‘It’s all about hazelnuts’: feminist political ecology of nut collecting in the Black Sea region of Türkiye

Despite women’s prominent role in agriculture, their experiences and relationships with the land are often framed through essentialist binaries that cast women as caring, and men as economically pragmatic, which obscure the intertwined nature of care and productivity. Drawing on feminist political ecology (FPE), gender and land tenure scholarship, and feminist ethics of care, we examine intergenerational women’s engagement with hazelnut farming in Türkiye’s Eastern Black Sea region. Based on a harvest-season feminist event ethnography within a four-generation hazelnut-farming family in Ordu, we trace how women’s affective, sensory, and embodied connections to the land are inseparable from strategic economic practices shaped by a neoliberalized hazelnut market. We argue that while these women mobilize cultural knowledge, care practices, and more-than-human relations, they do so in ways deeply informed by political-economic constraints and livelihood imperatives. This challenges ecofeminist-leaning framings that position care and productivity in opposition, offering instead a nuanced account of how gendered agricultural knowledge systems integrate both. Our findings contribute to FPE debates on essentialism, commercialization of agriculture, and intergenerational rural change in the context of gendered agricultural labor. We advance feminist ethnography as a generative approach for critical feminist and environmental psychology, where ethnographic engagement with human-environment relations remains peripheral.