STS Colloquium
co-sponsored by the Multicampus Research Group on Food and Body

Marianne de Laet
Harvey Mudd

Tue, April 19, Noon, 1246 SSH
with pizza

"Counting calories: from logos to practice."

Abstract: What is a calorie? One might say, following physics (and Wikipedia), that a calorie is 4.18400 Joules, or the amount of energy necessary to increase the heat of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. It is a big step, from this description, to the calorie that circulates in our daily lives – where, after all, it holds much more than this tiny amount of energy. And yet, it is precisely this step that I want to take in this paper: from the notion that, because we know how to define it, we know what a calorie is, to the exploration of what a calorie does – all in support of the claim that a thing is what it performs. This lecture, which comes out of work I am doing with Annemarie Mol and her "Eating Bodies" Project at the University of Amsterdam, I ask a "praxio-graphical" set of questions: following Mol's philosophical/anthropological footsteps, I seek to find out what comes with, and what is in, the calorie, rather than what it is; asking questions about its praxis, rather than providing answers that mobilize its logos, and attending to the material relationalities of which the calorie is made.

Marianne de Laet, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science, Technology, and Society
Director, Hixon Forum for Responsive Science and Engineering
Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts
Harvey Mudd College