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Materials for the session on Feb 3 – part 02

The Archive Problem:

Ottoman archives document Kurdistan. British Mandate archives document Kurdistan. Turkish state archives document Kurdistan. Iraqi, Syrian, Iranian state archives document Kurdistan.

But these archives don’t document the same thing. They create different “Kurdistans” through what they record, how they categorize, which connections they trace, which movements they erase.

Kurdish oral histories document something else entirely—not “Kurdistan” as a bounded entity, but networks of kinship, seasonal movement, shared water sources, marriage alliances that don’t map onto any state archive’s categories.

ACTIVITY III

Your task for 20-30 minutes: Each of you at best brings a different provocation. Together, work through this: How do networks, selective signals, and distributed emergence help you understand what’s happening with these archives?

SPECIFIC ANGLES TO EXPLORE:

For the person from Group 1 (Networks):

  • Archives are infrastructure. They determine what becomes “knowable.” Which scholars get access to which archives? If you’re a Kurdish researcher, which infrastructure do you depend on—Ottoman? Turkish? Iraqi? Western academic databases? How does that dependency shape what you can say? If the archive feeds some narratives and starves others, what does “scholarship” mean?

For the person from Group 2 (Signals):

  • Kurdish oral histories exist in forms that state archives can’t capture—not because they’re secret, but because archival infrastructure can’t process them. Stories passed through kinship networks. Knowledge embedded in seasonal practices. Memory carried in place names that official maps erased. Is this a failure of preservation? Or successful communication that protects itself by being illegible to state power?

For the person from Group 3 (Emergence):

  • Kurdish political movements have repeatedly decided to “emerge”—1920s, 1960s, 1990s, 2010s. Each time: partial information, conflicting signals, irreversible consequences. Were these centralized decisions or distributed ones? Who was weighing which signals? When nationalist movements claim to speak for “Kurdistan,” whose emergence are they talking about—and whose are they not?

WHAT YOU NEED TO FIGURE OUT TOGETHER:

  1. If studying “Kurdistan” means choosing which archive to depend on (which network to be fed by), and that choice determines what you can see—where is the “real” Kurdistan? In the Ottoman documents? The oral histories? The underground networks that no archive captures?
  2. If these different archives create different objects (different “Kurdistans”), not just perspectives on one object—what does it mean to claim you’re studying “the same thing”?
  3. What would Kurdish autonomy even mean when Kurdish survival has always depended on networks (trade routes, kinship alliances, language practices) that cross the borders claiming to contain “Kurdistan”?

Materials for the session on Feb 3 – part 01

“A tree covered in darkness survives for years. It’s being fed by other trees through fungal networks underground. But the network doesn’t feed everyone equally. Some trees get resources. Others don’t. The infrastructure decides.”

Activity I

Here’s what I want to know: Where have you seen this pattern in contexts you study?

Not forests. Political situations. Social structures. Knowledge systems. Where does the visible map (what things look like above ground) radically differ from actual dependencies (what’s happening underground)?”

PAIRS (20 minutes):

Pick one example between you. Could be:

  • Resource flows that don’t respect official borders
  • Survival networks that official systems don’t acknowledge
  • Knowledge transmission that happens outside institutional channels
  • Communication infrastructure that connects ‘separate’ entities

Don’t write. Just talk. Figure out together:

  • What’s the ‘above ground’ story? (What’s visible, what’s official, what’s mapped)
  • What’s the ‘underground’ story? (Actual flows, dependencies, connections)
  • Who benefits from pretending the above-ground story is complete?”

Activity II

SMALL GROUP WORK: Three Provocations (45 minutes)

GROUP 1: The Selective Network

In forests, mycorrhizal networks connect some trees to each other but not others. A tree might be fed by its neighbors—even trees of different species—but some trees in the same forest get excluded from the network entirely. The infrastructure itself makes decisions about who gets access.

In your fields: Where does infrastructure create communities by determining who gets connected? Not communities based on choice or shared identity, but communities created by who has access to the same networks.

