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the question you’re not asking

Here is something I notice every semester without exception. Someone comes into the colloquium with a topic. The topic is usually well-formed, defensible, recognizably academic. Palestinian urban planning. Islamic environmentalism in Iran. Moroccan migrants and religious identity in Berlin. And underneath it, sometimes buried quite deep, is a question that the topic was built on top of — a genuine intellectual problem, something that actually bothers the person, something they want to know that they cannot yet say cleanly out loud.

The topic is the safe version. The question is the real one.

What we did in this session was try to find the gap between the two. Not to collapse it — sometimes the gap is productive, sometimes you need the institutional legibility of the topic to get the funding, the supervisor, the degree — but to see it clearly and know what’s in it. Because what’s in the gap is often the most important thing about the project. It’s where the actual thinking is happening.

I want to say something about why this is harder than it sounds. It’s not just a matter of being more precise or finding better words. The problem is structural. By the time ISME students arrive at the colloquium, their topics have already been through several rounds of invisible negotiation — with what seems supervisable, with what counts as a legitimate question in a Western European university, with what Middle East studies as a field has decided is worth knowing. The topic is the result of all that prior filtering. Which means the real question — the thing that made you care in the first place — has often already been compressed, translated, made to fit. And the compression happened so gradually, and with such good institutional reasons behind each step, that most people have stopped noticing it’s there.

Finding the assumption in a question is one way back.

Every question contains an assumption — something it takes as settled that isn’t actually settled, something it needs to be true in order for the question to even make sense. “How does X resist Y” assumes X has agency and something to resist. “Why did Z fail” assumes failure is the right frame and that there was a single coherent project that could succeed or fail. “What role does W play” assumes W is distinct from the surrounding field rather than constitutive of it. None of these assumptions are wrong, necessarily. But they are positions. They have been taken. And the person who can name their own assumptions explicitly is in a completely different position from the person who can’t — not because the research changes, but because they know what they’re arguing rather than just what they’re describing.

James Scott is worth sitting with as an example because it’s clean enough to be instructive. He went to Malaysia to study peasant political economy. That’s the topic. What he wanted to know — the question that drove the fieldwork, that organized what counted as evidence and what didn’t — was something like: what does resistance look like when open revolt is impossible, or even suicidal? That question contains an assumption: that resistance doesn’t require open confrontation. In 1985, in political science, that assumption was genuinely contestable. Plenty of people would have said: if there’s no open confrontation, there’s no resistance, just accommodation. Scott’s question had something to argue against. It could go either way. That’s what made it a question rather than a topic.

Now here’s the harder version. Scott had fieldwork. He had language. He had eighteen months in the villages. He could look for foot-dragging and gossip and feigned incompetence because he was there to see them. ISME students working on their MA theses often don’t have that access, or have it partially, or have to construct it from a desk in Berlin using sources that were produced under conditions that constrain what they can say. This is not a complaint — it’s a methodological condition that is itself worth analyzing. But it means that the question has to be calibrated not just to what you want to know but to what you can actually find out. And figuring out where those two things diverge — what you want to know versus what the sources will let you say — is part of the work we’ll do together this semester.

Something else happened in the session that I want to name. When we worked through one question as a group the most productive moment was not when someone found a better formulation. It was when someone asked: who would disagree with the assumption in this question? Because suddenly the question had an opponent. Suddenly it was situated in a conversation rather than hovering above one. And you could see the researcher visibly relax into it — not because the question got easier, but because it got real. A question with an opponent is a question you can write toward. A question that floats above disagreement is just a topic wearing a question mark.

Come to the next session with two things. Your question in one sentence. And the assumption it contains — the thing that would have to be true for the question to make sense, that someone in your field would actually dispute. If you can’t find the assumption yet, bring the question anyway and we’ll find it together. That’s what the colloquium is for.


Before our next session: write your research question in one sentence. Then write, separately, the assumption it contains — the thing it needs to be true, that someone could reasonably dispute. If you find yourself writing more than two sentences for the assumption, you’ve probably found more than one. Pick the deepest one. Bring both.

conversations: task for May 6 (preparation for May 13)

Before next week, write one page (max 400–500 words total) structured as follows:

1. My current thesis (5–6 lines only)

Describe your thesis as you currently understand it. No improvement. No refinement. Just the working version in your head.

2. The weakest point

Answer honestly: Where does my project stop being convincing — even to me? This is not about “problems in general,” but a specific pressure point, for example:

I don’t actually know if I can access the sources I assume exist
I am relying on categories I haven’t questioned (e.g. “community,” “literature,” “Islam,” “migration”)
my method doesn’t actually match my material
I am assuming a stability in my object that might not exist
I cannot clearly say what counts as data

Be concrete. One main weakness only.

3. What I am secretly avoiding

One short paragraph: What part of this project do I keep postponing thinking about?

This can be:

methodological difficulty
political discomfort
lack of material
fear of narrowing down
uncertainty about relevance
dependence on ideal sources that may not exist

No moral framing. Just description.

4. One fragment of evidence (very important)

Bring ONE concrete thing from your project world:

a paragraph from a text
a quote an interview fragment
a source title a media example
a case detail

And answer in 2–3 sentences only: Why is this here at all in my project?

Not interpretation. Just positioning.

conversations: preparation for the session on April 29

Before we meet, a word about what this colloquium is — and isn’t.

I have taught versions of this course for long enough to know what happens when a thesis colloquium runs on the usual logic: the instructor presents a timeline, explains the genre conventions of the exposé, offers a template or a model, and students leave knowing what is expected of them. The administrative scaffolding is in place. What is rarely in place, at the end of such a session, is any honest accounting of where anyone actually is.

Where students actually are, in my experience, tends to involve one or more of the following: a topic that interests them genuinely but that they have been told, or have told themselves, is not academic enough; a question they can articulate in conversation but that falls apart on paper; a field they are trying to enter that keeps refusing their question because it doesn’t fit the existing categories; a supervisor they need to find and no clear idea of how to find one whose work touches theirs; a suspicion that their angle on the Middle East is somehow too personal, too political, too located to be legitimate; or simply the vertigo of being asked to produce original knowledge in a field that is anything but neutral, inside an institution that was not designed with their question in mind.

None of that gets addressed by a timeline and a template or a required presentation of a potential topic. So I am not offering those on Wednesday — or at least, not leading with them.

What I want instead is for the first session to begin from wherever you actually are. Which means you have to come having thought about that. Not having prepared a presentation, not having already resolved the difficulty into something manageable — but having sat with it long enough to be able to name it, roughly, in a room with other people who are in adjacent versions of the same position.

The sessions from there will be shaped by what you bring. I have no fixed agenda beyond the dates and the final deadline. If three people are stuck on the same methodological problem, we spend a session on that. If someone’s question keeps dissolving under scrutiny, we spend time on why. If the room needs to talk about what it means to research the Middle East from inside a German university in the current moment, we talk about that. The shape of the semester belongs to what you bring to it.

This is not a way of avoiding structure. It is a different kind of structure — one that starts from the actual situation rather than from an imagined ideal student moving smoothly toward a finished document. The document will come. But first, Wednesday.