In January 2026, Laurens Schlicht spoke with CURE fellow Hilal Alkan. Alkan was the principal investigator of the DFG project “In the Company of Plants: Multispecies Care and Migrant Home-Making in Germany”, which was conducted at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient from 2021 to 2025. The project explored the complex relationships that have evolved between humans and plants in contexts of migration and displacEpiement. To investigate these relationships, Hilal Alkan carried out fieldwork in the Berlin-Brandenburg region and interviewed people who grew plants or migrated together with their plants.
The conversation centres on the multifaceted relations of care that connect humans and plants in contexts of migration. Hilal Alkan is particularly interested in practices of “emplacement” – that is, how people situate themselves in new places and come to feel at home. However, this process of coming to feel at home does not concern only relationships between people, but also relationships with other species with whom humans live. Plants thus appear not merely as decorative background elements, but as active companions in migration, memory, and belonging. As part of her research, Hilal Alkan visited people in their homes and gardens and invited them to show her their plants. Her interlocutors spoke about where the plants came from, how they were cared for, and what stories and memories were connected to them. In the conversation, Hilal Alkan also describes this method as “plant-prompted life story collection”: plants become the starting point for biographical narratives. At the same time, the project also developed into an auto-ethnographic investigation. Some interlocutors gave her seedlings, which she continued to care for herself. She drew plants, observed their development, and asked what kinds of needs and preferences plants themselves might have.
The research began during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period in which plants became increasingly prominent in public discourse and turned into important companions of domestic life for many people. The conversation takes up this constellation and asks how plants shape ideas of proximity, care, and home.
Another focus lies in a shift in the ways people describe themselves. People frequently use plant metaphors when speaking about migration and belonging: they talk, for example, about where their roots lie or about having been uprooted. Such ideas can also become entangled with nationalist or chauvinist notions. Hilal Alkan, by contrast, demonstrates how open and multivalent the metaphor of roots can be. Many of her interlocutors described their roots as plural and mobile – roots can exist in several places at once and express different forms of belonging. Finally, the episode also discusses how one might decentre a worldview that fundamentally places humans at its core. Looking at plants opens up alternative perspectives on care, coexistence, and relationality. In this context, Hilal Alkan speaks about “phytomorphism” as a double movement countering a purely anthropomorphic view of the world.
SHOWNOTES
The following research projects are mentioned in this episode:
In the Company of Plants: Multispecies Care and Migrant Home-Making in Germany (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, project led by Hilal Alkan, 2021–2025) (https://www.zmo.de/en/research/mainresearchprogram/environment-and-justice/company-of-plants)
The following persons are mentioned in this episode:
Henk Wildschut (Dutch photographer, b. 1967, https://henkwildschut.com/)
Prince Charles (now King Charles III, b. 1948)
The following concepts are mentioned in this episode:
Yerini sevmek – Turkish for “finding/loving/liking one’s own place”
Great Chain of Being (The widespread idea, prevalent from antiquity through the eighteenth century, that all entities, from the lowest to the highest, are arranged in a hierarchical chain of being, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being)
Phytomorphism (in the context of this episode: the practice of describing human beings through plant features)
Related publications by Hilal Alkan:
Alkan, Hilal and Sandra Calkins, eds. “Plant Intimacies: Exploitation, Survival, and Care”. Special issue, Social and Cultural Geography 26, no. 9 (2025).
Alkan, Hilal and Sandra Calkins, eds. “Making Place with Plants: Intimacy, Mobility, and Displacement”. Special issue, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 43, no. 2 (2025).
Alkan, Hilal. “Plantifying Emplacement: Intimate Care and Human-Plant Relations in Migration”. Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 43, no. 2 (2025). https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2025.430203.
Alkan, Hilal. Welfare as Gift: Local Charity, Politics of Redistribution and Religion in Turkey. De Gruyter, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111156552.
Alkan, Hilal. “The Gift of Hospitality and (Un)Welcoming Syrian Migrants in Turkey”. American Ethnologist 48 (2021): 180–191. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13012.