Metabolic Relations, Subjects, Differences

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

To metabolize is to be alive. To metabolize is to be connected to specific foods, movements and environments. Metabolism is at once an abstraction representing a host of chemical processes and a powerful social metaphor. It is a way of studying the material and energy of the body and the body’s relationship to consumption, transformation and destruction. In short, metabolism is good to think with. With the expansion of calculative potential at personal and public levels, a focus on metabolic relations opens new questions about science and technology's roles in selfhood, human-non human relationships, and human-environment relationships among other themes. This panel includes a wide array of papers that consider practices of metabolism research as well as the care for human metabolism as ways into apprehending the human body as a site of emerging relations, subject formations or notions of human difference.

Sub Unit

• Papers for Open Panels / Metabolic Relations, Subjects and Differences

Individual Presentations

• Mining Experience for Methods - Elspeth Oppermann, Charles Darwin University

• Doing Energy or Commensality? Some dissonances between dietary guidelines and social eating practices - Elsher Lawson-Boyd, University of Sydney

• Optimizing food through or without technologies? Nutritionalization in France, from digital health to fasting revival - Tristan Fournier, CNRS; Sébastien Dalgalarrondo, EHESS/CNRS

• Embodied Transformations: Standardizing Movement in Australian Metabolism Research of “Subsistence” and Wage-earning populations in Papua New Guinea - Sandra Widmer, York University, Canada

• Beyond Homeostasis - Hannah Landecker, UCLA

Session Organizer

• Sandra Widmer, York University, Canada