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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.

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?