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Who Are You Writing For?

November 19, 2025 | 10:15-11:45

This session marked the first draft sharing for the course. Rather than traditional feedback, we focused on the gap between what writers think they’re communicating and what readers actually receive—particularly around instability, costs, and readers.


Opening Discussion: What Do You Want When You Share Writing? (10:15-10:40)

We began by asking students to reflect on what they actually want when they share unfinished writing.

Responses included:

  • “Tell me if it makes sense”
  • “Tell me what’s missing”
  • “Tell me it’s good”
  • “Tell me whether to keep going”
  • “Find the problems”
  • “Understand what I was trying to say”
  • “Tell me if anyone would care about this”

The key insight: These are completely different—and often incompatible—asks.

Some requests assume the idea is right and just needs clarity (“tell me if it makes sense”). Others question whether the whole project is worth doing (“tell me if anyone would care”). Some ask readers to decode the writer’s intentions (“understand what I was trying to say”) while others ask readers to challenge the work (“find the problems”).

The tension: Most writers want readers to validate what they’re trying to do while also telling them what’s wrong. But you can’t have both simultaneously.

The discussion surfaced:

  • Feedback that serves writer anxiety vs. feedback that serves the writing
  • Feedback about what you meant vs. what readers received
  • Feedback that assumes your frame is right vs. questions the frame

The reframe for draft sharing:

Readers should NOT try to understand what the writer meant. Instead, readers report what they actually received.

Not “I think you’re trying to say X”—but “Here’s what I understood.”

Not “This is good/needs work”—but “Here’s where I saw instability” and “Here’s where I didn’t see why I should care.”

The writer’s job: Listen to the gap between intention and reception.


Pair Reading: Mark What You Receive (10:40-11:20)

Students paired up with someone whose topic was different from theirs.

Phase 1: Silent Reading (20 minutes total, 10 per draft)

One person reads the other’s draft in silence, marking three things:

  • Where you see the instability (what doesn’t fit, what contradicts)
  • $ Where you see costs/benefits (why this matters to readers, not to the writer)
  • ? Where you can identify who the readers are (who cares about this?)

If the reader reaches the end without marking all three, that’s important information.

Phase 2: Report What You Received (20 minutes total, 10 per draft)

The reader reports back—but with strict constraints: Only report what you marked. Don’t interpret. Don’t suggest fixes.

Examples:

  • “I saw instability here where you said X contradicted Y”
  • “I didn’t see costs until page 3, and even then I wasn’t sure if they were costs to me or to you”
  • “I couldn’t tell who I was supposed to be as a reader”

The writer’s job: Listen. Don’t explain. Don’t defend. Just hear the gap.

This phase made visible the often-significant distance between what writers thought they communicated (instability, costs, specific readers) and what readers actually received (confusion, vagueness, unclear stakes).


Small Group Pressure Test (11:20-11:40)

Groups of 3-4 (mixed topics) took turns reading their openings aloud (first 1-2 pages).

The group’s role: Be the skeptical reader. Push on everything.

Questions:

  • “Where’s the instability? I don’t see what doesn’t fit.”
  • “So what? Why does that matter to me as a reader?”
  • “Who am I supposed to be? What community cares about this?”
  • “Is this a gap (we don’t know X) or a problem (not knowing X costs us Y)?”
  • “At what sentence would I stop reading? Why?”

This phase pushed beyond politeness. Students practiced being honest readers—the kind who are busy, skeptical, and will stop reading if they don’t immediately see value.

What emerged:

  • Many drafts described interesting observations but didn’t establish instability
  • Costs were often implied rather than explicit
  • Readers were frequently unnamed or too generic (“people interested in Berlin”)
  • The gap problem vs. the gap itself remained unclear in many drafts

Assignment for December 3

You’ve now tested your draft with multiple readers. You know where the gaps are—between what you thought you were communicating and what readers actually received.

Revise your 3-4 pages based on what you learned today.

Your goal:

  • Make the instability visible in the first two paragraphs
  • Show costs that readers bear (not you)
  • Make clear who your readers are (even if implicitly)

The test: Between now and next session, give your revised draft to someone outside this class—a friend, a colleague, anyone. Ask them: “Where would you stop reading and why?”

If they stop before they see the instability and why it matters, keep revising.

Bring the revised draft printed on December 3. We’ll go deeper into how instabilities actually work and how to construct them effectively.


Key Takeaways

  1. Intention ≠ Reception: What you think you’re communicating and what readers receive are often very different.
  2. The gap is the learning: The distance between what you meant and what readers understood shows you what needs work.
  3. Readers report, don’t interpret: The most useful feedback describes what was received, not what the writer “really meant.”
  4. Instability must be unmissable: If readers have to work to find your tension, it’s not clear enough.
  5. Costs must be explicit: Implied stakes don’t work. Readers need to know specifically what they lose if this stays unresolved.
  6. Generic readers = no readers: “People interested in X” isn’t specific enough. Name the actual community.
  7. Skeptical readers are generous readers: Honest pushback helps more than polite validation.

The Readers Who Don’t Exist Yet: A Problem with Problems

Larry McEnerney’s insight—that academic writing exists to help readers understand better something they want to understand well—is more radical than it sounds. Most academic writing isn’t reader-centered at all. It’s résumé-centered. Look at what I know. Look at how smart I am. Look at my command of theory, my mastery of method, my original contribution. The text exists to credential the writer, not to help readers think.

So teaching reader-centered writing is already a corrective. It’s already asking writers to stop performing and start serving. To stop treating texts as monuments to individual brilliance and start treating them as tools for collective understanding.

But I keep thinking: What happens when the readers you need don’t exist yet?

McEnerney’s framework assumes a stable situation: there’s a community of readers who care about certain questions, and your job is to help them understand those questions better. You identify the instability they recognise (or should recognise), show them the costs of leaving it unresolved, and offer your work as a solution. The community’s interests are given. Your task is to serve them.

But what if you’re writing at a border?

What if you’re trying to understand something that doesn’t fit neatly into any existing disciplinary conversation? What if the readers who should care about your question are scattered across different fields, speaking different languages, asking questions that don’t quite connect? What if the very structure of how communities organise their care—what they think is worth understanding—is part of what needs to be rethought?

This isn’t a hypothetical problem. It’s the situation most interesting work finds itself in.

