THE ANIMAL TURN
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.
About Catherine Oliver
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.
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Recorded 3 May 2021
Featured Readings:
City chickens: What the rise of urban hen-keeping might mean for veganism and 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 and I Eat an Apple by Annemarie Mol; The Rise of Cheap Nature and Metabolic rift or metabolic shift? dialectics, nature, and the world-historical method by Jason Moore; Killer Cities by Nigel Thrift; and Metabolic Labor: Broiler Chickens and the Exploitation of Vitality by Les Beldo; Cities: Nature’s New Wild by the BBC.