QUESTIONS FOR YOUR GROUP:

  1. Think about a knowledge network you’re part of (academic databases, language communities, professional networks, informal study groups). Who gets access? Who doesn’t? How did the infrastructure create this division? What’s the difference between being excluded by active gatekeeping vs. being excluded by how the infrastructure is built?
  2. Regional communication networks: Arabic satellite TV, Turkish internet infrastructure, Persian digital platforms, Kurdish cross-border networks. These connect some populations while excluding others—not by explicit policy, but by how the infrastructure works. What communities get created by shared access? What gets hidden when we talk about “the Arab world” or “the region” as if infrastructure access were universal?
  3. Mycorrhizal networks are not egalitarian—some trees get more nutrients than others. Where do you see this in knowledge production? Some institutions, some languages, some methods get more resources through the network. Others are technically “connected” but starved. What does it mean to be part of a network that systematically undernourishes you?

GROUP 2: The Signal Problem

Plants communicate chemically. But some signals are only detectable by certain species. A plant might release a warning about herbivores that only its kin can sense. Other plants in the same soil don’t receive the message—not because it’s encrypted, but because they don’t have the receptors.

Communication succeeds because it’s selective. Universal accessibility would be a vulnerability.

QUESTIONS FOR YOUR GROUP:

  1. Code-switching and selective intelligibility: Consider Arabic with its different registers (fus7a, 3amiyya, specific dialects), or minority languages (Kurdish, Amazigh, Aramaic) where speakers can choose to be understood or not depending on who’s listening. When is unintelligibility a feature, not a bug? When is it protection?
  2. Historical texts and interpretive communities: Sufi poetry, Kabbalistic texts, Islamic legal reasoning—they don’t aim for universal comprehension. They require training, context, initiation. Outsiders can read the words but miss what’s being communicated. Is this exclusionary? Or is it acknowledging that some knowledge can’t be transmitted without the right receptors?
  3. The plant releases a warning signal but this also attracts predators’ attention. Communication is risky. Where do you see communities deciding whether to speak publicly or stay quiet? When does visibility become vulnerability? What communication strategies work because they’re not universally accessible?

GROUP 3: The Emergence Decision

Seeds have “decision-making centers”—clusters of cells that weigh antagonistic signals (warmth vs. cold, wet vs. dry) to decide when to germinate. The decision is distributed across cells with no central consciousness. And it’s irreversible: emerge too early, you freeze. Too late, you miss the growing season. Never emerge, you also die. The cells can’t see above ground. They only have fluctuating temperature data. They decide anyway.

QUESTIONS FOR YOUR GROUP:

  1. Distributed decision-making: Think about a community you know that made a collective decision about visibility, emergence, political claims. How was the decision made? Was it centralized (leadership deciding) or distributed (many people weighing signals)? What were the “antagonistic signals”—the contradictory information people were integrating?
  2. Irreversible emergence: Some political acts are like germination—once you emerge, you can’t go back underground. Claiming a right. Making a demand. Becoming visible. What examples can you think of where the timing question is impossible? When is it “safe” to emerge? What information would you need to know for certain? (And if you can never know for certain, how do you decide?)
  3. Seeds decide without seeing above ground. They use temperature fluctuations as proxy data. In political contexts, when do communities have to make decisions based on indirect signals because they can’t see the full picture? What’s the equivalent of “temperature data”—information that hints at conditions but doesn’t show you everything?

Session Tomorrow (Feb 3) at 10:15 – Online via Webex

Hi all,

We’re moving tomorrow’s session online due to transport strikes and weather.

Join at 10:15 in my personal Webex room (sent via email).

Same session structure (10:15-13:15 with break), just via Webex with breakout rooms instead of in-person.

Before 10:15:

Quick reminder of the blog post prompt: Think about one political situation where the visible map (official borders, claimed autonomy) differs from actual dependencies (resource flows, infrastructure, who feeds whom).

The questions to sit with:

  • What would an “underground map” reveal that the official map hides?
  • What infrastructure connects supposedly separate entities?
  • If survival is always networked, what does “self-determination” even mean?

We’ll start from there. Don’t write anything—just notice what makes it uncomfortable.

See you at 10:15.

V

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).

Session Postponed to Next Week + Something to Watch

Hi all,

Due to severe weather today and very low attendance, I’m postponing our session to next week, same time (10:15-13:15).