Think about writing that tries to hold Berlin and the Middle East together—not as separate objects of study (Berlin here, Middle East there) but as mutually constitutive, as folded into each other in ways that exceed disciplinary boundaries. Who are your readers? Middle East scholars? Urban studies people? Migration researchers? German historians? Each community has different stakes, different problems they recognise, different ways of deciding what counts as understanding.

You could write for one community, making your work legible to their concerns. But then you’d lose the other communities—and probably lose what’s most interesting about the work, which is precisely what exceeds any single disciplinary frame.

Or you could try to write for multiple communities at once. But then you face the translation problem: you’re constantly explaining to each community why they should care about what the other community cares about. The text becomes crowded with justifications, bridges, apologies for terminology. And still, readers from each community might feel like you’re not really writing for them.

Or—and this is what interests me—you could write for readers who don’t yet exist as a coherent community. Readers who are scattered across different fields but who might, if they read your work, start to recognise each other. Start to see that they’re asking related questions. Start to form a new community of concern.

But how do you write for readers who don’t exist yet?

This is where McEnerney’s framework strains. Because it assumes you can identify your readers, understand what they care about, and show them why your work matters to their existing concerns. But what if your work is trying to create new concerns? What if you’re not just helping readers understand better—you’re trying to change what they think is worth understanding at all?

McEnerney knows this problem exists. He mentions it briefly: sometimes a writer can change what a community cares about. But he’s clear this is “rare and difficult” and “carries serious danger.” Better to align your work with what readers already want to understand.

And he’s not wrong. Most work that tries to create entirely new problems fails. Readers don’t engage. Papers get rejected. Careers stall.

But if everyone follows this advice, how does intellectual change happen? How do new questions emerge? How do fields transform?

There’s a temporal paradox here. The work that most successfully serves existing readers’ interests is work that reinforces existing structures of attention. It makes incremental progress on problems the community already recognises. This is valuable—most knowledge advances this way. But it can’t disrupt. It can’t ask fundamentally new questions. It can’t point to instabilities the community doesn’t yet see as instabilities.

For that, you need writing that’s slightly out of phase with its moment. Writing that addresses problems readers don’t quite recognise yet. Writing that tries to create the community that would recognise it as valuable.

But this creates a cruel bind: that writing is most vulnerable to rejection precisely because it doesn’t meet readers where they are. It asks readers to become different kinds of readers. And that’s a hard ask when readers are busy, when they’re trained to scan for value quickly, when they’ll stop reading after two paragraphs if they don’t immediately see why your work matters to them.

So what do you do?

The standard moves are:

  • Frame your radical question as an answer to a recognised problem (smuggle in the new under cover of the familiar)
  • Build enough legitimacy through conventional work that you’ve earned the right to take risks
  • Find the one or two readers who already get it and write for them, hoping they’ll evangelise to others
  • Write at the border between fields where neither field fully controls what counts as legitimate questions

All of these can work. All of them are partial solutions.

But I wonder if there’s something else—something about the form itself.

What if you wrote texts that worked at multiple registers simultaneously? Not dumbing down for different audiences, but creating multiple entry points, multiple ways of caring about the question?

A text that could be read by Middle East scholars as a contribution to understanding diaspora. Could be read by urban studies people as a contribution to understanding how cities layer histories. Could be read by anthropologists as a contribution to understanding how people make homes in displacement. Could be read by German studies scholars as a contribution to understanding how Berlin carries its Eastern origins.

Not because you’re diluting each claim to make it palatable to everyone, but because you’re working at a level of complexity where the question genuinely matters across multiple frameworks.

This isn’t the same as interdisciplinary writing that tries to translate between fields. It’s something more like writing that thinks from the border itself—from the place where disciplinary languages break down and you have to find new ways of describing what you’re seeing.

Maybe the “problem” with McEnerney’s framework isn’t that it’s wrong, but that it assumes a stability that doesn’t exist for the most interesting intellectual work. It assumes you can identify your readers, understand their problems, and meet them where they are. But what if the most important work happens precisely when you can’t do that—when you’re writing for a community that doesn’t exist yet, when you’re trying to articulate problems that readers don’t recognize as problems, when you’re pointing to instabilities in the very structure of how we organise intellectual attention?

This isn’t an argument against reader-centered writing. Reader-centered writing is infinitely better – I think! – than ego-centered writing. But maybe we need a more complicated temporality. Maybe we need to ask: reader-centered for which readers? The readers who exist now, or the readers your work is trying to call into being?

And maybe we need forms that can work across that temporal gap—forms that meet some readers where they are while simultaneously inviting other readers to become something different. Forms that serve existing communities while also seeding new ones. Forms that are strategic enough to survive the present moment but ambitious enough to change what the next moment cares about.

I don’t know what those forms look like. I’m watching students walk Berlin, holding tensions that don’t yet have disciplinary homes, and I wonder what it would mean to teach them to write not just for existing readers but for the readers they’re trying to create. Not to abandon readers—that way lies irrelevance—but to understand writing as a practice of community-building rather than just community-serving.

Maybe that’s what all good academic writing has always done, quietly, without theorising it. Maybe the texts we remember aren’t the ones that most efficiently solved recognised problems, but the ones that changed what we thought was worth solving. The ones that created new readers by teaching us to care about questions we didn’t know were questions.

If that’s right, then McEnerney’s framework isn’t wrong—it’s incomplete. Yes, write for readers. Yes, help them understand better. But also: write to create new structures of attention. Write to change what counts as understanding. Write for the readers who will only exist if you write for them.

This is harder. More uncertain. More likely to fail. But maybe also more necessary—especially now, especially at the borders, especially when we’re trying to understand things that exceed the ways we’ve learned to organize knowledge.

Why Should Anybody Care About Your Tension?

November 5, 2025

Today’s session focused on a crucial shift in thinking about academic writing: moving from explaining what we know to creating problems that readers care about solving.

Opening Discussion: What IS the Function of Academic Writing?

We began by asking students what they think the function of academic writing is. The whiteboard captured a rich range of responses:

Students suggested academic writing functions:

  • To think
  • To express clearly
  • To present “objective” research
  • To prove/select ideas
  • To share new info/data
  • To open perspectives
  • To convince people
  • To add to conversation
  • To archive (what is wanted to be known)
  • For career/prestige/credibility
  • To show expertise
  • As control (of people)
  • To make money
  • To fill gaps
  • To entertain?

Bigger questions that emerged:

  • Is academia isolated from society?
  • What does academic writing matter to?
    • Individuals?
    • Institutions?
    • “The field”?
  • Why write at all?

