Agenda

Metabolic Commons: Against Entropic Zones and the Ecology That War Built
Feminist Political Ecology Workshop — Call for Papers
21–22 September 2026 | Aula Mario Baratto and Sala Marino Berengo, Ca' Foscari University of Venice

The frameworks that organize contemporary environmental governance, climate policy, and energy transition emerged from Cold War military research, colonial field sites, and postwar techno-scientific infrastructures. The energy-flow paradigm that structures contemporary systems ecology, climate modeling, and green transition planning descends from a specific lineage, from Wilhelm Ostwald's energetics through Alfred Lotka's physical biology to Howard T. Odum's maximum power principle, in which life was reformulated as thermodynamic process, competition was encoded as ecological ground, and political accountability was excluded from the descriptive apparatus.

Against this inheritance, the workshop develops the concept of the metabolic commons: the historically produced, gendered, and racialized configurations of land, water, and collective practice through which communities reproduce the conditions of life. The entropic zone names its political-economic counterpart, a territory, community, or body whose social-ecological reserves have been irreversibly dissipated through extractive operations and registered as the structural underside of accumulation.

The workshop brings together ecological Marxism, feminist materialism, the history and philosophy of science, decolonial science studies, and political ecology toward a feminist political ecology adequate to the conjuncture of green transition, rearmament, and reorganized extractive frontiers. It asks what forms of metabolic commons are already being built from within entropic zones, what knowledge they generate, what political subject they constitute. We are particularly interested in contributions that engage specific material sites and geographies and in work that brings together theory with place-based, grassroots, and artistic modes of engagement.

Call for Papers
We invite scholars, artists, and organizers to submit a 2-page position paper accompanied by a brief biography with institutional affiliation. Submissions to antonia.friedman@unive.it and r.gush@tugraz.at by 1 July 2026.
Notification by 15 July 2026. There is no participation fee; limited financial assistance may be available to independent scholars.

Organized by the Radical Epistemologies: Political Ecology and Transversal Praxis research cluster at NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, in collaboration with IZK Institute for Contemporary Art, Graz University of Technology, and the ERC project HealthXCross at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca' Foscari University of Venice. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GA n. 949742 ERC-HealthXCross).

Curated by Rose-Anne Gush (Graz University of Technology) and Antonia Majaca (Ca' Foscari University of Venice).

Workshop committee: Rose-Anne Gush, Antonia Majaca, Roberta Raffaetà.