I know it’s frustrating when plans change, but maybe this gives us an unexpected gift: more time to sit with what we’ve been reading.

Something to watch/listen before next week:

I came across this interview with N. Katherine Hayles about her book Bacteria to AI that connects directly to what we’ve been working through with Schlanger:

It’s long (nearly 2 hours), but you don’t need to watch all of it. Here’s what I’d suggest:

Watch/listen to the first 30-40 minutes (up to where she starts discussing her specific experiments with GPT-3).

Pay attention especially when she talks about:

  • Why “decentering the human” matters (around 10-15 minutes in)
  • The concept of “umwelt” – how different entities construct their worlds differently (she gets into this around 25-30 minutes)
  • Non-conscious cognition vs. unconscious (early in the conversation)

Why this connects to what we’re doing:

Hayles is making an argument that sounds familiar if you’ve been reading Schlanger: that we need frameworks to understand intelligence that don’t assume it looks like human brains, human consciousness, human decision-making.

Her “integrated cognitive framework” (ICF) is trying to do what Schlanger does with plants – recognize cognitive capacities that work completely differently from ours. She’s just extending it from bacteria to AI.

But here’s where it gets interesting for us: When she talks about how liberal humanism assumes bounded, autonomous individuals, and how this is fundamentally wrong because we’re all “holobionts” (collectivities of organisms) – doesn’t this sound like the covered tree problem we’ve been discussing? The fiction of autonomy when everything survives through networks?

And when she discusses “umwelt” – how different species construct completely different worlds through their sensory and cognitive apparatus – isn’t that another version of asking: what does a plant’s world look like? What signals can it detect that we can’t?

Small task (optional, but useful):

As you watch/listen, notice one moment where Hayles’ argument about non-human cognition, interdependence, or distributed intelligence makes you think differently about something in your Middle East studies work.

Not “could be applied to” – but genuinely: what specific situation, archive, text, community, historical moment came to mind?

Bring that noticing to next week. We’ll start there.

One more thing:

Around 40-45 minutes in, Hayles talks about the “umwelt of LLMs” – how large language models construct their worlds. If you’re interested in the AI stuff we’ve been gesturing toward, that section is worth your time. But it’s not required for our session.

Stay warm, stay safe. See you next week.

Best,
V

P.S. If the weather or other circumstances keep you from attending next week, just let me know. We’ll figure it out.

after office hours + one week left

Thanks to everyone who came to office hours today (even those who came on campus instead of online, that’s fine). Your questions were genuinely interesting—several of you are working on things I want to keep thinking about, which is exactly what these conversations should do.

I’m sorry I couldn’t get to everyone. A few sessions ran longer because the problems you were working through deserved the time. If you didn’t get in today, you’re welcome to try again next Wednesday (January 28, 10:30-11:30)—though that’s deadline day, so it’s really for last-minute panic questions, not substantial rethinking. For more substantial questions, write me an email.

One week left.

A few things I noticed in today’s conversations that might help you this week:

If you’re stuck on structure: Stop trying to organize the whole paper. Just make sure each section does ONE clear thing. If you can’t name what a section does, it probably doesn’t belong.

Example: Don’t have a section called “Context” that covers history + current demographics + policy + urban planning. That’s four things. Pick one. If you need them all, they’re four separate sections with four clear purposes.

If you’re worried your argument isn’t “strong enough”: Strong doesn’t mean certain. Strong means honest. If you’re genuinely uncertain about something, say that. Hedging is weak. Acknowledging limits is strong.

Example: Weak: “It could perhaps be argued that maybe this practice reflects a kind of adaptation.” Strong: “I can’t determine whether this is adaptation or resistance. The practice looks like both, which suggests the categories themselves might not work here.”

If you’re trying to include everything: You can’t. Choose. What’s the smallest version of this paper that still makes your point? Cut everything else. You can always add back if you have space.

Example: If you’re writing about informal economies, you don’t need to also cover language politics AND housing policy AND cultural identity. Pick one thread. Follow it through. The other stuff can be one sentence: “This also connects to language and housing, but that’s beyond this paper’s scope.”

If you’re paralyzed by the conclusion: It doesn’t have to wrap everything up. It can open a question. It can acknowledge what you couldn’t resolve. It can point to what you’d need to know next.

