Shifting landscapes of human-plant co-mobilities between Europe and Asia (PLANTH)
Funding Scheme: Leibniz Collaborative Excellence Grant 2025
Principal Investigator: Hilal Alkan
Collaboration partner: Leibniz-Zentrum für Agrarlandschaftsforschung (ZALF)
Duration: 2026-2029
The Leibniz Collaborative Excellence project PLANTH, traces human-plant co-mobilities and asks how these co-mobilities change and shape landscapes in several interconnected sites in Europe and Asia: between Turkey and Bulgaria, Italy and Bangladesh, and Syria, Iraq and Germany.
PLANTH challenges the human-centric paradigm of migration and mobility studies by foregrounding the role played by human–nonhuman relations in creating new livelihoods and ‘making place’ in contexts of migration. The project focuses on plants as mobility companions, as temporal anchors to/in pre- and post-migration lives, and as both care charges and resources throughout migration. By bringing together two Leibniz research institutes, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) and Leibniz-Zentrum für Agrarlandschaftsforschung (ZALF), and expertise from three European universities, Wageningen University (Netherlands), Ca’Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and Cardiff University (UK), it fosters synergies between spatial, agricultural and ethnobotanical research and historical and anthropological studies of migration and translocality.