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?
Citations
Lauren Fournier, “Fermenting Feminism as Methodology and Metaphor: Approaching Transnational Feminist Practices through Microbial Transformation,” Environmental Humanities (2020) 12 (1): 88–112.
Stephanie Maroney, “Sandor Katz and the Possibilities of a Queer Fermentive Praxis,” CuiZine (2018) 9 (2): doi.org/10.7202/1055217ar 
Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015
Mercedes Villalba, Manifiesto Ferviente. Cali, Colombia: Calypso Press, 2019.