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Paper short abstract:

This paper looks into the relations Turkish migrants living in Germany have with their house and garden plants and it traces the role of intimate human-plant relationships in migrants’ home-making in their newly settled land. Home, here, appears as a multispecies constellation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper finds inspiration in approaching the home as a constellation, especially for the people who have histories of migration, ie. as the location of day-to-day care activities, the sites of memories and longings, and as the sociopolitical entity that situates them within legislation and norms (Fabos and Brun 2015). It then argues that home-making, in all three senses, is never an individual or a single-species activity; it is performed and experienced in cooperation with the living beings other than the human. Based on my DFG funded ethnographic research on the relations Turkish migrants living in Germany have with their house and garden plants, it traces the role of intimate human-plant relationships in migrants’ senses of feeling at home in their newly settled land. These relationships include elements of transborder traffic in plants, joint struggles of climactic adaptation, strong emotional attachments, identifications, nostalgic yearnings, attentive care, as well as pragmatic, utilitarian and purely aesthetic engagements. Each one of these elements have strong implications for the three dimensions of home-making: they instantiate hands on care, involve invocations of memories and require negotiations with authorities. Alongside the materialities of plant presence in migrant lives, different temporalities—circadian rhythms, seasonal changes, growth and reaction times, life spans—of human migrants and their plant companions add a second level of analysis that affect this constellation in overt and subtle ways and address the question of uncertainty in migrant lives.