, labor, absorption, medicalization, appropriation, expansion, growth, surveillance, regulation, and enumeration. Accordingly, as we will learn, 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, we will interpret some of the most pressing metabolic crises facing human societies, including ecological disaster, industrial food regimes, metabolic health problems, and industrial-scale pollution.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS SISP
Course Format: Lecture / DiscussionGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (ENVS-MN)(ENVS)(STS)

Last Updated on MAR-28-2024
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