As the ecological crisis continues to deepen, questioning modern modes of thought and action that position humans as separate from and superior to nature has become one of our foremost ethical and political responsibilities. In this seminar, I aim to rethink our relationships with plants by following the posthuman turn. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species, Anna Tsing’s ideas of life in ruins and collaboration for survival, Michael Marder’s notion of plant-thinking, and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s concept of care, I approach plants not merely as economic resources, agricultural products, or commodities, but as agents that live alongside humans, co-create worlds, and make life possible.
This perspective moves beyond the nature–culture divide and anthropocentric thinking by tracing interspecies interdependencies and alternative forms of kinship, while also proposing that such relationships can be reimagined and reinvented when necessary.
Focusing on my doctoral research, a multispecies ethnography of tea cultivation in Turkey’s Eastern Black Sea region, I will discuss what I call companion plants and patchy collaboration through the stories of tea plants, alder trees, ferns, and maize. Despite the ecological and social destruction brought about by tea cultivation, I argue that different plant species continue to sustain one another by forming collaborative networks at the margins and within sites of devastation. In doing so, I seek to move beyond approaches that commodify plants and instead explore the possibilities of understanding them as companion species and as constitutive elements of relationships based on gift-giving and care.
Ayça Yüksel received her B.A. in Sociology from Istanbul University and her M.A. in Sociology from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University with the thesis The Struggle for Common Space in the Urban Environment: The Case of Haydarpaşa Railway Station. She completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Sociology at the same university with the dissertation The Possibilities of Interspecies Collaboration Amid the Destruction Caused by Tea Cultivation in Hopa. Between 2012 and 2013, she was a visiting student at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.
In 2021, she edited The Haydarpaşa Book: City, Space, Struggle, published by Kadıköy Municipality Cultural Publications. Yüksel is a founding member of the Association for Memory and Cultural Sociology Studies (BEKS). Her research focuses on urban sociology, critical plant studies, posthuman approaches, feminist political ecology, gender, social movements, and interspecies commons.
