This article examines Looping Futures Lost and Found (LFLF), a collaborative sound work developed at Malmö University's Medea Lab remixing audio from NASA's Voyager Golden Record alongside newly recorded expressions of regret gathered during a participatory workshop. Originally created as part of the multimedia installation Tender Time for the 2023 Time Space Existence exhibition in Venice, the work interrogates the Golden Record's idealised representation of humanity by inviting in the absences, vulnerabilities, and hauntings excluded from its planetary archive. Drawing on Derrida's hauntology and Bourriaud's relational aesthetics, we argue that regret functions as a compositional method and a temporal disruption, summoning unrealised futures, unresolved pasts, and the spectral traces of voices omitted from dominant narratives of culture and progress. Through looping, sampling, analogue degradation, live remixing, and collaborative performance, LFLF stages a sonic encounter between archival optimism and contemporary planetary precarity. The article combines theoretical reflection with first-person compositional accounts to examine how participatory sound practices can cultivate forms of collective witnessing, relational listening, and ethical openness toward the ghosts inhabiting cultural memory. In doing so, we position hauntological remixing not simply as an aesthetic strategy, but as a relational practice for reimagining whose voices are carried into the future.

Lebanon represents an interesting case study of the relationship between art and authoritarianism, as it has never been under the rule of a dictator or even a singular particular party. And although Lebanon did not take part in the Arab uprisings per se, like many urban centres across the region, Beirut has a history of street art that long predates the revolutions. In this chapter, I draw on fieldwork conducted in Beirut from 2009 to 2017 to consider the role of what I will call street writing in demarcating and documenting the spatial boundaries and histories of various publics. Street writing can reveal much about the spatial, political and social histories of Beirut’s myriad publics and public spaces. Where does this writing appear? Who is allowed to write, and what are they allowed to say? Locating street writing in the neighbourhoods and in-between spaces of Beirut, I argue that while such interventions in Lebanon, and especially in Beirut, might be ubiquitous, they are not always democratic nor indicators of intercommunal togetherness. While in some ways they mirror the revolutionary and community-centred ethos of street art related to the Arab revolutions, they also visually mark out different territories and trace the contours of spatially distinct publics that experience various degrees of privilege and poverty, access and denial, and mobility and stasis.

Despite many podcasts that take an oral history format or are about oral history as a method, there is very little research that critically connects podcasting to oral history or theorises about the possibilities of podcasting as an oral history practice. This article draws on recent research that argues for a focus on the work around podcasting praxis as an important site of analysis for understanding the community-building potential of podcasting work, especially in the context of migration and diaspora, where non-Western migrants are often not treated as the authorities of their own (hi)stories. In examining two episodes of Kerning Cultures and drawing on concepts from oral history, I develop the concept of shareable authority, a term that links oral history methods to digital media practice and scope. The article offers a contribution to oral history practice, as it demonstrates numerous methods for making authority more shareable between many collaborators and making the distribution of authority more transparent, both of which have implications for power-sharing and decolonial knowledge production. 

This article explores the intricate dance between desire and distance in ethnographic research and creativepractice, advocating for the inclusion of love letters as a methodological tool for critically articulatingindividual and collective desires. Grounded in the authors’ experiences at a workshop held during the 2023PARSE conference, the text delves into the genealogy of desire in research, situating love letters within aframework of intimacy and vulnerability. Drawing on diverse academic backgrounds, the authors reflect onthe intersections of personal and professional realms, emphasizing the ethical imperative of acknowledgingresearchers’ subjective experiences. Through a deep dive into the workshop’s planning process and itsenactment, the article elucidates the transformative potential of love letters as a means of fosteringconnection and understanding within academic and creative communities. This article invites readers toreconsider traditional research methodologies and embrace the tender work of love letter writing in theirown practice.

Scholarly work addressing art and migration has clustered around certain themes: art as therapy, art as expression of identity and memory, art as political mobilization, and art as integration. Similarly, scholars have noted the significance of tattoo art in terms of embodied identity and reclaiming the self after trauma. The overlap between these literatures remains a largely unexplored area of inquiry. This article examines tattooing as an everyday artistic practice in a refugee’s post-migration life. Through an ethnographic case study focusing on Kash, an Iranian man who sought asylum in Sweden, I theorize tattooing as intercultural bridgework (Anzaldúa 2002) functioning in three ways: self-expression, a mode of social integration, and ultimately a transferable skill. This article argues for considering tattoo art as a sustainable (meaning, something that can sustain the artist) art form in the post-migration context. A focus on tattooing as a refugee/migrant practice presents a novel contribution to work on migration and art and allows for an examination of the embodied intersections of expression and integration outside the realm of project-based research.

Working at the intersection of migration studies and radio studies, we interrogate podcasting’s potential as a practice-based activist research method. This article documents podcasting’s role in an ethnographic project conducted together with Konstkupan (The Art Hive), a migrant-focused community arts space in Malmö, Sweden. We argue that the value of podcasting as a practice-based research method exists in its potential to function as a boundary object. Boundary objects are technologies and processes bridging social worlds and providing sites of communication and translation between groups. Challenging narratives that detect a decline in podcasting’s radical potential, we argue that as a boundary object, podcasting’s political significance continues in how it convenes small, diverse, but attentive ‘listening publics’. A boundary object does not demand consensus on the meanings or representations it produces, affording space for both the synchrony and dissonance of narratives produced by migrants.

‘Conviviality’ conveys a deep concern with how we understand modes of human connection and possesses a renewed charge in the context of current migration. Within the extant literature, however, there exists little thinking on the methodological possibilities of conviviality: What can conviviality do , or rather, what can researchers do with it in efforts to understand the connections between media, mediation, and migration? How can researchers across disciplines do conviviality as part of an interventionist research praxis? In this chapter, I draw on a research project in which conviviality becomes a prism to understand media practices related to migration and refugees, and I discuss how the concept is best appropriated as a methodological tool in research designs informing current and future activist-based studies.