Acknowledging the agencies of others as an epistemic practice : an example from baking

Abstract

This paper employs the first author’s baking practice as both the focus and the medium of research. Panicuocoli, a commercial sourdough bakery run from 2020 to 2024, allowed us to investigate how knowledge emerged through collective acts of making, in which human practitioners became entangled with other-than-human agencies to co-produce bread. The practice embraced the inherent variabilities of local agricultural cycles and their products, leading the research to operate across multiple scales and temporalities. Through different sources of documentation derived from this practice, we employ the complex, unstable, and unpredictable space where the practitioner-researcher worked as a means to transcend maker-material conversations and accommodate the evolving needs and circumstances of human and non-human actors alike. As a result, this practice-led study emphasises the epistemic dimension of acknowledging the agency of others, where knowledge is co-produced in ways that transcend human temporality, understanding, and intelligibility.