S3E5: Urban Metabolism with Catherine Oliver
Metabolism is an increasingly important concept in understanding how cities operate. Claudia chats with Catherine Oliver about the concept of urban metabolism and its usefulness in understanding the multiple scales of multispecies relations that are produced in and through urban living.
Catherine Oliver is a postdoctoral researcher, currently working on the ERC-funded project Urban Ecologies at the University of Cambridge, where she is researching urban backyard chickens and chicken-keepers in London. Her monograph, Veganism, Animals, and Archives is forthcoming with Routledge (August 2021). She is also a Wiley-Royal Geographical Society Digital Archives Fellow, researching animals as collaborators and workers in geographical knowledge production. Catherine’s other research is in feminist geographies, notably focussed on ‘dis-belonging,’ precarity, and the reproduction of neoliberal hierarchies at academic conferences. More information can be found on her website (https://catherinecmoliver.wordpress.com) and she can be found on twitter at @katiecmoliver.
Mentioned:
City chickens: What the rise of urban hen-keeping might mean for veganism Catherine Oliver
Veganism, Animals, and Archives by Catherine Oliver
Earthlings with Joaquin Phoenix
Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
Industrial Metabolism: Fat Knowledge by Hannah Landecker
Eating in Theory Annemarie Mol
I Eat an Apple by Annemarie Mol
The Rise of Cheap Nature Jason Moore
Metabolic rift or metabolic shift? dialectics, nature, and the world-historical method by Jason Moore
Killer Cities by Nigel Thrift
Metabolic Labor: Broiler Chickens and the Exploitation of Vitality by Les Beldo
Cities: Nature’s New Wild by the BBC.
"Metabolisms are always geographical. Capitalist relations move through, not upon, space, which is to say through, and not upon, nature as a whole" - Jason Moore, Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift (2017).
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; the Sonic Arts Studio and the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory (SAPLab) for sponsoring this season; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John (Website) for the logo, and Hannah Hunter for the Animal Highlight