Dr. Hilal Alkan

Hilal Alkan is an anthropologist working at the intersections of migration, care, and multispecies relations. She has been a researcher at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient and a lecturer at the Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin (ASH) since 2016. Between 2021 and 2025, she was the principal investigator of the DFG funded project “In the Company of Plants: Multispecies Care and Migrant Home-making in Germany”. She was awarded the EUME Fellowship of the Forum Transregionale Studien 2016–2017 and the Georg Forster Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 2017–2020. In 2017, she received the Voltaire Award for Tolerance, International Understanding and Respect for Difference from the University of Potsdam. Her research investigates how care relations affect and are transformed by transnational migration and displacement. For the past five years, her work has focused on human–plant relations and how these unfold through the movement of both people and plants, with particular attention to practices of intimate care.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• Alkan, Hilal and Sandra Calkins, eds. Plant Intimacies: Exploitation, Survival, and Care. Special issue, Social and Cultural Geography 26, no. 9 (2025). https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rscg20/current.
• Alkan, Hilal and Sandra Calkins, eds. Making Place with Plants: Intimacy, Mobility, and Displacement. Special issue, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 43, no. 2 (2025). https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/cja/43/2/cja.43.issue-2.xml.
• Alkan, Hilal. “Plantifying Emplacement: Intimate Care and Human-Plant Relations in Migration”. Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 43, no. 2 (2025). https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/cja/43/2/cja.43.issue-2.xml.
• Alkan, Hilal. Welfare as Gift: Local Charity, Politics of Redistribution and Religion in Turkey. De Gruyter, 2023.
• Alkan, Hilal. “The Gift of Hospitality and (Un)Welcoming Syrian Migrants in Turkey”. American Ethnologist 48 (2021): 180–191.

Hilal Alkan at ZMO

CURE research project

FURTHER CONTRIBUTIONS