Key tension identified: The difference between:

  • Writer’s purpose: to think about something (uses text as thinking tool)
  • Reader’s purpose: to learn about/understand something (uses text as learning tool)

This gave way to the core insight from Larry McEnerny’s writing programme at the University of Chicago: The function of academic writing is to help readers understand better something they want to understand well.

That’s only one way to look at it, of course 😉

Here’s a session with Larry McEnerny; you’ll see I cite him alot:


Key Examples Analysed

Example 1: The Clonal/Sexual Co-existence Problem

We looked at two versions of the same academic opening to see which created more value:

Version 1a (flat?):

As a consequence of the “cost of sex,” the theoretical probability of clonal and sexual co-existence is low; observation of co-existence in vertebrate taxa has been reported. Within the frozen niche-variation (FNV) model, the relevant parameter is difference in overall niche breadth. A wider niche breadth for the sexuals than for the clones is predicted in performance in monocultures; performances in mixtures do not indicate such a relationship. Switching of behaviors or resource-use patterns between mixed and pure cultures may be the cause. The proposed study will examine this prediction of the FNV model.

Version 1b (creates problem?):

As a consequence of the “cost of sex,” the theoretical probability of clonal and sexual co-existence is low. Nonetheless, observation of co-existence in vertebrate taxa has been widely reported. Within the accepted model of frozen niche-variation (FNV), co-existence is explained by difference in overall niche breadth. However, although the FNV model correctly predicts wider niche breadth for the sexuals than for the clones, its predictions are inconsistent with reported performances in mixtures. The proposed study will examine whether the anomaly may be explained by the switching of behaviors or resource-use patterns between mixed and pure cultures.

What makes 1b work differently?

  • Uses instability language: “Nonetheless,” “However,” “although,” “inconsistent,” “anomaly”
  • Creates tension between what we expect and what we observe
  • Shows that current models don’t fully explain the phenomenon

Example 2: William Sewell on Historical Events

We didn’t analyse this one during the session, but I think it’s a brilliant example of how to create a problem that looks like background but actually destabilises existing knowledge:

Ever since Herodotus, historians have written about events. Battles, alliances, scandals, conquests, conspiracies, revolts, royal successions, reforms, elections, religious revivals, assassinations, discoveries: momentous events have always been the bread and butter of narrative history. But despite the prominence of events in historical narratives, the event has rarely been scrutinized as a theoretical category. Traditional narrative historians who reveled in the contingency and particularity of events generally refused on principles to engage in explicit theorizing. Meanwhile, historical sociologists, along with the minority of historians who turned to the social sciences in order to escape the hegemony of political narrative, generally disdained the study of mere events and sought instead to discover general causal patterns underlying historical change. This was true of the “Annales school” in France from the late 1920s forward and of the ‘new social history” that blossomed in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s the old antagonisms between narrative history and historical sociology had begun to fade; yet theoretical work on historical events has remained relatively rare…

What’s happening here:

  • Looks like historical background
  • But actually creates instability: “despite the prominence… rarely scrutinized”
  • Shows cost: historians can’t adequately theorize major turning points
  • Identifies specific readers: historical sociologists

Example 3: The Erasmus Chronology Problem

It is a perennial paradox of Erasmus studies that neither the wealth of autobiographical information that the Dutch humanist has left us nor the enormous mass of scholarly literature that has grown up around his life and works has ever given us a firm grip on the year of his birth and the chronology of his youth. We do not know with certainty, for example, how old Erasmus was when he entered Steyn monastery…

Key move: The instability is already recognised by the community (“perennial paradox”), so the writer just reminds readers of it.


Example 4: Caribbean Foreign Policy

What is missing [in the study of the international relations of the Caribbean] are the same things that are missing in the study of Third World or Latin American foreign policy and international relations as a whole: Most of what is written is country-specific or issue-specific rather than general and comprehensive; most is descriptive rather than theoretical. The challenge is to put together what we know into a plausible whole, within a suitable theoretical framework, as a first step in developing theory…

But readers may well ask: Why is it important to… to study Third World policy with some rigor… Is it of any great significance…? Apart from the obvious value of supplying knowledge to those who want it, the study of Third World foreign policy should assist in the building and refining of international relations “middle-range” theory. The sub-field of international relations that is most clearly linked to such study is that of comparative foreign policy… Also of relevance is the field of decision-making…the realm of process…

What’s happening:

  • Identifies gap/instability
  • Anticipates reader skepticism: “But readers may well ask…”
  • Has to work harder to show costs/benefits because it’s a gap problem
  • Names specific theoretical benefits to specific sub-fields

Example 5: The Book of Amos – De-stabilizing Stasis

In recent years several attempts have been made to discover an overall structural pattern in the book of Amos. Certainly inspired by the burgeoning interest in “literary approaches” to the Bible, these studies have divided Amos into a relatively small number of extended sections, each of which (it is claimed) has a high degree of literary integrity. A comparison of these studies, however, soon reveals considerable diversity among them. Thus, to look no further than the authors mentioned in footnote 1, the following divergent analyses of chaps. 3-6 have been proposed:

Hayes: [pattern #1]
Andersen and Freedman: [pattern #2]
Dorsey: [pattern #3]

The only points these scholars are all agreed on are that 5:1 begins a new section (although I shall argue below that in fact it does not) and that 6:14 closes a section (which has long been recognized by all commentators).

The main reason for this diversity, in my view, is that insufficient attention has been given to the criteria for making such analyses. In particular: (i) Formal criteria, such as introductory and closing formulas, have been given much greater prominence than they merit. (ii) Literary criteria, such as palistrophic structuring and inclusos, have often been employed too loosely and impressionistically.

In the present article, I shall offer a new analysis which, through giving particular attention to thematic considerations, will argue that Amos consists of a…

What’s happening here:

  • Sets up what looks like stable knowledge: “several attempts have been made”
  • Then de-stabilises it: “however, soon reveals considerable diversity”
  • Shows the cost: scholars can’t agree because their methods are flawed
  • This is a stasis → de-stabilising move rather than just pointing to an existing instability

The Three Components of a Problem

1. INSTABILITY

  • Something doesn’t fit
  • Something contradicts something else
  • Something is inconsistent
  • Signal words: however, although, nonetheless, but, paradox, anomaly, inconsistent, reported, widely accepted

2. COSTS/BENEFITS (to readers)

  • What can’t we understand if we leave this unstable?
  • What would we gain by resolving it?
  • NOT “I won’t finish my degree”
  • NOT “I find this interesting”
  • But: “This prevents us from understanding X that the community cares about”

3. READERS

  • Specific communities
  • Who cares about this?
  • Whose understanding needs to be better?

