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Movable Nature: “Greening” Large Dams in Northeastern Turkey - Dr Ekin Kurtiç (Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge)
2026-02-25 16:00 - 18:00 UTC | Small Lecture Theatre, Department of Geography
This presentation will critically examine the incorporation of environmental concerns into the technopolitics of large dams in northeastern Turkey. In the last decade, resettlement and restoration efforts related to infrastructure and extraction projects expanded to encompass plant life. In the Çoruh Basin, where the country’s two highest dams are located, resettlement plans that traditionally focused on local communities and archaeological sites expanded to include plant life as part of a broader trend of “greening” large dams. State-led projects of salvaging and relocating endemic plants, local fruit species, and farming soils produced what I call movable nature. My ethnographic analysis of these projects shows that the governmental practice of making nature movable is a salvage work that moves nature out of the way of infrastructure and extraction projects.
