Unhoused

Unhoused is a composite fieldwork document—drawn, written, layered—that emerged through collaboration between cartoonist Mana Neyestani and anthropologist Mirco Göpfert. What began as a series of interviews, drawing lessons and message exchanges gradually evolved into something less easily classifiable: a joint attempt to trace how displacement unsettles not only bodies and homes, but also narrative, memory, and authorship itself. The resulting work moves across three interwoven registers. The first is public and discursive: a series of Wikipedia edits that reveal how identity, kinship, and truth claims are rewritten through digital struggle. The second is political and forensic: a report drawn from Neyestani's imprisonment, typed in clipped, compressed form and language. The third is intimate and disoriented: a dream sequence that distills the mood of narrative suspension, doors that open into nowhere, speech that cannot find its place. The three registers are folded together by other forms: a sketch-based dialogue, a reflective monologue, and a glossary that reframes rather than defines. Drawing, marginalia, and typographic shifts are meant to reframe how the piece is read: not as a single narrative, but as a layered encounter. This piece was developed over the course of several years of conversation, sketching, and co-editing between Mana and Mirco, in Paris, Frankfurt and virtually. The report section draws on Mana's own records, reconstructed from memory, personal documents, and an autobiographical comic book (Neyestani, 2012). The dialogue was adapted from chat transcripts and live conversations. The comic sequence was jointly sketched: Mana drew Mirco, and Mirco drew Mana. Drawing and layout choices were shaped in tandem with narrative and ethnographic framing. Figures 1-11 contain the complete work, including conceptual framing, drawn dialogue, report, monologue, glossary, and dream. Each figure corresponds to a full-page layout as finalized by the authors. Grouped loosely by mode and tone: Figures 1 and 2 establish the conceptual frame; Figures 3-6 present, first, a public and then a personal version of who Mana Neyestani is; Figures 7-9 include the report, dialogue, and glossary; and Figures 10 and 11 carry the final sequence. We are deeply grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editorial collective of Anthropology and Humanism for their generous and thoughtful engagement. Their encouragement gave us confidence to take the visual and structural choices of this piece seriously. For assistance in shaping both the questions and the manuscript itself, we thank Sepide Ghorbani for her careful thinking, critical nudges, and steady support. Earlier versions of this work were presented at LMU Munich (on invitation by Eveline Dürr) and at the University of Vienna (on invitation from Tatjana Thelen). We thank both for creating space for this strange material—and the students and colleagues who sat through what must have been a confusing presentation with more generosity than we could have asked for. This research is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, ours only, and they do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. This work is supported by ERC grant 101040059 (NoJoke).