Example: Instead of “In conclusion, this paper has shown that informal economies are complex and require more research,” try: “I still don’t know why some of these practices remain informal while others don’t. Answering that would require understanding who benefits from opacity—which I can’t see from where I’m standing.”

If you haven’t started writing yet: Start badly. Write the version you know is wrong. You can’t revise what doesn’t exist.

Example: Write “This paper is about how refugees navigate bureaucracy in Berlin and I think it’s important because…” Yes, that’s a terrible first sentence. Write it anyway. You’ll delete it later. But it gets you moving.

One practical thing: On Sunday or Monday, read your whole draft aloud to yourself. Slowly. Or what I like to do (even with your completed papers): Use text to speech in your text editor or a relevant tool. You’ll hear what doesn’t work. Fix those parts.

You’ll notice: “This sentence is 47 words long and I ran out of breath.” “I used ‘however’ four times in one paragraph.” “I have no idea what this section is actually saying.” “This sounds like I’m trying too hard to sound academic.”

Next Wednesday’s office hours (10:30-11:30) are your last chance for questions. After that, you just have to submit.

What Work is “The Middle East” Doing Here?

Provocations from the January 20 Campus Walk

You walked the campus. You found the Middle East – in department names, on bulletin boards, in conversations, in the library classification system, in course catalogues.

Good. Now let’s think about what you actually found.


Provocation 1: What Work is “The Middle East” Doing as a Category?

You identified something as “Middle Eastern” on campus. A department. An institute. A poster. A person. A language. A book classification.

But what is that category organizing?

Think carefully about this. When an institution creates a department called “Institute for Middle Eastern Studies” or shelves books under “Middle East – Politics,” it’s not just describing reality. It’s organizing reality.

So what’s being organized?

Is it organizing knowledge? (This is what we know about this region)

Is it organizing people? (These are the people who study/come from this region)

Is it organizing funding? (This is where research money for this region goes)

Is it organizing expertise? (These are the people authorized to speak about this region)

Is it organizing danger? (This is the region we need to understand for security purposes)

Is it organizing otherness? (This is what’s different from us)

Here’s the uncomfortable part: All of these are happening simultaneously. The category does multiple kinds of work, often contradictory work.

Questions to sit with:

  • When you saw “Middle East” on a department sign, what did that sign authorize? Who gets to speak? Who gets listened to? Who gets funding? Who gets jobs?
  • When you saw books classified under “Middle East,” what was being produced? Regional knowledge? Strategic intelligence? Academic careers? Or the region itself as an object that can be known?
  • When you identified a student as “Middle Eastern,” what were you organizing? Their identity? Your attention? The diversity statistics of the university? Their foreignness?

What if the category “Middle East” at this university exists primarily to manage – to contain, to study, to make legible, to control – rather than to understand?

What if “Middle Eastern Studies” is less about taking the region seriously and more about producing the kind of knowledge that makes the region knowable to Western institutions?

How would you tell the difference?


Provocation 2: Who Decided What Counts as “Middle Eastern”?

You found Arabic script. You heard languages. You saw posters for events. You identified people. You located institutes.

But who created the boundary that says “this is Middle Eastern” and “this is not”?

Let’s get specific:

On language:

  • You heard someone speaking Arabic in the cafeteria. Did they identify themselves as “Middle Eastern” or did you assign that category to them?
  • If you heard someone speaking German with an accent, did you classify that as “Middle Eastern presence”? Why or why not?
  • What about Turkish? Is Turkey in “the Middle East” or not? Who decided?

On geography:

  • The library has a “Middle East” section. Does it include North Africa? Turkey? Afghanistan? Iran? Central Asia? Who decided where the boundaries are?
  • Are there books about Egypt in both “Middle East” and “Africa” sections? What does that reveal about how regions get constructed?

On identity:

  • You saw someone you identified as Middle Eastern. What visual markers did you use? Skin color? Clothing? Language? How do you know you were right?
  • What if that person identifies primarily as German? As Berliner? As a student at FU? What makes “Middle Eastern” the salient category for you?

