Event overview
Animal Scales seminar series, February-July 2024
This is the first of a series of six seminars, thinking animals in and through scale. Co-hosted by UCL Anthropocene and the Goldsmiths Centre for Critical Global Change. For further information, please contact m.motamedi-fraser@gold.ac.uk.
SCALE: METABOLIC
Maan Barua
Department of Geography, Cambridge
ABSTRACT
Metabolism has to do with biochemical relations that cut across bodies and environments. At the same time, metabolism can be structured by social relations and has political effects. This talk moves from views of animals predicated upon a model of thought - the perceiving animal - that has been the staple of much posthumanist scholarship, to one that is metabolic. It thinks of animal lifeworlds through the optics of ingestion and egestion, which have bearings on questions of relation, difference, duration and event. These optics also have bearings upon how scale might be conceived, as relational, working through and working upon assemblage, and troubling long-held divisions between environment and body. This is articulated through ethnographic work on broiler chickens in Guwahati, a city in northeast India.
BIO
Maan Barua works on the ontologies, economies and politics of the living and material world. His work is at the intersections of posthumanism, political economy and postcolonial thought. His current research spans four thematic areas: urban ecologies and urban surrounds, biocapital and postcolonial environments. Maan is the PI on an ERC Horizon 2020 Starting Grant Urban Ecologies, and is a University Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge. His book Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology was published in 2023 (Minnesota University Press), and a second monograph, Plantation Worlds will be published by Duke University Press in fall 2024. At present, he is working on metabolism and urban life, which will culminate in a future book.
ANIMAL SCALES SEMINAR SERIES
From Aristotle's scala naturae, to the vast scales of animal agriculture, to moral scales, determined by cognitive scales: animal lives have and continue to be shaped by different kinds of scales and their positions on them. Scales enact, authorise, and justify possible relations with animals, including deathly scales of comparison. But scales are neither fixed nor unchanging, and in the context of increasingly complex, multi-dimensional and multi-temporal analyses of environmental catastrophe, numerous, often novel, scales are proliferating. How do animal scales come into existence? Are animals themselves 'scale-makers' and, if so, can they disrupt the pre-scaled objects of knowledge that support the division of academic labour? This seminar series asks after the disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, empirical, political, ethical, and legal implications of thinking animals in and through scale.
Link to individual speaker abstracts and to register
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 20 Feb 2024 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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