Caring for more-than-human metabolic health: Self-tracking technologies as tools of calculation and communication in obesity and type 1 diabetes care

This article draws on the findings of ongoing ethnographic research to examine the use of self-tracking devices and the embodiment of numerical data in type 1 diabetes (T1D) and obesity (self)care. We engage the notion of industrial and post-industrial metabolism as proposed by Hannah Landecker (2013) to explore the technologically mediated, more-than-human dynamics of metabolic health. While studies tend to depict self-monitoring devices as reinforcing a rigid, mechanistic, and control-obsessed approach to bodies, we argue that if understood in terms of the post-industrial metabolic framework, they may be seen as tools of communication and regulation rather than control, enabling care for the metabolic processes enacted within extended more-than-human relations and the biosocial environment.