Food, Nourishment
and Metabolic Justice
in the Extractive
Frontiers

The Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences invites scholars with a solid fieldwork background, primarily in the Indo-Pacific but not limited to it, to present research examining contemporary issues in food, nourishment, and extractivism. The extractive imperative (Jacka 2018: 22), stemming from the necessity of self-consuming capitalist growth, has increasingly devoured nourishing ecologies (forests, rivers, swamps, coastal areas, mountains, lakes, and small islands etc.) and transformed them into mining concessions, plantation zones, large-scale agricultural production which, ironically, are often justified by the global narrative of energy transition, food insecurity, and climate change mitigation. These ecologies are living social arenas that convey emotion, memory, feeling, and empathy, and encompass a range of practices, interactions, skills, and affects that together reanimate human and more-than-human relations and sustain the intricate web of life. The depletion of nourishing ecologies and the insatiable appetite of capitalist extraction prompt scholars to rethink food, nourishment, and extractivism as "metabolic (in)justice" (Chao 2023; 2025: 167), a process that intricately links individual physical health, cultural wellbeing, ecologies, and multiscalar but uneven power relations. The lens of metabolic justice attends how nourishment is still primarily constituted by multispecies relations and more-than-human interdependency, but increasingly shaped by the legacy of colonialism, capitalist frontiers, and the global food system.

A major concern of the workshop is to reflect on how social, cultural, and nutritional aspects of nourishment (identity, multispecies relations, value, kinship, beliefs, politics, history, and technologies) are shaped, constituted, and transformed by extractive activities. Possible research questions include, but are not limited to, what nourishing practices across sites, scales, species, and subjects embody metabolic justice? How do extractive activities generate metabolic (in)justice in the human body, landscape, and society? How do people creatively resist metabolic (in)justice and rework nourishing practices? How do people reimagine a nourishing future in extractive zones? The workshop also asks possible questions on methodology: What challenges do researchers encounter when they experience the transformation of a nourishment site and practice? What is the limit of ethnographic methods in addressing and telling metabolic (in)justice?