On knowledge:

  • The university has institutes that study “the Middle East.” Do those institutes include scholars who are from the region? Or is “the Middle East” something that gets studied about rather than studied from?
  • Whose knowledge counts as knowledge about the Middle East? Academic knowledge? Embodied knowledge? Lived experience?

Even more:

  • Is “the Middle East” a category that people from the region use to describe themselves? Or is it a category imposed from outside?
  • When you use “Middle Eastern” as a descriptor, are you recognizing someone’s identity or are you creating their identity as foreign, as other, as from-elsewhere?
  • What if the people you’re identifying as “Middle Eastern” don’t use that category for themselves at all? What if they’re Moroccan, Egyptian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian – and lumping them all together as “Middle Eastern” erases the specificity of their actual locations, histories, languages?
  • What happens when a category designed by colonial powers (yes, “Middle East” is a British imperial invention) becomes the organizing principle for how a German university structures knowledge?

Who benefits from “the Middle East” existing as a coherent category?

Is it the people from those regions – or is it the institutions that fund research, departments, area studies programs, security studies, strategic intelligence?


Provocation 3: What’s the Difference Between Studying and Containing?

FU has multiple institutes, departments, and programs focused on the Middle East. That’s significant institutional resources. That could mean:

Possibility 1: This university takes the region seriously as a site of knowledge production, history, culture, and thought worthy of sustained scholarly attention.

Possibility 2: This university needs to understand the region for strategic, political, or security purposes – to manage it, to predict it, to contain potential threats.

How do you tell the difference?

Look at what you found today:

Funding sources:

  • Where does the money come from for Middle Eastern studies at FU?
  • Are there connections to foreign policy institutes? Security studies? Government funding tied to “understanding the region”?
  • Or is it primarily humanities-based, focused on languages, literatures, histories for their own sake?

What gets studied:

  • When you looked at course offerings, what kinds of courses exist?
  • Are they primarily about conflict, terrorism, political instability, migration “problems”?
  • Or are they about poetry, philosophy, art, everyday life, intellectual history?
  • What does the balance reveal about what the university thinks is important to know about the region?

Who studies what:

  • Are Middle Eastern languages taught primarily to students interested in the region’s culture and history?
  • Or are they taught to students in political science, security studies, international relations who need to “understand the region” for policy purposes?
  • Who’s in those classrooms? What are they planning to do with that knowledge?

Where it’s located:

  • Are Middle Eastern studies programs integrated into the main campus or isolated?
  • Are they well-funded or scraping by?
  • Do they have institutional prestige or are they marginalized?

Even more:

  • Can you study a region without participating in its domination?
  • Is all knowledge production about the Middle East implicated in geopolitical power, or can scholarship be genuinely separate from policy interests?
  • When FU trains students in Arabic, Persian, Turkish – are they training cultural mediators or are they training future diplomats, intelligence analysts, NGO workers who will “manage” the region?

Edward Said wrote about Orientalism – the way Western scholarship created “the Orient” as an object of knowledge that could be studied, known, managed, controlled. The “Middle East” is Orientalism’s successor category.

So: Is Middle Eastern Studies at FU continuing that tradition, or breaking from it?

How would you know? What evidence did you see today? What evidence would you need to see?


Provocation 4: What If You Stopped Looking for “The Middle East” Altogether?

You’ve spent months walking Berlin looking for Middle Eastern presence. You’ve gotten good at recognizing it in a way – the signs, the languages, the shops, the restaurants, the people.

But what if that very skill – the ability to identify something as “Middle Eastern” – is a problem?

Think about what happens when you categorize:

On people:

  • You saw someone in the library and thought “that’s a Middle Eastern student.”
  • What made you think that? Their appearance? Their language? Their name?
  • But what if that person is just… a student at FU? What if they were born in Berlin, speak German as a first language, identify primarily as German?
  • By categorizing them as “Middle Eastern,” are you recognizing their identity – or are you refusing to let them be German? Are you marking them as perpetually foreign?

On spaces:

  • You identified certain campus spaces as “Middle Eastern spaces” – where Arabic is spoken, where certain student groups meet.
  • But what if those are just… campus spaces? Places where students gather, study, eat, talk?
  • By marking them as “Middle Eastern,” are you describing neutral fact – or are you othering those spaces, marking them as different from “normal” campus spaces?