Gap vs. Problem: The Crucial Difference

Gap thinking: “No one has written about Syrian grocery stores in Neukölln.” → SO WHAT? There are infinite things we haven’t written about.

Problem thinking: “We think we understand how diaspora communities maintain identity through food practices, but the Syrian groceries in Neukölln challenge this model because…” → NOW you’re showing that the gap has consequences for something readers care about.

Gap = “here’s something we don’t know” Problem = “here’s why not knowing hurts our understanding of something we care about”


Work to Do During the Next Week (November 6-18)

Since we won’t meet next week, use this time for two activities:

Activity 1: Find the Problem Language

Take 2-3 published articles related to your field or topic. Read just the introductions and:

  • Circle the instability words: however, although, nonetheless, inconsistent, paradox, anomaly, reported, widely accepted
  • Locate where costs/benefits are articulated
  • Identify who the readers are

Notice the patterns. What language does your field use to create problems?

Also notice that maybe many academic papers do not use problem language at all – and maybe that’s a problem 😉

Activity 2: Test Your Own Tension

Write responses to these three questions about your Berlin tension:

  1. Instability: What exactly doesn’t fit in your tension? (Use instability language: however, although, but…)
  2. Costs: What can’t we understand if we leave this unresolved? (What intellectual cost does the COMMUNITY bear – not you personally?)
  3. Readers: Who are three specific people/groups who would care about resolving this tension? Why would they care?

If possible, share your answers with a fellow students and test whether your costs actually land with readers. Does someone else see why this matters?

A note: You might discover as you do this that the topic you want to write about is actually more about what you’re interested in, or what you want to use to demonstrate your knowledge, qualifications, or expertise. That’s completely okay. That’s how most of us have been trained in academia, and we can do this well.

But in this course, I’m asking you to try something different: to experiment with reader-centered writing. To see what happens when you start from what readers need to understand rather than what you want to show them you know. It’s a different muscle, and it takes practice. This course is the space to try it.

Then: Write your 3-4 page draft (see full assignment details above)


Assignment for November 19th

Write a 3-4 page draft

NOT necessarily the beginning of your paper. Instead:

Pick one moment from your walking where your tension became visible. A specific place, observation, encounter, reading, source etc. that made the tension real.

Write 3-4 pages describing that moment and exploring what made it a problem of understanding – not just something you noticed, but something that created instability in how we think we understand Berlin or/and the Middle East // the Middle East in Berlin.

As you write, keep asking:

  • What doesn’t fit here?
  • Why should readers care that it doesn’t fit?
  • What can’t we understand properly if we leave this tension unresolved?

Don’t worry about:

  • Perfect structure
  • Citations yet
  • Whether this is “academic enough”
  • Starting at the beginning

DO worry about:

  • Making the instability visible
  • Showing why it matters
  • Writing toward specific readers (even if you’re not sure who they are yet)

Bring this draft in a format that you can share with fellow students on November 19th.


Looking Ahead to November 19th

Next session focus: Who are you writing for, and can they see why this matters?

We’ll work in pairs or groups or alone to:

  • Identify who your specific readers are
  • Test whether your instability creates costs they actually care about
  • Practice addressing instabilities that help readers understand something better

The question we’ll be asking: Does your writing fulfill its function of helping specific readers understand better something they want to understand well?


Key Takeaways

  1. Function over form: Academic writing’s job is to help readers understand better, not to explain what you know.
  2. Problems, not gaps: Don’t just identify what we don’t know. Show why not knowing matters.
  3. Instability language matters: Words like “however,” “although,” “inconsistent” signal to readers that there’s a problem worth solving.
  4. Costs must be to readers, not writers: “I need to graduate” is not a reason for readers to care. “We can’t adequately theorise X” might be.
  5. Background creates stability, problems need instability: Don’t start with what we all agree on. Start with what doesn’t work.

When Your Normal Becomes Someone Else’s Problem

I live in Steglitz. Not the part of Berlin that anyone means when they talk about the “problem in the Stadtbild.” Not Neukölln or Wedding or Kreuzberg—the neighborhoods where the so-called issue apparently lives.

Which means I’m thinking about this controversy from a position of remove. I’m not watching my own street get turned into evidence. I’m reading about other people’s neighbourhoods being marked as problems.

And there’s something about that distance that keeps bothering me.

In one of the last weeks Chancellor Merz said there’s still a “problem in the cityscape” that needs addressing—through “removing” that what disturbs the Stadtbild he means. Within 24 hours, ten thousands of people signed a petition. Protests erupted with signs reading “Wir sind das Stadtbild”—”We are the cityscape.”

I’ve been trying to understand what “problem in the cityscape” means as a description of what’s actually there versus what someone thinks should be there. And I keep coming back to the question of who gets to not-notice.

Because here’s the thing: I don’t think about the “look” of Steglitz very much. It’s just where I live. The streets are familiar to the point of invisibility. I know which bakery has better bread, which café has the window seat I like, where the U-Bahn entrance is that’s slightly closer to my flat.

None of this registers as a “cityscape” to me. It’s just the unremarkable ordinary of daily life.

There’s a concept in anthropology—Bourdieu, I think—about how habituation makes the social world feel natural. You stop seeing the constructed nature of things because familiarity renders them invisible. What’s around you just becomes background, the taken-for-granted texture of existence.

But habituation is never neutral. What you get to stop noticing depends entirely on your position.

I get to experience Steglitz as just where I live, unmarked and unremarkable, because neighbourhoods that look like mine aren’t the ones being discussed when people talk about problems in the cityscape. The visual field of my daily life—the shop signs, the languages in cafés, the people on the street—apparently codes as “normal” in whatever framework produces the category “problem.”

I didn’t choose this. I’m not claiming credit for it. But I benefit from it. My neighbourhood gets to be invisible in the sense that matters: it’s not being marked as evidence of anything wrong with Germany (except for high rents maybe).

Meanwhile, people in Neukölln or Wedding—neighbourhoods I rarely go to compared to Kreuzberg, Schöneberg or Charlottenburg, if I’m being honest—are living in spaces that someone in government has decided to name as visual problems. Their daily ordinary has been turned into a crisis requiring state intervention.

And I’m sitting here in Steglitz trying to think through what that means.

