This article is part of the following series: Writing Life
Figure 1: Emma Kowal writing her thesis in 2006 with 7-month old Maya in Darwin, Australia. Image: supplied.
One evening in December 2021, in a small South African coastal town where my best friend’s bustling wedding preparations were underway, I got goosebumps. I turned off the music, looked up from my reading, and said “please listen to this”. Then I …
In June 2021, more than 180 early-career Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars and participants congregated at this year’s Australasian STS Graduate Network Conference (henceforth AusSTS2021) to reflect on the theme of “situated practice.” The third event since the network was founded in 2017, this year’s multi-sited gathering comprised local nodes in the Australian cities of Sydney, Melbourne, and Darwin, …
This article is part of the following series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
Life comes apart on the reef. Changes to ocean chemistry and temperature—generated by the fossil-hunger of militarism, extractivism, and industrialism—break open coral worlds on Australia’s northeast coast. Encountering death’s ascendency on the Great Barrier Reef, scientists seek to track coral life by descending within: to study limestone structures, the tiny polyps that build them, and the microscopic symbiotic algae that …
This article is part of the following series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
The metabolism of a city is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in its archaeology. Decades of excavations triggered by cultural heritage management legislation in Melbourne, Australia reveal a city honeycombed with rubbish pits. Disused cesspits (old-fashioned long-drop toilets), purpose-dug holes and localised dumps filled to the brim with rubbish remain below the factories, office buildings and car parks we see …
This article is part of the following series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
The metabolic rift
“All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil,” Marx (1976: 637-38) wrote in Volume I of Capital. For Marx, not only was the capitalist mode of production incapable of valuing nature in its own right, but its central contradictions also left it …
This article is part of the following series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
In October 2019 the Australian Productivity Commission (APC) released a report stating that mental health cost employers $4.7 billion AUD in absenteeism. The report also highlighted significant government expenditure on health services as well as intangible costs on committees. Over the past decade there have also been a number of reports from federal and state governments on the economic and …