On knowledge:

  • You found books classified as “Middle East – History” or “Middle East – Politics.”
  • But those books are about specific places (if you accept national or cultural borders) – Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Iran. Why are they all grouped under one regional category?
  • What gets lost when Egyptian history gets classified as “Middle Eastern history” instead of just “history”?
  • Why is there a “Middle East” section but no “Western Europe” section? Why is one region marked and the other unmarked as universal?

The uncomfortable questions:

  • Every time you identify something as “Middle Eastern,” you’re drawing a boundary between “Middle Eastern” and “not Middle Eastern” (which usually means “German” or “European” or “Western” or just unmarked as normal).
  • What if drawing that boundary – even with good intentions, even to recognize diversity, even to celebrate presence – is what keeps “Middle Eastern” as a category of otherness?
  • What if every time you say “I saw Middle Eastern presence at FU,” you’re actually saying “I saw something that doesn’t belong to the normal category of FU”?

Could this entire course be reproducing the problem it’s trying to examine?

You’ve been trained all semester to see “the Middle East in Berlin.” You’ve gotten very good at it. You can identify Middle Eastern restaurants, Middle Eastern neighborhoods, Middle Eastern cultural practices.

But what if that entire project – looking for the Middle East as if it’s a distinct, identifiable thing – is exactly what keeps people, languages, practices marked as foreign, as other, as not-quite-German?

What if the moment you stop looking for “Middle Eastern presence” and just start seeing people living in Berlin, students studying at FU, languages spoken in the city, shops selling things – that’s the moment the category loses its power?

But then what happens to your research? What happens to this course? What happens to Middle Eastern Studies as a field?

If the category is the problem, what’s the alternative?


Provocation 5: So What Now?

These provocations are deliberately uncomfortable. They’re designed to make you question the entire premise of what you’ve been doing.

But discomfort without direction is just paralysis. So: what now?

Some possibilities to consider:

Option 1: Reject the category entirely Stop using “Middle East” as a descriptor. Talk about specific places, specific languages, specific histories. Don’t lump Morocco and Iran together just because Western institutions decided they belong to the same region.

But: Does this erase the real connections, histories, and solidarities that exist across those regions? Does it ignore how people from those regions do sometimes organize collectively in diaspora?

Option 2: Use the category strategically Recognize that “Middle East” is a constructed, problematic category – but also recognize that it has material effects. Departments exist. Funding exists. Communities organize around it.

Maybe the point isn’t to reject the category but to be conscious of what work it’s doing and when it’s useful vs. when it’s harmful.

But: Can you use an oppressive category strategically without reinforcing it? Or does every use of the category, even critical use, make it stronger?

Option 3: Complicate the category constantly Every time you use “Middle Eastern,” immediately problematize it. Ask: whose Middle East? which parts? defined by whom? for what purposes?

Make the category unstable. Refuse to let it settle into common sense.

But: Does constant problematization become its own kind of academic performance? Does it actually change anything or just make you feel better about using a bad category?

Option 4: Focus on power, not categories Stop asking “what is Middle Eastern” and start asking “who has power to define, to include, to exclude, to represent?”

Make the analysis about institutional power, not about whether categories are accurate.

But: Can you analyze power without using any categories at all? Don’t you need some language to describe who’s being marginalized and who’s doing the marginalizing?


There are no clean answers here.

Every option has problems. Every position is compromised.

That’s the point.

The question isn’t “what’s the right answer” but “what are you going to do with the discomfort?”

Are you going to:

  • Keep using the category unconsciously?
  • Refuse the category entirely?
  • Use it strategically while acknowledging its problems?
  • Spend all your time problematizing it?
  • Find a different framework altogether?

TASK: What you do next week:

Take one observation from today’s campus walk.

Write it two ways:

Version 1: Using the category “Middle East” / “Middle Eastern” / “Arab” / regional or ethnic labels

Version 2: Without using any of those categories – describe what you saw using only specific, concrete details

Bring both versions to the next session on Feb 10. We’ll see what changes.

We’ll see what becomes visible when you remove the category.

We’ll see what gets lost.

We’ll see what the category was actually doing.

And then we’ll decide what to do with that knowledge.

