Artemia are brine shrimp, tiny aquatic crustaceans that can remain alive for up to two years in the absence of oxygen and at below-freezing temperatures, a capacity scientists describe as cryptobiosis, or “hidden life”. Artemia have been and are used extensively in scientific experimentation, capital accumulation, value creation, and as aquarium feed.
This blog hosts an array of theoretical ideas, field notes, and thoughts by professors and graduate students whose research in one way or another is concerned with the question: how is biological life rendered as capital? We write with multiple spatial, temporal, and species perspectives, and with attention to the ways that histories, spaces and species shape each other and are all at stake in thinking about the formation and workings of economies and life. Artemia are our guides in this maze of histories-spaces-species in economies of life. Arbiters of capital, “significantly unfree partners” in scientific experimentation, including space travel, feeders of multi-species reproductive economies, and capital themselves, Artemia embody the multiple ways life – human and not – animates and fuels economies.