Ferment as Method: Creating the Conditions for Transformative Relations - III

Abstract

Where the 2020 pandemic prompted new desires for hyper-sterile environments, it also sparked interest in the microbe-rich world of fermentation. Home kitchens, wiped clean with bleach and sanitizer, produced effervescent brews, doubling sourdoughs, and funky sauerkrauts. Fermentation provided a collaborative ‘contamination’ (Tsing 2015) that prompted experimentation, care, and new forms of sustenance amid loss, isolation, and precarity. In fermentation microbes transform their substrates and each other into new forms, textures, flavors, aromas, and matters. Practicing fermentation invites open-ended collaboration across species boundaries; requiring attention (when is it ferment and when is it rot?), care (who needs more water, more food, more salt?), and a willingness for all parties to be changed by the process (no one is coming out the same as they went in) (Fournier 2020, Maroney 2018, Villalba 2019).

Fermentation is more than a material process; ideas, people, and movements ferment. The concept offers a rich metaphor that captures the energy of activists, and transformative potential at any scale. Since ferments can also turn sour, go awry, become toxic, and foment violence and trouble, as a metaphor for responsible change, it contains its own limits.

This panel invites participants to ferment as a method in their STS projects. How does thinking with fermentation foreground new configurations of interdependence and care in our work? How might a slower process that allows for unexpected results affect our means of producing knowledge? Might such a method, emergent in the becoming together, open up space to foster ‘good’ relations or challenge ‘bad’ ones?

Chair

• Susannah Chapman, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland

Individual Presentations

• Cross-Contaminations: Fermenting Food and Relations in Northern Italy - Janita Van Dyk, University of Toronto

• Fermentation as a method for doing otherwise - Salla Sariola, University of Helsinki

• Interplanetary Fermentation - Maggie Coblentz, Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT)

• Productive Rot: Summoning Natural Processes for Other-than-natural Ends. - Xan Sarah Chacko, Wellesley College

Session Organizer

• Xan Sarah Chacko, Wellesley College