Dr. Jessica Bissett Perea, Assistant Professor of Native American Studies at UC Davis (College of Letters and Sciences) in dialogue with Stephanie Maroney. 

This series brings together coordinators of the DHI transcollege research cluster Radical and Relational Approaches to Fermentation and Food Sovereignty for interdisciplinary dialogue about fermentation science, Indigenous food sovereignty, performance, feminist science studies, and radical/relational approaches to fermentation. We invite participants with interests in these topics from across campus to join the series and build a research community.

This event has passed, view the dialogue on YouTube: https://youtu.be/AzdXgu_RG54

Jessica Bissett Perea is a Dena’ina [Alaska Native] musicologist and assistant professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her research centers critical Native American and Indigenous studies approaches to music, sound, and performance studies; Critical race, Indigeneity, gender, and feminist studies; Arts and activism in North Pacific and Circumpolar Arctic communities; and Relational studies of Indigenous and Black experiences in the Americas. Her first monograph Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska (forthcoming 2021) will appear in the “American Musicspheres” series published by Oxford University Press. In fall 2021 she will co-teach “Radical Storywork: Performing Food Sovereignty through Inuit Fermentation Culture” with Professor Maria Marco, which advances Inuit knowledges and performing arts processes as a means to unsettle and expand dominant modes of knowledge production in food science research.

About the Radical Fermentation Dialogue Series

View the full series description here.

Our fermented food and food sovereignty discourse and praxis are guided by the following questions: What are fermented foods? What is the current state of knowledge about the contents of those foods and their impacts on our diet and health? What is the significance of radical and relational perspectives in food science research? How are Indigenous fermented foods represented across different disciplines and how might we critically address issues such as sub/conscious bias? Whose stories matter and who decides? Instead of proposing singular truths or facts, this cluster invites participants and audiences to consider the existence of multiple simultaneous truths, all of which are culturally constructed, performed, and in some cases politicized and policed.

Each event will feature a presentation of one scholar’s work, followed by a dialogue led by another research cluster member and questions from event participants.