Metabolic geographies: Work, shifts and politics

Abstract

This article reinvigorates a pivotal arena of scholarship in human geography and the social sciences: metabolism. It does so by staging an encounter between political economic and biochemical readings of metabolism, fleshed out through three complementary concepts: metabolic work, metabolic shifts and metabolic politics. These concepts, respectively, specify how metabolism is rendered into a productive force, account for the asymmetric effects that emerge as a result, and reveal how such effects become object-targets of power. Together, they enable grasping the material and political dynamics of metabolism whilst advancing the social sciences' concerns with the economization, transformation and governance of life.

Topics & Concepts