Paper short abstract:

This is a participatory troubleshooting session that invites people to bring stories, artifacts (within reason), or documentation about ferments that have gone awry. What happens when undesirable growth or unintended circumstances get the best of us and our ferments? What constitutes failure in these settings?

Paper long abstract:

This is a participatory troubleshooting session that invites people to bring stories, artifacts (within reason), or documentation about ferments that have gone awry. What happens when undesirable growth or unintended circumstances get the best of us and our ferments? What constitutes failure in these settings? Failure, in this context, becomes fruitful for rupturing ideas of human dominion and offers inroads for better understanding the vitality and agency of nonhuman forces (e.g., microbes, environmental preconditions). By interrogating these ‘failures,’ the session will invite participants to reframe/rethink how biology cannot be predicted or contained. This making/doing session invites participants to reflexively analyze their ferments, while also crowdsourcing ways to recuperate, restart, or repurpose a ferment. Depending on the participants’ interests, potential topics for discussion would build on existing research in multispecies STS, citizen science, and feminist technoscience. The session is intended for people who self-identify as beginners as well as experts in fermentation. It also welcomes those engaged in other lines of microbial inquiry (e.g., composting, marine microbes) or the generally curious. The goal will be to create an environment for sharing by putting into practice academic discussions about knowledge hierarchies, ways of knowing, and situated/embodied knowledges. Participants will be encouraged to bring their experiments, or pictures/stories of them, along with all matters pertaining to “I don't know who to ask this.” This will become a chance to bare all and (in some instances, literally) air out our darkest hindrances.