EDUC 326 - Fermentation and Multispecies Pedagogies

There are a number of biophilic historiographies de-centering human exceptionality and offering alternative renderings of existence and epistemology by bearing witness to the deep cultural and organic symbiosis with other species and matter. Fermentation—as process, art, and metaphor—offers another refractive aperture from which to consider issues at the pressure points of contemporary life. If, as scholars have suggested, fermentation names the transformative action of microorganisms, then, given the historical present and its attendant precarities and violences (e.g., massive economic inequity; neoliberal racial capitalism and necrophilia; climate crises; the return of the not-so-repressed (fascism); and, among others, global pandemics), it’s maybe not surprising that many are turning to it as an ancestral and inherited practice. There are insights to be gained from understanding what fermentation does, how it does it, and why. As calls to transform everything from exploitative/extractive human relations to gut microflora mark both public and private discourse, fermentation offers a refractive lens from which to add to contemporary literature on multispecies ethnographies to regimes of microbiopolitics to theories of Eros and understandings of the state.

Credits: 1.0
Corequisite: None
Prerequisites: None
Major/Minor Restrictions: None
Class Restriction: None
Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents
Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges
Core Component: None

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