Anke Schaffartzik specializes in social ecology and ecological economics, with a focus on social metabolism, that is, on the resource flows (extraction, imports, and exports) and stocks required to reproduce a society.
The Anthropocene is marked by intensifying climate-related catastrophes, driven by a growth-dependent economic system that benefits some anthropoi (humans or sons of men, depending not just on the translation) while eroding the inhabitability of Earth for human and more-than-human life. Such fundamentally altered society-nature relations, compared to the Holocene, are usually cited as a defining feature of the Anthropocene. The research field of social metabolism proposes that a society, in an analogy to a living organism, has a metabolism: It requires material and energy inputs, stocks, and outputs for societal reproduction. This conceptualization underpins much of what we know as ‘environmental accounting’. And it is through these accounting tools that we can observe present-day patterns in resource use and how they have changed over time. So, what is that has changed in our societal resource use? I will offer a socio-metabolic perspective on this question, with the invitation to discuss what this tells us about society-nature relations and about the specific form(s) of societal organization to which these resource use patterns are tied, focusing specifically on the role of inequalities.
Anke Schaffartzik holds a PhD in Social Ecology from Alpen-Adria University for research on the socio-metabolic patterns in international trade. As an assistant professor at the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy at the Central European University in Vienna, Austria, her research focuses on the interplay between societal organization and resource use and considers aspects such as environmental and climate justice, inequality, trade and unequal exchange, and extractivism. Most of Anke’s research occurs in interdisciplinary cooperation and employs a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods.
The event will be followed by a small reception.