There’s something about distance that feels both necessary and suspect. Necessary because I need some remove to think clearly, to not just react emotionally. Suspect because thinking clearly from a position of safety is itself a kind of privilege. The people whose neighbourhoods are being marked as problems don’t easily get the luxury of intellectual (and physical) distance.

I keep trying to imagine what it would feel like if someone in government looked at Steglitz and said it had a “problem” that required—well, let’s name it more bluntly—deportation. If my unremarkable ordinary—the bakery, the café, the familiar streets—suddenly became evidence of something wrong.

But I can’t quite get there. Because the framework that produces the Stadtbild as a “problem” isn’t aimed at neighbourhoods that look like mine. It’s aimed at visibility of a particular kind: Turkish script, Arabic conversations, the aesthetic presence of people marked as somehow not-quite-German-enough in the ideas of Merz.

This is what I keep getting stuck on: the politics of what becomes background and what stays foreground.

In visual perception studies they track eye movements to see what people actually look at in an image. What registers as important, what gets skipped over, how long attention rests on different elements. And it turns out people trained in different ways literally see different things in the same visual field.

But those are productive forms of trained attention. They help you notice what matters for your work, your discipline, your purposes.

What happens when the trained attention is aimed at deciding who belongs? When the framework is designed not to understand but to mark certain presences as disruptions?

I think this is what Stadtbild as a political term does. It creates a particular way of seeing urban space. It makes some things hypervisible (Turkish shops, Arabic conversations, headscarves) while rendering other things invisible (the economic structures producing gentrification, the history of guest worker programmes, the reality that Berlin has always been multiple cities layered over each other).

And once that framework exists, once someone has named certain neighbourhoods as having a “problem,” you can’t unhear it. The category persists. It shapes how people see, how they talk, what solutions seem reasonable.

From here in Steglitz, I can think about this somewhat abstractly. I can read about protests in other neighbourhoods. I can try to analyse the frameworks and the politics and the differential distribution of whose presence gets marked as normal versus problematic.

But I’m also aware that my ability to think about it abstractly is itself produced by distance. I’m not (usually) the one being looked at. My neighbourhood isn’t the one being turned into evidence. I get to be the one analysing rather than the one being analysed.

And I don’t know what to do with that asymmetry except notice it.

There’s something Marx said about ideology—that it makes the historical appear natural, the constructed seem inevitable. The framework that produces “Stadtbild problems” works the same way. It treats a particular vision of what Berlin should look like as if it’s just describing what’s normal, what’s proper, what belongs. As if saying “there’s a problem in the cityscape” is a neutral observation rather than a strong political claim.

But neutrality is always someone’s particular position claiming to be universal.

My neighbourhood gets to be neutral. Gets to be unmarked. Gets to just exist without justification or explanation or defense. Other neighbourhoods don’t have that luxury. They’re marked, noticed, turned into sites where the question of belonging gets fought over.

I wonder sometimes what it would take for Steglitz to become a “problem” in someone’s framework. What would have to change—or what shift in political rhetoric, what new way of seeing—for my unremarkable ordinary to suddenly become evidence requiring intervention.

But that’s probably the wrong question. Because the framework isn’t really about what’s actually there in any neighbourhood. It’s about power. About who gets to define normal, who gets to mark deviation, who gets to decide what counts as the proper look of a city.

The protests said “Wir sind das Stadtbild”—we ARE the cityscape. Present tense. Not asking for inclusion, but refusing the framework that treats their presence as a problem requiring solutions.

And I’m here in Steglitz, not in those protests, not in those neighbourhoods, trying to figure out what my relationship is to all of this. What it means to be the one whose neighbourhood gets to be invisible, unremarkable, unproblematic. What responsibility comes with that particular form of habituation.

I don’t think the answer is guilt. That’s too easy, too self-focused. And I don’t think the answer is just being a good ally or showing up at protests, though maybe that’s part of it.

I think maybe the answer—if there is one—is about learning to see your own seeing. Recognising that what feels neutral to you is produced by a particular framework. Noticing that your habituation, your ability to not-notice, is itself political.

And then—this is the harder part—figuring out what to do with that knowledge.

I’m still living in Steglitz. Still experiencing it as just where I live, unremarkable and ordinary. I can’t stop that habituation through force of will. Can’t make myself constantly notice the privilege of being unmarked.

But I can notice when someone marks other neighbourhoods as problems. I can notice the framework being deployed. I can refuse to treat that framework as neutral description rather than political claim.

Maybe that’s all there is. Maybe that’s where the work starts: in the gap between frameworks, in the moment when you realise your normal is produced by the same system that marks someone else’s normal as crisis.

I don’t know if that’s enough. Probably it isn’t. But it’s what I have from here, from this position, from this particular distance.

The view from Steglitz. Unmarked, unremarkable, complicit.

Writing Berlin: On Disciplinary Seeing

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

There’s something strange about asking people to name their discipline and say how it looks at cities. The strangeness is that most of us don’t realize we have a discipline until someone asks us to articulate it. We just think we’re looking at the world. We don’t notice we’re looking *through* something.

Today we made that looking-through visible. And what became clear is that disciplines aren’t just different areas of expertise—they’re different forms of attention. Anthropology trains you to see power and exclusion. Sound studies trains you to hear what others walk past. History trains you to notice what persists and what gets erased. Each discipline is a technology for rendering certain things visible while making other things recede into background noise.

This matters because we’re asking a question that every discipline thinks it can answer: What survives in cities? But “survival” means completely different things depending on which disciplinary lens you’re wearing.

For someone trained in economics, survival is about market durability, about businesses that persist through waves of rising rents. For someone trained in literary studies, survival is about whose stories continue to be told, whose voices remain audible. For someone doing ethnographic work, survival is about everyday practices that continue even when everything visible seems to have changed. For someone thinking about heritage and memory, survival is about what gets marked, memorialized, acknowledged as having been here.

These aren’t complementary answers to the same question. They’re different questions masquerading as the same one.

What always strucks me is a certain anxiety around claiming disciplinary expertise. People start with qualifications—”Well, I’m sort of in anthropology but…” or “I guess you could say I’m working in the humanities, though…” This hedging isn’t just modesty. It’s uncertainty about whether you’re allowed to speak from within a discipline if you’re also questioning it, borrowing from elsewhere, working across boundaries.

But that uncertainty is productive. It means people are already sensing the limits of their frameworks. They’re already aware that their discipline gives them permission to see certain things but also restricts what they’re capable of seeing.

