The Fermentation Orientation: Cultivating a Microbial Methodology of Creative Inquiry

How is sauerkraut like a poem? As human understanding of microbes deepen, humans find themselves embedded in a microbial matrix. I extend privileging this ecocultural embeddedness with microbes and the deep ecological process of fermentation by microbes to explore creative inquiry. This work offers two primary outcomes. First, I offer an articulation of proposed methods for use within a posthumanism as research methodology, including methods for working with nonhuman research participants, especially microbial ones. These proposed methods include touching grass, eco-listening, and guthinking as well as expansions of qualitative research methods to encompass nonhuman participants, especially in interviewing and ontological shifts. Second, I present a creative fermented framework for understanding creative inquiry as embedded in understandings of a microbial matrix and metaphorical fermentation practices. Creative fermented framework concepts include incubation, environmental input, and composting, with specific proposed methods ranging from creative procrastination to feeding the starter to composting turds. As a whole, I offer the fermentation orientation, which is a worldview of attending to microbes and fermentation processes as they relate to processes of inquiry, epistemology, and methodology.