PhD project 2021-2029 (P/T) In-progress | Monash University
Fermentation as teacher: agitating the relations among pedagogy x art x curatorial work

This PhD presents a practice-led, post-qualitative research project that rearticulates the relations among pedagogy x art x the curatorial within the Asia-Pacific region. Addressing the continued dominance of Euro-American theory and its potential to produce colonising effects when transposed across contexts (Soon, 2016), the study responds to a critical gap in the literature: the lack of situated, relational frameworks that explicitly map how these three fields co-constitute one another in practice.

The research is grounded in Barad’s (2007) ethico-onto-epistemology, which understands ethics, being, and knowing, and understands relations as the very condition through which the world comes into being. It adopts a post-qualitative orientation through St. Pierre (2014, 2015, 2018), by disrupting humanist methodological traditions and refusing binary logics, linear procedures, and extractive approaches to research. It is informed by Haraway’s (1988, 2016) feminist posthumanist thinking, particularly her emphasis on staying with the trouble and positioning knowledges as situated and partial. It is further enlivened by Haraway's commitment to an ongoing practice of becoming-with others, through speculative fabulations and complex worlding projects.

Together, these thinkers are engaged as forms of ‘auntie wisdom’ (2024)—a term borrowed from the South Korean fermentation collective Rice Brewing Sisters Club. Rather than functioning as distant theoretical authorities, they are understood as relational presences that sit alongside the work: holding, guiding, and at times 'troubling' its direction. In this sense, the ‘auntie wisdoms’ operate as a theoretical container, a warm, supportive structure that sustains the research as it ferments and takes shape. Within this formation, fermentation is positioned as a teacher, expressed through the creative praxis M⁵ | Fermentation as: material, metaphor, manners, method-ish, and methodological sensibility. Rather than functioning as a fixed framework, M⁵ operates as a dynamic mode of inquiry that supports processes of becoming-with others, where knowledge is generated through entangled, situated and porous encounters.

The study is enacted through a collaborative, multi-phase research design. First, twenty practitioners termed Bubbles working among pedagogy x art x the curatorial are engaged through semi-structured interviews. Second, a selection of Bubbles are invited to join the voluntary Fizzy Friends research group, gathering online over the course of a year and playing with collective processes that extend the inquiry into pedagogy x art x the curatorial and the exploration of M⁵ as an emergent system. Third, the research culminates in The Gut, a dynamic web-based offering that supports participants to enact pedagogy x art x curatorial work through the construction of personalised web-brews. As a living and adaptable platform, The Gut holds the residue of the Bubbles and Fizzy Friends through fragments, offering a suite of relational and processual propositions that can be assembled and reconfigured by diverse users and carried into diverse pedagogical, artistic, and curatorial contexts, acknowledging the need for situated, context-specific practice.

Across these phases, the research challenges the stratification of pedagogue, artist, and curator as discrete roles and instead proposes an integrated practice and identity. The work recognises that each practitioner adopting this orientation will begin from a situated position, and that these relations and influences are unlikely to be equal, but the study embraces this unevenness as an inherent condition of the practice. Within this coming together, pedagogy operates as a central, activating force, foregrounding collaboration, difference, and productive agitation as essential conditions for purposeful learning. This project contributes an Asia-Pacific-informed methodological and conceptual framework that expands post-qualitative and practice-led research by offering fermentation as a teacher and as a way of thinking, making, and learning with others. It advances an understanding of knowledge as dynamic, embodied, and co-constituted, opening possibilities for more responsive, ecologically conscious, and relational pedagogy x art x curatorial manifestations.