2026 Theses Master's

Desire on the Line: Oral Histories of Absence and Return

Shaikh, Ekta

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.