Jan Bartsch

Metabolic Apparatusses in or of the Anthropocene. The Political Ecology of Aquaponics

My Research is concerned with metabolic apparatuses in or of the Anthropocene. More specifically I am working on the Political Ecology of Aquaponics. Aquaponics is an experimental technology in which seemingly natural metabolic cycles between fish and plants are used to produce food. Against this background, I address the seemingly contradictory relationship between economic rationalities and ecological sustainability within alternative food production. I try to grasp this relation with the term metabolism in order to show immanent power relations on the one hand and to trace the diverse entanglements of human and other-than-human worlds on the other hand. Through an ethnographically informed understanding of metabolism, it is possible to show how new forms of urban food production imply political factors and at the same time entail contingencies and unpredictable outcomes.

Contact
Research interests
  • Urban Political Ecology
  • Science and Technology Studies
  • More-than-human ethnography
  • Metabolism Studies
  • Environmental Sociology
Vita
  • Since 2020
    PhD  Scholarship holder of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. 
  • 2016 – 2019
    M.A. Cultural- and Social anthropology at the Philipps-University of Marburg.
  • 2010 – 2016
    B.A. Political Science and Cultural Studies at the University of Bremen.
Publications
Talks, Workshops, and Events
  • Talk Metabolic Apparatuses in Urban food production. The Political Ecology of Aquaponics
  • 2022 Conference Exploring Unruly Sites of more-than-human Entanglements. Workshop AG Environmental Anthropology 19.05-20.05.2022.
  • Talk Metabolizing Ethnography. Aquaponics and the Anthropocene.
  • 2022 Conference METABOLISM STUDIES: MATERIALITY AND RELATIONALITY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE. Scientific research symposium. 28.06-30.06.2022 in Lyon, France.
Back to overview
paradox

“The basis of law is not an idea as a systematic unified principle but a paradox.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
relational

“At first I thought contradiction was always a relational thing; but the more I ponder it, the more I think contradiction creates relation.”

Ingo H. Warnke
Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf
problem to be solved

“Contradiction is not primarily a problem to be solved but a motor we cannot do without.”

Martin Nonhoff
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht