Desire On The Line: Oral Histories of Absence and Return is a multimodal thesis on how people sustain attachment when bodies cannot be together. It centers on Humsafar, a listening website of family voice notes and calls between my father in Karachi, our family cook in Feni, and me in New York, alongside a phone-booth installation that invited visitors to “invite the one you cannot touch.” I propose desire-based listening as a feminist oral-history method that treats hesitations, counting, repairs, and sound textures as evidence of social life. An analytic triad—tempo, threshold, tether—traces how speakers keep time with one another, cross infrastructural edges (kitchens, borders, devices), and address the distant or dead into the second-person “you.” Rather than documenting loss alone, the thesis maps the small routes by which speech makes absence inhabitable and return imaginable.
Ekta Shaikh is a Pakistani oral historian and interdisciplinary researcher working across feminist anthropology, gender studies, and public/digital humanities. Her work explores how women navigate space, memory, and everyday violence across Karachi and New York, with particular attention to domestic life, transit, and the infrastructures that shape intimacy and belonging. She experiments with form—oral history as sound, installation, and interactive archive—building participatory projects that invite publics into practices of listening, address, and care. Going forward, she will continue developing collaborative oral history work with women across both cities, expanding her multimodal methods and public-facing research practice.