Singing with invisible Worlds: Fermenting Sake on Microbial Time

Join us on October 2 for the first talk of the Speculative Life Speaker Series 2026/27 featuring alumna Maya Hey. She will talk about her new book and her journey from her doctoral studies at Concordia to publishing a book! There will also be time and space to ask Maya any questions you may have about her work.

Within us and around us, microbes are everywhere, constantly reshaping what it means to be human as we interact with them — least of which through foods made and consumed. Singing with Invisible Worlds theorizes human–microbe relationships through a rare ethnographic account of the fermentation process at the 350-year-old Terada Honke, one of only two natural sake breweries in Japan. Painting a vivid picture of how sake brewers collaborate with bacteria, molds, and yeasts, Dr. Maya Hey reveals that ambient microbes are not controlled but courted, cultivated, and deliberately choreographed. In documenting these remarkable practices, the book offers an intimate, situated understanding of how we can come to know and live with microbial life, with implications for feminist theory, science and technology studies, and multispecies ethnography. Unsettling simplistic notions of “good” or “bad” microbes, it presents a compelling vision for planetary coexistence—one that starts not with grand solutions but with small, rhythmic acts of microscopic attunement.

Maya Eva Hey is a Concordia alumna and current postdoctoral researcher at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory based in Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology and a core member of the Centre for the Social Study of Microbes in Helsinki. She holds degrees in nutrition, food studies, and communication studies.