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- Convenors:
-
Ellis Kokko
(University of Edinburgh)
Christina Chalache (University of St Andrews)
Chandreyee Goswami (University of Edinburgh)
Nicole Anderson (University of Edinburgh)
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- Formats:
- Roundtable
Short Abstract
This roundtable explores notions of longing as a complex relational force, particularly within contexts marked by violence, trauma and polarization. We ask, how can forms of longing, desire, and speculative thinking regenerate anthropological praxis and political possibilities?
Long Abstract
This roundtable explores notions of longing as a complex relational force, particularly within contexts marked by violence, trauma and polarization. Instead of centring “damage centred” research practices and agendas (Tuck, 2009), it examines how forms of longing, desire, and speculative thinking can regenerate anthropological praxis and political possibilities.
This roundtable positions longing as a generative and future-oriented modality. Longing is generative of alternative possibilities of living that go beyond the hegemonic binary of subjects marked by either ‘happiness’ or ‘victimhood’. It is precisely this affective duality that longing draws its power from. It illuminates those conditions and structures of violence that power seeks to keep hidden. Yet, it simultaneously makes these conditions redundant through articulating a shared desire for the otherwise, offering a glimpse of what the not-there-yet feels like. Longing, however, does not offer a clear blueprint for political practice – rather, it resides in the moments when our desires escape control and refuse to be assimilated in the world-as-it-is.
We are particularly interested in papers that approach longing through decolonial and queer lens, exploring its potential for disrupting dominant structures of power such as cis-hetero-patriarchy, racial capitalism, and colonial practices. Contributors may address questions such as: How does desire persist under conditions of profound suffering without being consumed by it? How is longing imbued with different and at times opposing emotions, such as envy and empathy? What does longing ‘do’ on the field and as part of ‘researching otherwise’? How do we write about longing academically without losing its affective potential?
The roundtable will take the form of a discussion and an experimental workshop where participants are asked to reflect on their own relationship with longing and its many possibilities. We particularly invite contributions that engage with creative or multimodal methods to ‘think and feel’ with longing.
Accepted contributions
Session 1Contribution short abstract
This contribution explores LGBTQ+ be/longings in the Balkans as spatial, relational and imaginative projects characterized by degrees of ambivalence, hope(fulness/lessness) and ‘future nostalgia’, focusing on the role of hope, disappointment, trust, and responsiveness as crucial affective practices.
Contribution long abstract
This contribution departs from Aimee Carrillo Rowe’s (2008) provocative reverse interpellation to ‘be’ ‘longing’, a call which draws attention to the political nature of our belongings and co-constitutive nature of our subjecthood and longings. Drawing from Carrillo Rowe’s question, ‘how might our subjects be constituted if we were hailed by the needs and demands, struggles and joys, of those whose lives and loves are excluded from the realm of our affective economies?’ I argue that hope, disappointment, trust, and responsiveness are crucial affective practices in relational projects of be/longing. Relying on twelve months of engaged ethnography and 25 in-depth interviews with LGBTQ+ people in Skopje, Macedonia and Belgrade, Serbia, I explore how LGBTQ+ be/longings in the Balkans are characterized by degrees of ambivalence, hope(fulness/lessness) and ‘future nostalgia’—a longing for the not-there-yet and spatial, relational, and imaginative movements to and from. Be/longings in these two cities are tempered by the complex entanglements of national, transnational, EU and European LGBTQ+ politics. These entanglements generate forms of activism and space-making which frequently fail to meet the myriad expectations of LGBTQ+ people for a ‘better life’, yet it is exactly in this space of ‘hope in the face of heartbreak’ (Muñoz 2009) that the political potentialities of relational ‘being’ ‘longing’ emerge.
Carrillo Rowe, A. (2008). Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Contribution short abstract
This contribution argues that the study of ‘sexilio’ and other queer mobilities must be conceived of and oriented from the perspective of desire and longing, thus changing not only what we research and theorise about, but also how we do it in terms of epistemology and methodology.
Contribution long abstract
‘Sexilio’ has become an increasingly frequent term in Spain’s queer politics and studies, a travelling concept that is used to refer to migration linked to sexual orientation and gender identity and expression. Drawing from Manuel Guzmán’s (1997) seminal work on Puerto Rican queer men in New York City, this term has expanded in geographical contexts and theoretical scope, experiencing three decades of transformations as it has been used in cultural analyses of Latin American diasporas. More recently, this concept has morphed and adapted into the specificities of Spain’s politics, thus intersecting with preexisting frameworks focused on rural flight and territorial inequalities faced by left-behind places.
This contribution draws from both theoretical and empirical work on ‘sexilio’ in Spain to argue for the need to incorporate longing and desire in its discussions and research. Whereas most existing studies have focused on actually existing migratory pathways, this contribution posits that ‘sexilio’, as any form of mobility, must be understood from the perspective of desire, longing, and the assessment and comparison of places, communities, and life projects. Besides incorporating desire and longing into the concept of ‘sexilio’ per se, this contribution focuses on the impact and relevance of this shift in terms of epistemology and methodology. How do we research mobilities while focusing on desire? How do we intertwine the longing for alternatives while considering the actual changes and trajectories? How do we expand the study of ‘sexilio’ without losing sight of the actual lives and experiences of its protagonists?
