Carna Brkovic

Montenegrin LGBTIQ activists often claim that freedom is fundamentally shared, echoing the global activist idea that ‘No one is free unless we are all free’. The collaborative research project ‘Shared Freedom’ poses two kinds of questions stemming from this claim.

First, it asks what this idea of freedom as shared can contribute to the anthropological thinking about freedom and morality. Second, Shared Freedom looks at how LGBTIQ activists can make use of anthropological thinking on freedom in order to advance their socio-political project of the liberation of LGBTIQ people.

Shared Freedom presents a collaborative ethnographic study of two instances of collective moral deliberation. One instance is grassroots queer activism where participants reach their decisions through collective deliberation and consensus. Another one takes place during the post-coming out period in the families of LGBTIQ people, when their parents and siblings often turn to psychiatrists, fortune tellers, and other LGBTIQ parents to seek interpretative frameworks that would help them orient themselves in a new and morally demanding situation.

Shared Freedom hopes to offer an ethnographically grounded theorization of how freedom is understood, claimed, and pursued through collective moral deliberation among differently positioned people in everyday life.