Senior Research Seminar with Dr Ekin Kurtiç (University of Cambridge)

Dr Ekin Kurtiç (University of Cambridge)

This talk explores the environmental salvage projects undertaken in the frontier landscapes of northeastern Turkey by focusing on political and technoscientific actors who design and implement them. In 2012, Turkey’s first project to salvage rare and endemic plants before their submergence in a dam reservoir was implemented in the Çoruh Valley. This was the first instance of resettlement and restoration efforts associated with large dams to encompass plant life. A few years later, when another dam upstream was to be built in the same valley, fruit trees and fertile soil were designated as valuable ecologies to be salvaged. My ethnographic examination of these state-led projects reveals the inextricable relationship between ruination and restoration, highlighting the central role of the state officials and experts. Through these salvage projects, they cast the soon-to-happen submergence as an “inevitable” process while enacting what I term “movable nature” to make ecological life possible in the aftermath of ruination. Making nature movable, ostensibly presented as a means to mitigate environmental damage, constitutes a salvage practice inextricably linked with ruination.

Ekin Kurtiç is an Assistant Professor of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. Ekin Kurtiç is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research intersects political anthropology, materiality and infrastructure studies, political ecology, and environmental history. Her work focuses on the role of infrastructure and ecology in the making of state power, techno-environmental expertise, and rural futures. She has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Çoruh Basin in northeastern Turkey to critically examine state-led projects of restoring and salvaging nature in the process of large dam building. Drawing on this research, she is currently writing a book manuscript entitled Sedimented Landscapes: Building Dams, Restoring Ecologies. She has recently embarked on a new research project on militarized ecologies, particularly focusing on the Turkish military's role in afforestation and tree planting practices. Her work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Environment and Planning D, and Middle East Research and Information Project. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming book volume "Material Politics in Turkey: Infrastructure, Science, and Expertise.