Turnbull, Jonathon and Cusworth, George and Searle, Adam and Vogel, Else and Thoreau, François and Oliver, Catherine (2026) Metabolo-politics : Bovine Metabolism and Environmental Biopower. Theory, Culture and Society. ISSN 0263-2764
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
More-than-human metabolic processes increasingly constitute the locus of contemporary biopower, often responding to industrially-altered biogeochemical cycles. We conceptualise ‘metabolo-politics’ to examine the targeting of bodies and populations via interventions in the biochemical surroundings and ecologies that shape them; and simultaneously, the administration and modulation of materials in the environment via interventions in the bodies and populations that ingest, digest, and excrete them. Focusing on the governance of environmental crises related to carbon and nitrogen pollution, particularly in livestock sectors in the Global North, we offer three analytics for theorising metabolo-politics as a form of governance oscillating between bio-politics and anatomo-politics. They are: the dispositive , which grapples with the relations of matter and discourse that shape emergent problematisations of metabolism; the milieu , which is the more-than-human scene of intervention; and technologies , which are the diverse means through which power is operationalised metabolically and through which bodies, populations, and environments are governed.