Louise Whiteley On March 23rd, 17.15-18.00 CET, Professor Hannah Landecker of UCLA will give an online talk entitled ‘Metabolism and Society: A Short History of Mutual Transformation’. The talk is part of Metabolism Month – a weekly seminar series throughout March 2021, hosted by the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR). You can register for Metabolism Month by clicking on the link on this page, and attend whichever talks are of interest:
REGISTER AND JOIN HERE: https://cbmr.ku.dk/metabolismmonth2021
Professor Landecker (click here) works at the interface of the life sciences and social sciences, and has been an enduring influence for our interdisciplinary research on metabolism. We have particularly drawn inspiration from her work on the new metabolism of excess, linking metabolic science and politics (‘Fat Knowledge’), her work on epigenetics and the conception of food as an environmental exposure (‘Food as Exposure’), and her philosophical unravelling of the history and philosophy of metabolism and the uncertain parameters and potential re-opening of the concept of metabolism for humanities today (‘The Metabolism of Philosophy’). Her writings have been a knowledgeable guide for our unfolding experiments into ‘metabolic thinking’ about both medical humanities and what a museum is and can be.
If you have any questions about the talk, get in touch with Louise Whiteley on lowh@sund.ku.dk
Short bio
Landecker, a historian and sociologist of science, studied cell and developmental biology before going on to receive her PhD in Science and Technology Studies from MIT. She is the author of Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (Harvard UP, 2007), as well as many research articles spanning topics from the development of time-lapse microcinematography to the environmental politics of reproduction. Her current research interests have turned toward the history and social study of metabolism and epigenetics, and this talk is drawn from her current book project, American Metabolism.
Hannah Landecker holds a joint appointment in the life and social sciences at UCLA, where she is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, and Director of the Institute for Society and Genetics. The Institute for Society and Genetics is an interdisciplinary unit at UCLA committed to cultivating research and pedagogy at the interface of the life and human sciences, and houses the Human Biology and Society undergraduate major. She also recently helped found the UCLA EpiCenter for interdisciplinary study of the intersection of reproduction, epigenetics, and society, and is its co-director; she is a senior editor of the journal BioSocieties.
References
“Metabolism, Reproduction, and the Aftermath of Categories,” Feminist & Scholar Online 11(3): Summer 2013.
“Post-Industrial Metabolism: Fat Knowledge,” Public Culture 25(3):495-522, 2013.
“The Metabolism of Philosophy, in Three Parts,” 193-224 in Dialectic and Paradox: Configurations of the Third in Modernity, B. Malkmus and I. Cooper, eds., Bern: Peter Lang, 2013.
“Food as Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the New Metabolism,” BioSocieties 6:167-194, 2011. [open access publication here]
