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Paper short abstract

This article proposes designing ethnographic encounters to co-create micro-moments of emotional justice—moments when people feel seen and heard. Such encounters work with emotions and draw on the anthropologist’s emotional positionality as a site of mutual vulnerability.

Paper long abstract

How do we want to practice anthropology in a world that is falling apart? This article proposes the design of ethnographic encounters with a purpose: co-creating micro-moments of emotional justice, understood as the recognition that occurs when people feel seen and heard, both by themselves and by others. Creative forms of expression can cultivate this recognition, opening spaces for new understandings and meanings by research participants and anthropologists alike. Designing ethnographic encounters in this manner offers two twists to the affective turn in anthropology: first working not on, but with the emotions of research participants; second, drawing on the anthropologist’s emotional positionality as the context for mutual vulnerability. For the case of return aspirations amid Syria’s regime change, the article examines the potential of poetic engagements to provide insights into dynamic and relational meaning-making. The article argues that emotional justice can constitute a source of ethnographic authority for anthropologists.