Walk the Campus: Looking for the Middle East at FU

January 20, 2026

You’ve been walking Berlin’s neighborhoods for months – commercial spaces, residential streets, restaurants, shops. You’ve learned to notice how “the Middle East” appears in the city.

But what about here? What about this campus?

Today, walk Freie Universität Berlin for about 90 minutes with this question: How does the Middle East appear at FU, and how is it framed?


What to Look For

Don’t just look for “where is the Middle East” – look for how it appears as a category in this institutional space.

Buildings, institutes, departments, programs:

  • Which ones deal with the Middle East?
  • How are they named?
  • Where are they located on campus – central or peripheral?
  • What does the architecture communicate?

Bulletin boards and posters:

  • What events are advertised?
  • Whose events get space?
  • What languages appear?
  • How is content categorized or framed?

The library:

  • How are Middle East materials organized?
  • What classification systems are used?
  • Which floor? What’s shelved nearby?
  • What does the organization reveal about how knowledge is structured?

Student spaces:

  • Which languages do you hear?
  • Which groups meet where?
  • Who’s visible? Who’s invisible?
  • What spaces feel marked as “Middle Eastern” vs. unmarked as “German” or “international”?

Campus maps and signage:

  • How is the Middle East represented, if at all?
  • What gets labeled? What doesn’t?
  • What languages are used?

Memorials, plaques, building names:

  • Who gets remembered?
  • What histories are marked on this campus?
  • What connections to the Middle East are commemorated (or absent)?

Classrooms:

  • Where do Middle East courses happen?
  • What do these spaces look like?
  • Are they in specific buildings or scattered?

Your Task

Document 3-5 specific moments/places/things where you notice something about how the Middle East appears (or doesn’t) in this institutional space.

Be specific:

❌ Not just: “I saw Arabic”

✅ But: WHERE did you see it, in what CONTEXT, how was it FRAMED, what was NOTABLE about it?

Example of specificity:

  • “In the lobby of Building X, there’s a bulletin board. Left side: German student group posters. Right side: International student posters, including one in Arabic for a Palestinian solidarity event. The Arabic poster is smaller and in the corner. Next to it: a university regulation, in German only.”

Take photos. Take notes. Notice details.


The Question to Carry With You

Is FU Berlin a space where the Middle East is:

  • Studied?
  • Present?
  • Absent?
  • Produced?

Or maybe: What work is “the Middle East” doing as a category in this institutional space?


Walk alone or with one other person. Meet back at 2.2058 at 12:15 (take 11:45-12:15 as a break).

Final session Wednesday + office hours through deadline

Quick reminder: Our final session is Wednesday, January 14, 10:30-11:30 (haha, that wasn’t intentional, it was supposed to be the normal 10:15… but no worries)

Since we last met in December, you’ve had time to write. Some of you came to December office hours, many didn’t (that’s fine). Now we’re in the final stretch.

For Wednesday’s session, bring:

  1. Your draft (whatever state—messy is expected)
  2. One specific question or problem you’re actually stuck on

Not “I need feedback on my draft.” That’s too general. More like:

  • “My introduction explains my whole argument—should it?”
  • “I have three possible readers and it’s making everything muddy”
  • “This section just lists what scholars say—what should it actually do?”
  • “I think I have two different papers here—how do I decide?”

The session will be:

  • Small groups: troubleshoot one specific problem each (30 min)
  • Whole group: discuss what you learned from the experiments you tried (20 min)
  • Quick individual check-ins: your plan for the final two weeks (10 min)

Continued support after Wednesday:

If you want to talk through a specific problem or decision point in your draft, I’m offering individual consultations online in my personal webex room on:

  • Wednesday, January 21, 10:30-11:30
  • Wednesday, January 28, 10:30-11:30 (deadline day—last-minute questions)

Ideally 10-15 minutes per person or in small groups. To sign up, just email me with one sentence about what you want to discuss.

Your deadline: Wednesday, January 28, 2026 (5000 words)

You have two weeks after our session. Use them. Write messy, then clean up. Ask for help when you’re stuck. Don’t wait until January 27 to discover a problem.

See you Wednesday.


Part 1: Individual Diagnostic (15 minutes)

Setup: Everyone works silently on their own draft.

