ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Metabolic Frontiers: Transforming Matter and Energy in the 20th Century

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

For living organisms, being alive depends on a continual exchange of matter and energy with the environment. Physiologists have described this process in terms of “metabolism,” a cycle of constructive, destructive, and reconstructive processes by which life perpetuates itself. Historians of science, energy, and the environment have recently extended metabolic frameworks from biology to analyze how social-ecological systems (e.g., capitalism, empire, militarization) have reorganized flows of matter and energy between humans and more-than-human worlds. Joining this trend while also attending to material metabolic processes, this panel brings together case studies from the twentieth century to the present, where new understandings and uses of “metabolism” inspired new material and energetic possibilities, stretching and transmuting the limits of the digestible and the exploitable to serve varying political projects. Papers on this panel show how the metabolisms of fungi, microbes, plankton, and cetaceans were enrolled by different historical actors to turn decay into productivity, soil into territory, waste into surplus, and scarcity into abundance, each with the possibility of reversal or foreclosure. They also explore how metabolism and digestion diverged biochemically and conceptually from technological and scientific planning and expectations, opening up room for alternative ways of harnessing metabolism.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Zi Yun Huang, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations

• The “Blue Revolution” that never was? Harvesting plankton to feed a hungry world, 1920s-1950s - Zi Yun Huang, University of Chicago

• Environmentalism in Decay: Microbial Decomposition and the Politics of Recycling from Ecology to Resource Recovery, 1960s–70s - Boyd Ruamcharoen, Harvard University

• “Local contamination requires local metabolism”: The Making of Microbial Indigeneity - Danhue J. Kim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Metabolic closures: what happens when foodways end? - Aaron Van Neste, Oberlin College

Session Organizers

• Zi Yun Huang, University of Chicago

• Danhue J. Kim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Boyd Ruamcharoen, Harvard University