Contribution short abstract
This paper examines trans mother–daughter relationships in Turkey as sites where longing becomes a practice of endurance. Through temporal and linguistic play, trans women rework kinship, memory, and continuity, imagining other ways of belonging beyond cis-hetero-patrilineal family norms.
Contribution long abstract
This paper approaches longing not as lack or deferred fulfillment, but as a generative practice that unfolds through trans women’s everyday negotiations with time, language, and kinship in Turkey. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with trans women in Istanbul, I focus on trans mother–daughter relationships: non-biological, matrilineal bonds through which trans women care for, teach, and orient one another across time. These relationships function as sites of memory-making, temporal pedagogy, and survival, enabling trans women to navigate everyday life while collectively reshaping what family, continuity, and care can mean. Centering narratives of trans mothers and trans daughters, I examine how cis-hetero-patrilineal recipes of family, continuity, and propriety are disrupted through alternative matrilineal formations. These relationships are not simply chosen or symbolic; they are actively practiced through temporal and linguistic play—reworking concepts such as birth, growth, generation, and care in ways that make trans lives livable and joyful. Through practices of teaching, waiting, warning, joking, and remembering, trans women cultivate modes of endurance (being long) that exceed survival while refusing the binary of victimhood and happiness. Longing emerges here as a trans-specific orientation toward time: a longing to be and to belong otherwise. This longing is neither purely future-facing nor nostalgic; it circulates through memory, particularly through the shared archives of motherhoods and daughterhoods that trans women assemble together. Attending to these circulations allows us to rethink how memory moves—not as linear transmission, but as a relational practice that creates other ways of imagining belonging and continuity.
Contribution short abstract
In this paper, I am concerned with how we as ethnographers might understand and articulate longing in biomedical science, centring affect in laboratory practice, and in the ways we imagine what science is or could be.
Contribution long abstract
In this paper, I am concerned with how we as ethnographers might understand and articulate longing in biomedical science. Scientific writing is a particularly precise genre which gives the retrospective impression of a highly methodical approach, omitting extraneous details, affective orientations, and experimental failures. But scientific practice is constantly shifting in response to its own successes and failures, to political and commercial interests, to technological capabilities, and to the expertise and interests of its practitioners. In this way, researchers are constantly building and rebuidling possible futures, driven in part by their own desires.
This paper is based on fieldwork conducted with research scientists investigating Huntington’s disease – a debilitating and fatal hereditary neurodegenerative disease, for which there currently exists no treatment or cure. Significantly, many Huntginton’s researchers come from affected families, and/or are at-risk or gene-positive themselves. Because of this, researchers are not only academically interested but highly emotionally invested in research. With constant experimental failure (from small lab experiments to large clinical trials), researchers have to continuously shift their practice and expectations while managing their affective attachment to the work. This creates a complex entanglement of hope, grief, disappointment, suffering, excitement, and longing.
I am therefore interested in two things. One, conceptualising the affective labour of scientific practice as a potential site of longing, requiring both a pragmatic creativity and a general orientation toward hopefulness. And two, asking how anthropologists can (or fail to) responsibly and faithfully articulate the longing(s) of others.
Contribution short abstract
I conceptualise longing as a creative, communal force by reflecting on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with an ecumenical LGBTQ+ congregation based in Metro Manila, Philippines, where congregants celebrate queer longing and sexuality as mutually inclusive to Christian religiosity.
Contribution long abstract
As part of this roundtable, I conceptualise longing as a creative, communal force by reflecting on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with an ecumenical LGBTQ+ congregation based in Metro Manila, Philippines. Congregants’ framing of Jesus Christ as a queer icon and subject of desire is emblematic of various spiritual missions and practices that celebrate queer longing and sexuality as mutually inclusive to Christian religiosity, foregrounding the tenet that God loves them because of their identities as LGBTQ+ people, not in spite of them. Not only does longing here disrupt the oft-conceived nature of the church as elevated and isolated from the messy physicality of being human (and, indeed, queer), it both embraces and transcends antiquated definitions based on bodily desire or unconscious drive; longing can be a resource for affirming faith, for building community, and an agentic subject in its own right. Thus, ‘Queer Jesus’ exemplifies how my interlocutors account for the interplay of multiple, seemingly opposed ideas and influences through and beyond their worship as LGBTQ+ urbanites living amidst the realities of colonially-rooted Christian ideology still embedded within contemporary Filipino national identity and culture. I also discuss the personal impact of this research and its evocation of an embodied empathy that not only infuses my academic work but my own understanding of myself a queer lapsed Catholic, working in tandem with my interlocutors to dispute reductive narratives of ubiquitous queer suffering under religion and homophobic discourses that dismiss queerness as antithetical to Christianity or a Western import and, thus, un-Filipino.