In this episode of Field Notes, host Sam speaks with Dr Emrah Karakuş about queer and trans Kurdish life, intimacy and affect as political terrains, and the ethical stakes of ethnographic research. From a working-class Kurdish background to an interdisciplinary anthropological journey, Dr Karakuş reflects on how care, struggle, obligation, and belonging shape both scholarship and lived experience.

The conversation explores the Kurdish concept of bedel—the cost, sacrifice, and responsibility carried in collective struggle—and asks what it reveals about queer and trans lives, political community, and the meaning of freedom. The episode also touches on fugitive ethnography, visibility and danger, and what it means to treat Kurdish histories and concepts not just as subjects of study, but as theory. ...