Making Kin with Trees

This book analyzes how trees act as mediators of interspecies relationships in popular science writing and creative nonfiction. Making Kin with Trees argues that trees emerge as agents of “arboreal poetics” shaping not only fictional but also material interactions. Following how speculative care practices infuse scientific and poetic texts, formatting practices of reading, sensing, knowing, and communicating (with) trees while affirming both cultural and scientific meaning making processes. This book shows how arboreal thinking connects and might ultimately require breaking down the barrier between fact and fiction, human and plant, onlooker and artwork. This book will be of interest to audiences based in fields including environmental humanities, science and technology studies and ecocriticism, and everyone engaged in science communication and interested in the relationship between scientific fact and narrative.

Solvejg Nitzke is interim professor of comparative literature at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Her research focuses on the production of knowledge under precarious circumstances. She publishes on science fiction, catastrophes, climate change and literary and cultural plant studies.