ACADEMIC WRITING | AT A GLANCE
On Microbes in Health/Food Systems
Hey, Maya and Sarah Elton. Forthcoming (in production). “Making Microbes Explicit: Introduction to Microbes, Food, and Food Systems” Gastronomica: journal of food studies 26(1).
Hey, Maya and Erica Zurawski. Forthcoming (in production). “Brokering the gut: microbial decoys in the documentary Hack Your Health.” Humanities and Social Science Communications.
Zurawski, Erica and Maya Hey. (2025). “Gut Healthism: The Penetrating Gaze and Depoliticising Forces of Direct‐to‐Consumer Microbiome Testing Kits” Sociology of Health and Illness 47:e70111.
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9566.70111
Hey, Maya. (2020). “Against Healthist Fermentation: Problematizing the ‘Good’ of Gut Health and Ferments.” Journal of Critical Dietetics 5 (1) 12-22.
DOI: 10.32920/cd.v5i1.1334.
On Food and/as Media, Fermentation, and Multispecies Ethics
Hey, Maya (2025). “Knowing Enough and Space-making for Microbes in Sake Fermentation.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. 11(1).
DOI: 10.17351/ests2023.1547.
Hey, Maya and Eleni Michael. (2025). “A Whole New World of Possibilities”: Koji Uses and Ambiguities on the Global Marketplace.” Food, Culture & Society: an International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 28 (2) 365-386.
DOI: 10.1080/15528014.2024.2447663.
Hey, Maya (2023). “Communicating with the Microbial Other: Reorienting Humans and Microbes in Polylogue.” Global Media Journal: Canadian Edition 15 (1) 11-25.
DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/CXM83.
Hey, Maya (2022). “Symbiosis and the Steward: Reconfiguring Human-Microbe Relations Towards a Story of Conviviality.” Synthesis: Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies 15: 6-28.
DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/PY3GA.
Hey, Maya. (2022). “Fermentation and Delicious / Disgusting Narratives.” In Food in Memory and Imagination: space, place, and taste, ed. Beth Forrest and Greg de St. Maurice, 25-38. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
Hey, Maya. (2022). “Does Eating Natto Make One Japanese?” In Food Studies: Matter, Meaning & Movement, edited by David Szanto, Amanda Di Battista, and Irena Knezevic. Ottawa, ON: Food Studies Press.
DOI: 10.22215/fsmmm/hm20.
Hey, Maya. (2021). “Attunement and Multispecies Communication in Fermentation.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 7 (3) 1-24.
DOI: 10.5206/fpq/2021.3.10846.
Hey, Maya. (2021). “Conspiring to be Convivial: Fermentation and Living with the Microbial Other.” PhD diss. Concordia University.
Hey, Maya. (2020). “In and Of and With and Through, Or How to Make Kin Through Eating.” Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts (E-book 03) 21-29. https://unlikely.net.au/docs/hey.pdf.
Hey, Maya. (2020). “Fermentation and Kitchen/Laboratory Spaces.” In Fermented Landscapes: lively processes of socio-environmental transformation, ed. Colleen C. Myles, 255-272. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Hey, Maya. (2020). “On Performative Food Acts and the Human-Microbe Relationship.” In Conversations with Food, ed. Dorothy Chansky and Sarah W. Tracy, 163-178. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press.
Hey, Maya. (2019). “Fermentation Praxis as Interspecies Communications.” PUBLIC (59) 149-157.
DOI: 10.1386/public.30.59.149_1.
Hey, Maya and Markéta Dolejšová. (2018). “Speculative Fiction as Companion Species in Food Studies Research.” Graduate Journal of Food Studies 5 (2).
DOI: 10.21428/92775833.af03d28b.
Hey, Maya and Alex Ketchum. (2018). “Fermentation as Engagement: on more-than-human connections and materiality.” Cuizine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures 9 (1).
DOI: 10.7202/1052113ar.
Hey, Maya and Alex Ketchum. (2018). “Fermentation as Agitation: transforming how we live together.” Cuizine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures 9 (2).
DOI: 10.7202/1055215ar.