When people shared their initial writing, the gaps became audible. “Wait, you noticed the memorial plaques? I walked past those every day and never registered them.” “You’re asking about economic relationships? I was only thinking about social function.” The blind spots weren’t failures—they were the inevitable result of having trained attention in one frequency while becoming deaf to others.

This is what disciplinary training does: it gives you high resolution in certain frequencies and renders you nearly deaf to others. You become exquisitely attuned to particular kinds of evidence, particular forms of change, particular types of relationships. And you stop registering what falls outside that bandwidth.

The question is whether we can become conscious of this without trying to transcend it. Because you can’t study everything from everywhere. You can’t attend to all frequencies simultaneously. You need the discipline to see anything at all. But you also need to know what your particular bandwidth leaves out.

The word *Stadtbild* came up—cityscape—and it hung in the air differently this week because of what’s happening in German politics. Chancellor Merz suggesting there’s a “problem in the cityscape” that requires deportations. Protests responding “We are the cityscape.” The controversy makes visible what’s usually invisible: that describing what you see in a city is never neutral description. It’s always already a claim about what should be there, whose presence counts as normal, whose presence registers as disruption.

This is what happens when frameworks become invisible to themselves. When one particular way of seeing—nationalist, rooted in imagined ethnic coherence—presents itself as just describing what’s there rather than making a political claim about what should be there. When the discipline stops being a lens and starts pretending to be reality itself.

So we’re asking people to stay conscious of their lenses. Not to abandon them—you need them to see anything at all. But to recognize them as choices, not inevitabilities. To know what they illuminate and what they obscure. To be honest about the partiality of their view while still doing rigorous work within that partial perspective.

Because cities are too complex for any single approach to capture. You need economic analysis and attention to practice and historical perspective and sensitivity to narrative. You need all of it. But you can’t do it simultaneously. So you choose where to focus, you follow a specific question, and you acknowledge what your choice leaves out.

The work ahead is partly about developing these specific questions—making them sharp, making them matter. But it’s also about learning to see your own seeing. Learning to recognize when your discipline is giving you insight and when it’s giving you blindness.

That’s harder than it sounds. Because disciplines don’t just shape what we look at. They shape what we’re capable of looking at. They structure perception itself.

Assignment for November 5

Write 2-3 pages responding to:

Why should anyone care about your question? What’s at stake if we ignore this tension? What might we understand differently if we pay attention to it?

Don’t just say “it’s interesting.” Make a case for why it’s important.

Think about:

  • What larger patterns or processes does your specific question illuminate?
  • Who is affected by ignoring this question?
  • What assumptions might we need to reconsider if we take your question seriously?
  • How might answering your question change how we see cities, survival, community, or power?

Three References Worth Knowing

Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991): On creating temporary spaces of autonomy outside state control. Useful if you’re thinking about how communities create their own spaces and practices in the gaps of official structures.

Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001): Ethnographic account of daily life in a small Chinese city undergoing rapid transformation. Useful if you’re interested in how everyday observation can reveal larger patterns of change, loss, and survival.

Jean Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1948): Exploring the idea of committed literature (littérature engagée).

You don’t need to read these, but they represent different approaches to urban space, time, and agency that might inform your thinking.

Next session: Wednesday, November 5, 10am-12pm

Writing Berlin – Session cancelled today, task for next week

Dear all,

I’m sorry to say I’m still not well enough to teach today, so we need to cancel our session this morning.

We’ll resume next Wednesday, October 29, 10-12, same room.

Since we’re missing our session on disciplinary approaches today, I want to give you something to work on in the meantime that will help us move forward when we meet next week.

Task for October 29

Between now and next Wednesday, I want you to do two things:

1. Think about how your field (or a field that you know well or like) studies cities

Reflect on the question we would have explored today: How does your discipline approach urban spaces? What methods, concepts, or frameworks does it use? What questions does it ask? What does it help you see—and what might it miss?

You don’t need to write this up formally, just think about it. Maybe jot down some notes for yourself.

2. Write 1-2 pages before class next week

Respond to this prompt:

“Think about Berlin—neighborhoods you’ve walked through, spaces you’ve encountered. What tension, pattern, or question about what survives (or doesn’t survive) in this city catches your attention? What makes you curious? What bothers you or puzzles you?”

Don’t worry about framing it in disciplinary terms yet. Don’t worry about being profound or academic. Just write honestly about what draws your attention when you think about survival, persistence, or disappearance in this city.

Bring this writing to class on October 29. We’ll work with it together to help you identify your specific angle on our shared question: What survives in cities?

A suggestion

If you’re stuck, go for a walk this week. Go somewhere in Berlin you’ve been meaning to explore, or somewhere familiar that you can look at with fresh eyes. Notice what catches your attention (especially also if you have started reading one of the three books from the explorations course already). What makes you pause? What makes you wonder?

Sometimes the best writing comes from genuine curiosity about something you’ve actually encountered, not from trying to think of a “good academic topic.”

I apologize again for the disruption. Take care of yourselves, and I’ll see you next Wednesday (or Tuesday for the Beyond course).

Best,
Victoria

Writing Berlin: What we discussed + next week’s assignment

Dear all,

Thank you for the engaged conversation today about writing as discovery. It was fascinating to hear the different tensions you’re noticing about urban life—from questions of visibility and erasure to patterns of displacement and belonging to the persistence of certain stories over others.

What We Explored Yesterday

We started with the question of what writing actually does—not just as a way of communicating what we already know, but as a tool for discovering what we think. Writing helps us see patterns we hadn’t noticed, make connections that weren’t obvious, and find questions we didn’t know we were asking.

The central question for this course is: What survives in cities?

Each of you will investigate this question from your own perspective and background over the semester, developing a substantial piece of writing (4,000-6,000 words) that approaches the question through your particular lens, using Berlin as your case study.

You may work and write in teams. The piece of writing is open to many different formats.

The early weeks (the next 4-5 sessions) will help you find your specific angle on this shared question. Then the course opens up—we’ll meet every few weeks to share drafts, problems, and discoveries, functioning more like a research community than a traditional seminar.

For Next Week (Oct 22, Wed 10-12)

Assignment: Bring one example of how your field studies cities—or a field that you like or in which you are interested.

This could be:

  • A book chapter or article that exemplifies the discipline’s approach to urban spaces
  • A specific method or framework the field uses
  • A key concept or theory
  • Even just a way of asking questions that’s typical of the discipline

Come prepared to share it briefly (5 minutes) with the group. We’ll discuss: What does each approach try to answer? What does it reveal? What might it miss?

