I am a first year phD student in the Anthropology department at Rice. I research in the intersections of political science, cultural studies and more-than-human anthropology. In my M.A. thesis I have theorized a more-than-human witnessing, which I refer to as wit(h)nessing, in order to understand multi-species entanglements and how the living witnesses to “unthinkable catastrophes” such as environmental catastrophe. Theory of wit(h)nessing explores the characteristics of catastrophe and argues that a more-than-human witnessing should be able to understand the overlapping histories of violence and trauma through political ontology. I believe that there is a promise in this process wit(h)nessing and its more-than-human politics and ethics.

As a continuation of this thesis, I want to understand how honeybees and beekeepers of the Turkey-Armenian borderland wit(h)ness to overlapping violent histories of climate, dispossession and genocide. In their shared vulnerability and suffering, I believe that I can find honeybees and beekeepers’ ways of becoming with each other on the both sides of a sealed borderland. Although I aim to perpetuate variety of methods for documenting such more-than-human withnessings in my years at Rice as a phD student, I am finding ways to do “api-ethnography” where I also attend hive inspections to share such vulnerabilities and sufferings both with the honeybees and their keepers through my own sensory observations and disconcertments.