“Love is calling”: Academic friendship and international research collaboration amid a global pandemic

In this intervention we desire to document and celebrate our own international research collaboration as an intimate long-distance relationship that sustains us amid a global pandemic of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. We share “love letter” poems that we wrote to each other, in response to a poem by Yayoi Kusama titled “Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears,” incorporated into her mirror room installation “Love is Calling.” In our discussion we reflect upon the emotional connections that sustain academic researchers, particularly those relationships that extend beyond national boundaries and conventional heteronormative expectations.