Presentation Schedule
Epidemiological Rift, Zoonotic Accelerationism and Contagion Capitalism: Pandemics in the Global Age (104069)
Session Chair: Celeste Cedillo
This presentation will be live-streamed via Zoom (Online Access)
Wednesday, 13 May 2026 17:00
Session: Session 4
Room: Live-Stream Room 4
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
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This presentation draws on Metabolic Rift Theory (MRT) to establish pandemics (such as COVID-19) as an integral aspect of global ecological crisis. Metabolic rift is a concept developed by eco-sociologist John Bellamy Foster to describe the undermining of life-sustaining ecologies by global capitalism. Metabolic rift accounts for how productivism and supporting consumer cultures in the service of capital accumulation disrupts life-affirming natural cycles, undermining the interdependence of social and natural processes, detaching human society from ecological sustainability. The argument informing my research is that metabolic rift manifests also as epidemiological rift. This denotes the negative consequences of metabolic rift on human health worldwide, in the sense that epidemics are also generated by ecological harms stemming from intensifying corporate exploitation of nature in the service of accumulation logics. Capitalist internationalization facilitates zoonotic accelerationism (i.e. increased rates of emergence of zoonotic diseases) owing to undermining of ecosystems from increasing capitalist extraction. The globalised economy of neoliberal capitalism – including large-scale industrialized farming, just-in-time production, instantaneous global supply chains, colonization of wildlands, hyper-urbanization, and consumption-driven lifestyles – accelerates disease emergence and transmission, manifesting epidemiological rift, rendering our contemporary corporate-economic order as a contagion capitalism. In the absence of a challenge to the logics of capitalist accumulation and productivism, this paper concludes, future pandemics will increase in frequency, manifest greater public health risks, and be harder to contain. Tackling zoonotic accelerationism and epidemiological rift thus depends on global policy responses that are not simply technocratic as they are presently under neoliberal modes of governance.
Authors:
Sean Creaven, University of the West of England, United Kingdom
About the Presenter(s)
Dr Sean Creaven is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at the University of the West of England (UK) where he has been based since 2003 .
Additional website of interest
https://people.uwe.ac.uk/Person/SeanCreaven
See this presentation on the full schedule – Wednesday Schedule
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