You don’t need to prepare a presentation—just be ready to talk about it conversationally.

Looking Ahead

Our schedule for the next few weeks:

  • Oct 22: Disciplinary approaches to cities
  • Oct 29: Identifying your specific tension
  • Nov 5: Why should anyone care? What’s at stake?
  • Nov 12: Continue development

Then we’ll meet every 2-3 weeks as you work independently on your writing.

A Reminder

If you’re thinking “I don’t know enough about Berlin yet” or “I’m not sure what my discipline would say about this”—that’s completely normal. You don’t need to know yet. That’s what the semester is for.

Keep the question with you this week: What survives in cities? Let it follow you around. Notice what it makes you pay attention to.

See you Wednesday, Victoria


P.S. If you’re having trouble finding an example from your field, or if you’re not sure what “your field” even is yet, that’s fine—just bring your uncertainty and we’ll work with it.

Architectural Thinking: Reimagining the Broken Structures of Academic Writing

Last semester, I watched a brilliant student struggle with her dissertation structure for months. Despite having compelling research and sharp insights, she couldn’t find a way to organize her material that felt both intellectually honest and academically legitimate. “I feel like I’m trying to force my ideas into someone else’s house,” she told me, “and none of the rooms are the right shape.” Her frustration stayed with me, crystallizing something I’ve been uncomfortable with for years: the rigid architectural templates we impose on academic writing often undermine rather than serve the knowledge we’re trying to create.

The metaphor of architecture seems particularly apt when thinking about academic writing. We speak of “building” arguments, creating “frameworks,” establishing “foundations,” and designing “structures” for our texts. This language isn’t accidental—it reflects deep assumptions about what scholarly writing should be: solid, stable, carefully engineered, and built to withstand scrutiny. There’s value in this approach, certainly. But I’ve come to believe that our attachment to conventional textual architectures often constrains thinking rather than supporting it. Perhaps it’s time to question the blueprints we’ve inherited.

Gloria Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking work “Borderlands/La Frontera” fundamentally challenged these inherited structures. By blending poetry, memoir, historical analysis, and cultural theory—switching between languages and refusing to separate the personal from the theoretical—she created a form that accurately reflected her content: the experience of existing between cultures, languages, and identities. Reading her work for the first time was revelatory for me. It demonstrated how structure itself could be an argument, how the organization of a text could do intellectual work beyond merely containing ideas. Why, I wondered, was this approach so rare in academic writing?

The conventional architecture of scholarly writing emerged from specific historical contexts and served particular purposes. The familiar IMRaD structure (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) reflected positivist assumptions about knowledge production that made sense for certain kinds of scientific inquiry. The problem isn’t that these structures exist—it’s that they’ve been universalized and naturalized, applied uncritically across disciplines with wildly different epistemological foundations. We’ve mistaken one architectural style for the only legitimate way to build scholarly knowledge.

I recall submitting an article to a prestigious journal early in my career, experimenting with a more recursive, reflective structure that mirrored the iterative nature of my research process. The rejection letter was polite but clear: the reviewers found the structure “confusing” and suggested I reorganize into standard sections. I complied, of course—tenure was at stake—but something important was lost in the translation. The conventional structure flattened the complexity of the research experience, presented as linear and orderly what had been anything but. I’ve often wondered how much knowledge we lose by forcing complex ideas into standardized forms.

Adrienne Rich wrote about “the dream of a common language,” a phrase that has always resonated with me. Academic writing conventions aspire to something similar—a common architectural language that allows scholars to communicate across differences. There’s undeniable utility in this. When we know what to expect from a text’s organization, we can more easily locate information, evaluate arguments, and engage with ideas. But whose conventions have become standard? Whose ways of organizing knowledge have been marginalized? These questions seem especially important for those of us working in interdisciplinary fields, where no single structural approach fully accommodates the complexity of our research.

Perhaps what we need is a more flexible understanding of scholarly architecture—less like modern skyscrapers with their rigid grids and more like vernacular architectures that respond to local conditions, materials, and needs. I think of Zora Neale Hurston’s methodological innovations in “Mules and Men,” where she created a nested structure of stories within stories that perfectly captured the oral tradition she was documenting. The form wasn’t arbitrary or decorative; it was integral to the knowledge being conveyed. What might academic writing look like if we approached structure with this kind of intentionality and creativity?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting we abandon structure altogether—that would be neither possible nor desirable. Architecture, whether in buildings or texts, is necessary. It creates spaces for ideas to inhabit, pathways for readers to follow, and points of connection between concepts. But I am suggesting that we might hold our structural conventions more lightly, seeing them as possibilities rather than requirements, as tools rather than rules. The question shouldn’t be “Does this follow the standard format?” but rather “Does this structure serve the knowledge I’m trying to create and share?”

This shift requires a different kind of architectural thinking—one that begins with the specific knowledge being developed rather than with predetermined blueprints. It means asking: What structure would best reflect the relationships between these ideas? How can the organization of this text enact the theoretical frameworks I’m employing? What would make this argument not just clear but compelling, not just logical but alive? These questions invite us to see structure as an integral part of the argument rather than a neutral container for it.

I’ve been experimenting with this approach in my own writing, with mixed results. Some readers find it refreshing; others find it disorienting. I sympathize with both reactions. When we encounter unfamiliar textual architectures, we must work harder as readers, developing new navigational strategies rather than relying on established conventions. Is it fair to ask this of our audiences? I’m not always sure. But I’m increasingly convinced that some ideas simply cannot be adequately expressed within conventional structures, that some knowledge requires new forms to be fully realized.

Susan Leigh Star’s work on “boundary objects” offers a useful concept here. Boundary objects are things that maintain a common identity across different contexts while being adapted to local needs—flexible enough to accommodate different perspectives but robust enough to maintain coherence. Perhaps academic structures could function more like boundary objects: recognizable enough to facilitate communication while adaptable enough to accommodate diverse ways of knowing. This seems particularly important in an era of increasing interdisciplinarity, when scholars are working across traditional boundaries and bringing different structural logics into conversation.

I think about my struggling student often, wondering what might have happened if she’d been encouraged to design a structure specifically for her unique research rather than trying to fit her ideas into pre-existing containers. What knowledge might have emerged more clearly? What connections might have become visible? What arguments might have been more persuasive? These aren’t just questions about writing; they’re questions about how we produce, validate, and share knowledge in the academy.

