Jake Fleming Awarded NSF Grant

PhD candidate, Jake Fleming, was recently awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for his dissertation research.
Research Summary: Property is central to the interactions of humans and nonhumans, but scholarship on property tends to be strongly anthropocentric: property is a relationship among people about a thing. Most property work represents nonhumans as passive and subordinate, to be shuffled among human owners for better or worse. But people are not so clearly in control of property regimes, nor are people and things so easily separated as this schema suggests. The objective of this project is a posthumanist analysis of property in the world's largest walnut-fruit forest, which grows in southern Kyrgyzstan. The trees of this forest - walnut, apple, plum, cherry, pear - grow in untended profusion in some places, but, through the horticultural practice of grafting, can be transformed into the dependable inhabitants we find in gardens and orchards around the temperate world. Human labor since the 1930s has scattered thousands of grafted trees throughout the forest, where they bear bigger, tastier, more valuable fruit than their ungrafted neighbors. Read more...