On Trans-Disciplinary Research with/in Science, Technology, and Art
Hey, Maya and Anna Sigrithur. Forthcoming (in production). Sympoiesis: the Ethics and Politics of Making with Microbes. In Feminist Making and Doing, eds. Lauren Guilmette and Ada Jaarsma. Duke University Press.
Hey, Maya. (2024). “Response-Ability Narratives in American Research Labs for Synthetic Biotechnologies.” Journal of Responsible Innovation 11 (1) 2355682.
DOI: 10.1080/23299460.2024.2355682.
Hey, Maya and Erika Szymanski. (2022). “Following the Organism to Map Synthetic Genomics.” Biotechnology Notes (3) 50-53.
DOI: 10.1016/j.biotno.2022.07.001.
Hey, Maya, Emilie St-Hilaire and WhiteFeather Hunter. (2019). “Horizontal Exchange, Relations, and Resistance in Bioart and Practice-Based Research.” Journal international de bioéthique et d’éthique des sciences 30 (4) 69-89.
DOI: 10.3917/jibes.304.0069.
On Education Practices
Hey, Maya. (2023). “Catalysts of Open Education in Colorado: A Qualitative Study of Enabling Forces in OE Momentum.” Journal of Open Education Resources in Higher Education 2(1) 105-127.
DOI: 10.13001/joerhe.v2i1.7651.
Hey, Maya. (2021). “UDL Practices: Contextual Difference and the Difference it Makes.” In Teaching Gradually: practical pedagogy for graduate students by graduate students, ed. Kacie L. Armstrong, Lauren A. Genova, John Wyatt Greenlee, and Derina S. Samuel, 170-176. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.
PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP AND OTHER WRITINGS
The Trouble With Ferments as Medicine
Published in Mold Magazine, Health.Food Series, 2023
The gut microbiome holds us captive to the promise of mind–body balance: take care of your gut/microbes, and your gut/microbes will take care of you. Baked into this axiomatic language are modern logics of choice and control, which could stand to be contested. This article analyzes several exhausted metaphors that tangle together to make ferments into medicine.
LINK TO ARTICLE | Illustration by House of Gül for MOLD Magazine.
fff musings (the abecedary, or ABC book)
an ABC book, 2021
fff’s second edition of musings is an abecedary, or ABC book, with words common to food, feminism, and fermentation. (As a teaser: A is for Archive, B is for Body Odor, C is for Capitali[ism]…) The goal was to find a shared lexicon that connects us as scholars, foodmakers, artists, scientists, and journalists engaging with/in these three domains. With international and cross-sector perspectives, and over 30 contributors, this abecedary has a little bit of everything for the fermentationally-cruious.
LINK TO PUBLICATION | cover design by Eliza Wolfson
Ufufu
Published in Fool Magazine #8, Japan Edition, 2020
A day in the life of winter brewing with Terada Honke, one of only two natural sake breweries in Japan. This article is based on ethnographic research and continued collaboration since January 2019.
From the Frontlines of Fermentation
Published in The New Gastronome, 2019
Dispatches from the frontlines of fermentation with explanations for how Terada Honke brews sake and makes koji. It includes moments that illustrate Terada Honke’s ‘natural’ brewing philosophy.
The Ongoing Work of Feminism and Fermentation
Published on the Public Scholars Blog at Concordia University.
This post deliberately connects the theoretical connections between feminist thought and fermentation praxis.
Microbes: Good or Bad? (Or Neither?)
Published on the Public Scholars Blog at Concordia University.
We may categorically label microbes as one thing (e.g. probiotic/pathogenic), but organizing the world around us into binaries can lead us to more trouble.
Opinion: Romaine lettuce alert shows limits of our power over microbes
An opinion piece published in The Montreal Gazette on November 24, 2018, after another E. coli outbreak in romaine lettuce. I argue that these food recalls are symptomatic of a much larger problem: the myth that we can control microbial life. If we are to address the actual root cause of food alerts and recalls, we need to change the way we think about how we live with microbes in everyday ways.
fff musings
musings is the biennial publication of the working group fff: food, feminism, fermentation. The inaugural edition is a collection of stories with food, feminism, and fermentation written from a diverse range of perspectives, including scholars, activists, artists, and practitioners.
LINK TO PUBLICATION | cover design by Monica Femi Laflamme
Maya Hey 