Hilal Alkan, a researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, will conduct an online research workshop on the topic “Between Metaphors and Ontological Connections: How Turkish Migrants Care for Plants and Make Homes in Germany” on September 30, at 17:00 within the framework of the project “Tbilisi as an Urban Intersection Space” funded by the Doctoral Program of Anthropology and the Rustaveli Foundation.
About the workshop
This talk draws from the research, which looks into the relationship Turkish migrants, from different waves and generations, develop with the plants they grow and care for in Germany, in order to explore the significance of multispecies networks. In the context of migration and displacement, human and plant migrants share the challenges of acclimatization and adaptation in a new environment.
While caring for their plants, migrants slowly settle and turn a foreign place into a home, both for themselves and the plants, which sometimes carry the scents, colors and textures of the home that is left behind.
For Turkish migrants this means transporting seeds, cuttings and plants from one country to another under unusual conditions, which is followed by attentive care to help plants survive.
In the process of caring for their plants and approaching them as companions, migrants find in plants the metaphors relevant to their struggles (rooting, being uprooted, branching, blossoming, etc.), and therefore the reasons to identify with them.
During the workshop, the researcher will try to illustrate how this shuttling between the metaphor and care manifest itself in migrants’ lives, how it creates possibilities and means of reflecting on their transnational condition, all the while opening up a discussion about anthropomorphism and plantification.
About the speaker
Hilal Alkan is a researcher at Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. Her research centers around care and gift practices in various realms of social life. Her recent research is about the caring relations migrants form with the plants they grow and the plants that accompany them in the cities they settle in. Hilal Alkan’s inspiration comes from feminist ethics of care and multi species studies.
Her articles were published in the American Ethnologist, Citizenship Studies, Migration Letters and in other collections. She has also co-edited Urban Neighborhood Formations: Boundaries, Narrations, Intimacies (Routledge, 2020) and The Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary Turkey: Reproduction, Maternity, Sexuality (IB Tauris 2021).
Time: September 30, 17:00
Format: Online, using platform Zoom
To register: ketevan_gurchiani@iliauni.edu.ge or use the permanent link of the seminar.