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Create Instructions for Seeing

Session Preparation for February 10, 2026

Last week you walked the campus. You looked at how “the Middle East” appears at FU – in departments, on bulletin boards, in the library, in conversations, in spaces.

And then we asked: What if the category itself is the problem?

You were assigned to take one observation and write it two ways – with the category and without it. Bring both versions to this session. We’ll start there.

But here’s what I want us to do with the rest of our time together:

You’ve spent four months developing a way of seeing. Now teach someone else how to see what you see.


The Task: Create Field Instructions

You’ve learned to notice things that most people walk right past. You’ve developed literacies – ways of reading the city, recognizing patterns, seeing how things work that aren’t supposed to work together.

That knowledge exists in your body, in your attention, in the routes you take and the things you stop to look at.

Your task in preparation of the next session: Distill that embodied knowledge into instructions that someone else could follow.

Not an essay analyzing what you learned. Not a report on what you saw.

Actual instructions. A field guide. A set of directions for a walk or an observation exercise that would teach someone else to see what you’ve learned to see.


What Makes Good Instructions?

Specific enough that someone could actually follow them:

❌ “Go to Neukölln and notice how cultures mix”

✅ “Stand at the corner of Sonnenallee and Weserstraße for 15 minutes. Count how many languages you hear or see, e.g. on shop signs within eyesight. Then walk into the closest grocery store and count again – how many languages on products, on price signs, spoken by customers and staff? What’s the relationship between outside visibility and inside operation?”

Open enough that the person discovers something rather than just confirming what you tell them:

❌ “You’ll see that Turkish and Arabic businesses coexist”

✅ “Notice which shops have signs in multiple languages and which have signs in only one. What patterns emerge? Who’s the assumed audience?”

Concrete in location, action, and observation:

  • WHERE exactly should they go?
  • WHAT exactly should they do when they get there?
  • WHAT specifically should they pay attention to?

Provocative in what it makes visible:

Your instructions should make someone see something they wouldn’t have noticed on their own. They should create a kind of attention that reveals patterns, contradictions, systems, silences.


Some Possible Forms

Your field instructions could take various forms:

A timed observation: “Sit on this bench for 20 minutes. Every 5 minutes, write down one thing you notice that you didn’t notice before. By minute 20, you should be seeing the space completely differently than at minute 5.”

A specific route with stopping points: “Start at X. Walk to Y. At Y, stop and [specific observation task]. Then walk to Z without stopping. At Z, compare what you see now with what you saw at Y. What changed?”

A question-driven walk: “Walk any route through Kreuzberg asking this question: [provocative question]. Stop whenever something interrupts your ability to answer. Document what interrupted you and why.”

A comparative observation: “Find two [similar things – two restaurants, two shops, two streets]. Spend 10 minutes observing each. Document every difference, no matter how small. What do the differences reveal?”

A material trace: “Pick one object you can buy in both a German supermarket and a Middle Eastern grocery. Trace backwards: where does each version come from? What route did it take? What does its presence in each store reveal?”

A conversation-based investigation: “Go to [specific location]. Ask [specific question] to three different people. Don’t analyze their answers. Document exactly what they said and how they said it. What does the range of answers reveal?”

An archival task: “Go to the library. Look up [specific topic] in the catalogue. Notice how it’s classified. What’s nearby? What’s far away? What does the organizational system reveal about how knowledge is structured?”


What You’re Teaching

Think about what you’ve actually learned to see over these months. Not just “Middle Eastern presence” but:

  • How to read spatial politics (who’s visible where, who’s been displaced, what’s marked as foreign vs. normal)
  • How to see economic systems (supply chains, informal economies, labor that’s invisible)
  • How to recognize temporal layers (what remains, what’s been erased, what’s emerging)
  • How to notice material traces (objects that carry histories, translations, transformations)
  • How to see contradictions (things that shouldn’t coexist but do)
  • How to read institutional power (who defines categories, who decides what counts)
  • How to spot erasures (what’s absent, what’s been made invisible, what resists visibility)

Your field instructions should teach one of these literacies.

Not all of them. Pick one. Make it specific. Make it doable.


What to Bring to the Session

1. Your two-version observation (with category / without category) – printed or on a device

2. Draft field instructions – doesn’t have to be perfect, but have something written down:

  • Where should someone go?
  • What should they do there?
  • What specifically should they notice?
  • What question or provocation frames the observation?

We’ll spend the session testing these instructions on each other, revising them based on feedback, and then compiling them into a collection that future students can actually use.


The Goal

By the end of this session, we’ll have created a field guide – a collection of instructions for seeing that encodes what this group learned over four months of walking.

Not an archive of your observations. Not a catalogue of what you found.

An archive of practices. A toolkit of attention. Instructions that future students can follow to develop the same kinds of literacy you’ve developed.

This is what survives the course: not your individual insights but the transferable practices that made those insights possible.


See you on Tuesday (Feb 10).


Nur der Text ist unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International nutzbar. Alle anderen Elemente (Abbildungen, importierte Anhänge) sind „Alle Rechte vorbehalten“, sofern nicht anders angegeben.


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (27. Januar 2026). Create Instructions for Seeing. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 9. März 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/15kx8


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