Jessica Croteau: For a Fermented, Fugitive, and Earthborn(e) Myth of Democracy
Friday | June 20, 2025 | 9:30-10:15
Lounge in the University Library, Steubenstraße 6, 99423 Weimar
Abstract:
This article proposes fermentation as both metaphor and method for reimagining democracy in ecological terms. Building on Earthborn Democracy’s insistence that political life must be attuned to interspecies entanglement and new myths, it argues that fermentation—characterized by decay, transformation, and collaboration across difference—offers a mythic and material framework for democratic life. Drawing on feminist fermentation practices and theoretical engagements with Sheldon Wolin’s concept of fugitive democracy, the article explores how fermentation unsettles dominant political imaginaries of stability, purity, and boundedness. In doing so, it supplements existing accounts of democratic natality with an equally vital politics of decomposition. Fermentation becomes a democratic pedagogy through which humans and more-than-humans co-create conditions for collective flourishing. Ultimately, the article invites a re-storying of democracy through decay, arguing that decomposition is not the death of political life, but its ferment.