Task: “Find the sentence in your draft you believe most and the sentence you believe least. Mark them.”

Then write (just for yourself):

  • Why do you believe the first one?
  • Why don’t you believe the second one?
  • Is the sentence you don’t believe doing necessary work? Or is it there because you think you’re “supposed” to say it?

The point: Often our problems are sentences we included because they sound “academic” but we don’t actually stand behind them. This helps them locate their real voice vs. their performed voice.


Part 2: Test Your Necessary Parts (30 minutes)

Setup: Pairs. Each person takes 15 minutes, then switch.

Task: “Tell your partner: What is your paper trying to do in the world? Not ‘what is it about’ – what work is it trying to do?”

Then: “Look at your outline or table of contents. For each section, ask: Is this section actually necessary for that work? Or is it there because papers are ‘supposed’ to have it?”

Partner’s job: Push back. “Are you sure you need that section? What happens if you cut it?” “What would you lose if it wasn’t there?”

Last 5 minutes together: Each person names one section they might cut or drastically shorten.

The point: Often we include sections (literature review, theory section, context chapter) because they’re conventional, not because they’re necessary. This helps them see what’s actually load-bearing vs. what’s scaffolding they can remove.


Part 3: Whole Class Provocation (15 minutes)

Setup: Everyone back together in a circle.

Prompt: “You have two weeks. Your paper will not be perfect. So let’s talk about: What are you giving yourself permission to NOT do?

Go around. Everyone shares ONE thing they’re explicitly deciding not to do/fix/perfect:

  • “I’m not going to make my theory section longer”
  • “I’m not going to find three more sources”
  • “I’m not going to fix the conclusion”
  • “I’m not going to rewrite the whole thing in third person”
  • “I’m not going to smooth out the contradiction in my argument”

After everyone shares, discuss:

  • What’s the difference between “good enough” and “giving up”?
  • What assumptions about academic writing are you still carrying that you need to drop?
  • What if finishing “badly” is actually finishing honestly?

The point: Permission to not be perfect. Permission to make strategic choices about what matters. Reframing “finishing” as making decisions, not achieving perfection.

What does a plant remember?

Plants have memory. They remember being touched. They remember droughts from previous seasons. They pass information to their offspring about environmental threats. Some plants “learn” through repeated exposure—they stop responding to harmless stimuli, conserving energy. Others remember kin and treat relatives differently than strangers.

But plant memory isn’t like human memory. There’s no brain, no central archive. Memory is distributed through the body—in growth patterns, chemical profiles, gene expression changes. The plant doesn’t “recall” the drought. The plant is the record of the drought.

What if we thought about collective memory this way—not as stories we tell or archives we keep, but as something embodied in how a community moves, responds, organizes space, treats strangers vs. kin?

Your task (thinking/discussion, not writing):

  1. Plants remember trauma in their tissue. What does it mean for memory to be in the body rather than in the mind? What gets remembered when there’s no narrator, no central story, just distributed responses?
  2. Plants’ “transgenerational memory”—parent plants chemically prepare seeds for threats they experienced. What happens when memory is inherited but can’t be explained? The offspring doesn’t know WHY it’s sensitive to certain stresses. It just is.
  3. Plants distinguish kin from non-kin. Roots grow differently when near relatives vs. strangers. But there’s no recognition, no meeting—just chemical sensing and response. What does kinship mean without recognition?
  4. Some plants “forget” harmless stimuli through habituation. They learn what’s not a threat by stopping their defensive response. What would it mean for a community to “forget” by habituation—not by erasing the past, but by ceasing to respond to it?
  5. Plant memory is un-retrievable by the plant itself. A plant can’t “think back” to last year’s drought. But its body carries the record. What’s the difference between memory you can access and memory that shapes you without your awareness?

Connect to your field:

How does your discipline/do your disciplines think about collective memory? Does it assume memory needs a narrator? A retrieval mechanism? Conscious recall? What changes if memory is just: the way a system responds because of what happened to it?

Bring to the next session:

Just your thinking. Be ready to discuss: What political/social situation are you thinking about when you read Schlanger on plant memory? What becomes visible if we think about collective memory as embodied response rather than stored narrative?