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sensing: task for April 28

Several of you have written to me that you cannot find the book. I want to address this — not by sending you a link, but by making the situation itself into the first task of the course.

The book is Simon Stjernholm’s Sensing Islam, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2025. It costs around 60 euros to buy new. It is not open access. It is not currently in our university library. It is available at other universities in the region — which means whether you can walk in and read it depends on where you happen to be enrolled.

Before our first session, I want you to try to get the book. Not just to have it, but to notice what the attempt requires. Try at least two different routes — whatever routes feel available or appropriate to you. Document what you tried, what worked, what didn’t, and what you ultimately decided to do.

Then write one short paragraph — no more than 100 words — not summarizing what you found but answering this: what did the process of trying to access this book tell you about who academic knowledge is produced for?

I am not telling you what the right answer is, or what the right route is. I am asking you to notice what you actually did, and to be honest about it — with yourself first, and then with the group. We will spend the opening of our next session on this, before we discuss anything in the book itself.

One more thing: I understand the expectation that materials arrive immediately, that a course comes with a reading list that is simply there, accessible, ready. That expectation is worth examining too. It is part of the same question.


Then, when you got it: Just read the book. Notice what it does to your body.

Victoria Mummelthei
Victoria Mummelthei

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 (23. April 2026). sensing: task for April 28. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 12. Juni 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/164j7


2 Antworten auf „sensing: task for April 28“

  1. It was disheartening to discover that access is almost always fee-based or requires institutional logins that I didn’t have. The book wasn’t available through Primo or other free library portals and I couldn’t easily find a printed copy either. The book was available online but access was restricted to members of the certain institution. Later on, I discovered that the book was available as an e-book at the State Library. This experience showed me that academic knowledge isn’t accessible to everyone. It is often tied to fees and institutional access making it primarily available to academics.

  2. Attempting to access the book revealed that academic knowledge is far from equally available. When institutional access failed, I relied on informal networks, which made me aware that access depends not only on affiliation but also on social connections. The discomfort I felt at the idea of “asking around” pointed to an implicit norm of access being there. Knowledge should not require privilege to be obtained and is presented as universal and open (because that’s the idea behind it, that it belongs to all humankind, isn’t it?). Yet in practice, financial means, institutional belonging, and social capital determine who can access it. What appears as an exception in my context may in fact be the norm globally. Academic knowledge, regardless of the presentation, is largely restricted and mainly structured by inequality.

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