The stakes of these questions extend beyond individual scholarly careers. Academic architecture reflects and reinforces hierarchies of knowledge—determining whose ideas count, which approaches are legitimate, what kinds of evidence matter. Audre Lorde’s famous statement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” seems relevant here. If we’re serious about creating more inclusive, equitable academic spaces, we must reconsider not just what we study but how we structure what we learn. The architecture of our texts matters because it shapes what can be thought, said, and known.

I’m not naive about institutional constraints. Journals have submission guidelines, dissertation committees have expectations, and hiring committees have limited time to evaluate unfamiliar formats. Working within these realities is necessary for many scholars, especially those without the protection of tenure or institutional prestige. But even small architectural experiments—a reflexive section here, a narrative interlude there—can create spaces for different kinds of knowledge to emerge. And those with more security can push harder, creating precedents that make space for others.

Ultimately, what I’m advocating is a more conscious, intentional relationship to the structures of academic writing—one that recognizes their power and approaches them as creative possibilities rather than fixed requirements. In architecture, form follows function; in academic writing, structure should follow substance. Our ideas deserve houses built to their exact specifications, with rooms that accommodate their particular shapes. Isn’t it time we became more thoughtful builders?

The Subtle Art of Crafting Researchable Questions: Beyond Academic Formulas

I’ve been thinking a lot about research questions lately—not just as academic exercises, but as genuine attempts to make sense of the world. Last week, as I was guiding my graduate students through their thesis proposals, I realized something: most of us struggle profoundly with formulating questions that are both intellectually rigorous and practically researchable. We either swing wildly toward the grandiose (“How has globalization transformed human consciousness?”) or retreat into the painfully narrow (“How many times does the word ‘sovereignty’ appear in Johnson’s 2018 speech?”). Finding that middle ground—that sweet spot where curiosity meets feasibility—seems to elude even the most brilliant minds.

This challenge reminds me of Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges,” which has shaped my thinking since I first encountered it in graduate school. Haraway argues that all knowledge is produced from somewhere—from a specific position that is never neutral or all-seeing. Our research questions emerge from our particular locations in the world, colored by our experiences, assumptions, and blind spots. I think this perspective offers a valuable entry point into thinking about what makes a question not just answerable but worth answering. When we acknowledge the situatedness of our inquiries, we can more honestly assess both their limitations and their potential contributions.

Perhaps what makes question formulation so difficult is that it requires holding contradictory impulses in tension. A good research question must be specific enough to be feasible yet open enough to yield meaningful insights. It must be original yet grounded in existing scholarship. It must reflect your personal interests while speaking to broader academic and social concerns. I remember spending months iterating through versions of my dissertation question, each attempt feeling either too ambitious or too trivial. My advisor finally told me something I now share with my own students: “Your question won’t be perfect. It just needs to be good enough to guide meaningful research.”

That advice shifted something for me. I started to see the research question not as a perfect crystallization of intellectual brilliance, but as a tool—imperfect but useful, provisional but necessary. Rebecca Solnit captures this sensibility beautifully in her essay “Woolf’s Darkness,” where she writes about the value of uncertainty: “To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.” Good research questions, I’ve come to believe, embrace this productive uncertainty. They open spaces for exploration rather than prescribing conclusions.

What does this look like in practice? I think it means moving beyond the formulaic approach often taught in research methods courses. Those approaches have their place—particularly for students learning the basics of research design—but they can sometimes flatten the intellectual vibrancy that makes research worthwhile. Sara Ahmed’s work offers a compelling alternative. In her book “Living a Feminist Life,” she demonstrates how research questions can emerge organically from our encounters with the world, from moments when something doesn’t quite make sense or when accepted explanations feel insufficient. Her questions arise from her lived experience while simultaneously challenging dominant frameworks of understanding.

I’ve noticed in my own work that my most productive questions often begin not with grand theoretical ambitions but with genuine puzzlement. Why did this particular policy intervention succeed when similar ones failed? How do researchers in different disciplines approach the same phenomenon so differently? What explains the persistent gap between stated institutional values and actual practices? These questions don’t necessarily follow the textbook formula of independent and dependent variables, but they’ve led me to insights I couldn’t have anticipated.

The challenge, of course, is transforming these initial curiosities into questions that can actually guide systematic inquiry. This is where craft comes in. I sometimes think of it as sculpting—starting with a rough shape and gradually refining it, removing excess material until the essential form emerges. It requires patience and a willingness to discard earlier versions that no longer serve. It also requires a certain comfort with imperfection, with the knowledge that even our most carefully crafted questions will inevitably miss something important.

I used to think this kind of question formulation was a preliminary stage of research—something to get right before the “real work” began. Now I see it as an ongoing process, one that continues throughout a project as our understanding deepens and shifts. Judith Butler’s approach in “Gender Trouble” exemplifies this iterative process. Her central questions about gender and performance weren’t formulated once and then methodically answered; they evolved as her exploration progressed, opening new lines of inquiry that she couldn’t have anticipated at the outset.

Maybe that’s the most important shift in my thinking: seeing research questions not as fixed destinations but as evolving companions in a journey of understanding. They guide us while being transformed by what we discover along the way. The art lies not in formulating the perfect question from the start, but in developing questions that are alive enough to grow with us.

As I work with students now, I try to encourage this more dynamic, emergent approach to questioning. Rather than pushing them toward premature precision, I ask: What genuinely puzzles you? What assumption would you like to test? Whose perspective is missing from current accounts? What would make your research matter to someone besides yourself and your committee? These questions don’t always yield immediately researchable formulations, but they often lead to more authentic and meaningful inquiry.

I’ve found that the most researchable questions often emerge at the intersection of disciplinary conversations. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s development of intersectionality theory arose from her recognition that neither feminist theory nor critical race theory alone could adequately address the experiences of Black women. Her research questions emerged from this gap, this space between established frameworks. Similarly, some of the most compelling work I’ve seen from students happens when they notice connections or contradictions between different bodies of literature and allow themselves to be puzzled by them.

These reflections don’t offer a neat formula for crafting researchable questions—and maybe that’s the point. Perhaps what we need isn’t another technique but a different orientation: more curiosity and less certainty, more patience with the messy process of refinement, more trust in our capacity to follow questions where they lead. Research, at its best, isn’t about confirming what we already know but about venturing into uncertainty with thoughtful questions as our guides. Doesn’t that seem like a more honest way to approach knowledge-making? I think so, though I’m still figuring it out myself.