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Map a supply chain backwards

You’ve been walking, documenting contamination, looking at what emerges from disturbance. Now I want you to do something different: trace value backwards through a chain of translation.

Imagine this idea from Tsing’s book: Matsutake mushrooms move from Oregon forests → Japanese wholesalers → Tokyo restaurants. At each point, the mushroom is re-valued. What it “is” changes. A picker sees food/money. A wholesaler sees inventory/risk. A chef sees tradition/season. The mushroom is the same object, but its meaning gets translated at each node.

She calls this “salvage accumulation”—capitalism extracting value from non-capitalist spaces by translating across incommensurable systems. The matsutake has value because it connects worlds that don’t speak the same language.

Your task:

Pick ONE object you can buy in Berlin that connects to the Middle East. Not “Middle Eastern food” (too general, too obvious). Something weirder: a cheap plastic toy, a specific spice, a building material, fabric, a phone card, a remittance service, knock-off electronics, cooking oil, cement, …

Then trace it backwards:

  1. Where/how did you encounter it? (Which shop, which neighbourhood, what context?)
  2. Who sold it to you? What did they say about it/price it as?
  3. Where did THEY get it? (Ask them. Actually ask. Document the conversation.)
  4. Keep going back: distributor → importer → manufacturer → materials

At each translation point, document:

  • How is value measured here? (price? weight? authenticity? legality? convenience?)
  • What does the object “mean” at this node? (What category does it belong to?)
  • What knowledge is required to make this translation work? (Whose metis?)
  • What gets lost/transformed in the translation?

The challenge: You probably can’t trace the whole chain. You’ll hit a wall—someone who won’t tell you, records that don’t exist, a border where information stops. Document where the chain becomes opaque and why.

What could be worth to bring to the next sessions:

  • Your map/diagram of the chain (visual, not just text)
  • One paragraph: What does this object’s journey teach you about how value crosses incommensurable worlds?
  • One question: Where in this chain does Scott’s “legibility” break down—and who benefits from that opacity?

When communication fails on purpose

Schlanger shows plants making decisions, communicating chemically, responding to each other. But what about communication that’s meant NOT to be understood?

Consider: A plant releases a chemical signal that warns others of herbivore attack. But releasing that signal also attracts the herbivore’s attention—it’s a risk. Some plants don’t warn. Some warn selectively. Some produce signals only certain neighbors can detect.

Or: Mycelium networks connect trees, but not all trees equally. Some connections are cut off. Some signals aren’t shared.

The provocation:

What if successful communication isn’t about being understood by everyone, but about being understood only by the right ones?

In your field—whether it’s literature, philosophy, politics, science—find an example of communication that succeeds precisely because it’s not universally accessible.

Could be:

  • Coded language that only insiders recognize
  • Knowledge that requires initiation to understand
  • Arguments that only make sense if you already know something
  • Communication that protects itself by being opaque to outsiders

Bring to session:

One example of deliberate opacity that works better than clarity would.

Then we may discuss: What does Schlanger’s plant intelligence teach us about strategic inscrutability? When is it ethical to communicate in ways that exclude? When is it necessary?

Connection to politics: Resistance movements, diaspora communities, marginalized groups often communicate in ways authorities can’t intercept. Is this a failure of communication or a different kind of success?

What thrives in disturbance?

Tsing writes about matsutake mushrooms. They don’t grow in pristine forests. They grow in forests that have been disturbed—logged, burned, disrupted. The mushroom needs the disturbance. It’s not “surviving despite” damage. It’s thriving because of it.

She calls this “salvage accumulation”—the way capitalism extracts value from ruins, but also the way life finds possibility in damaged landscapes. Not resilience. Not resistance. Something else: emergence from disturbance.

Scott writes about how “improvements” destroy the complex ecologies that actually work. Planned cities eliminate the informal knowledge that made old cities function. Scientific forestry kills the forest.

Macfarlane asks: what if we recognized rivers as legal persons, with rights and representation? Not metaphorically. Actually. With lawyers.

The provocation:

Berlin is a disturbed landscape. Bombed, divided, rebuilt, divided again, reunified, gentrified, contested. It’s not pristine. It’s not stable. The ground is literally unstable—full of unexploded bombs, forgotten tunnels, layers of different cities.

Your task: Find something that exists in Berlin BECAUSE of disturbance, not despite it. Something that couldn’t exist if Berlin had been left alone. Something that needs the gaps, the ruins, the failures of planning, the incompleteness.

Not immigrants adapting (too easy). Not informal economies (we’ve done that).

Look for:

  • Ecologies that require abandonment
  • Practices that need the gaps between jurisdictions
  • Spaces that exist because someone forgot to plan them
  • Knowledge that accumulates in ruins
  • Communities that form in places that “failed”

Bring to session:

  1. Documentation of what you found
  2. An argument: This thing/practice/ecology is not resilient (bouncing back) or resistant (fighting back) but emergent—it couldn’t exist without the specific disturbances that produced it
  3. A legal provocation: If Macfarlane’s rivers can have lawyers, should this thing you found have legal standing? Who would represent it? What would its rights be?

Connect this to your Middle East research: What emerges from war, displacement, colonial violence that couldn’t have existed otherwise? Not “silver linings” (offensive) but genuine new formations that previous conditions couldn’t produce?

After you submit

Your paper is due January 28. Let’s say you submit it. What happens to it then?

I don’t mean grades or feedback. I mean: who do you imagine reading it?

Not “academics in general.” Specifically. Picture someone—a specific person—sitting down with your paper. Where are they? What time of day? Why are they reading it? What do they already know? What are they hoping to find?

Now picture a different reader. Someone else who might encounter your work. Different location, different context, different reasons for reading.

Do these two people read the same paper? Or does your paper become something different depending on who’s reading?

Task (don’t write this, just think about it):

Your paper makes an argument about something in Berlin—some tension, some mixing, some question about what survives or how things coexist. But your argument only matters if it travels beyond the specific case.

So: what would have to be true elsewhere for your Berlin observation to matter there too?

Not “this proves a universal truth.” Rather: under what conditions does what you noticed in Berlin become relevant in Cairo, in Istanbul, in Ramallah, in London, in Kreuzberg vs. Neukölln?

Bring to final session: One sentence: “My argument travels to X when/if Y is true.”

This isn’t about generalizing. It’s about recognizing the conditions under which local knowledge becomes portable.

The Knowledge in the Hands

In the videos, their hands move with such certainty that it looks effortless. Press and turn, press and turn. The rhythm is hypnotic. An 86-year-old woman making fusilli ricci, fingers twisting strands of dough that seem impossibly thin. A 95-year-old in Sardinia braiding lorighittas—pasta shaped like tiny hoop earrings—so quickly her hands blur. A farmer from Basilicata rolling raschiatelli with both hands simultaneously, the motion so practised it seems mechanical. Except it isn’t mechanical at all. It’s the opposite: knowledge sedimented in bodies over decades, over lifetimes.

Watching someone’s hands this closely is unexpectedly intimate. More so than watching their face. Hands at work have their own language—the way they grip, the pressure they apply, the small adjustments they make without conscious thought. Watching these grandmothers work, I find myself trying to mirror the motions with my own hands, pressing my thumb against my palm, testing angles. It’s involuntary. My hands are trying to learn something my mind hasn’t figured out yet.

What’s curious is how the fluidity itself becomes the puzzle. When everything looks easy, you can’t see where the knowledge lives. You can’t see what’s difficult about it, what years of practice have made invisible. The challenge isn’t just learning the motion—it’s learning to see that there’s something to learn.

Vicky Bennison didn’t set out to create an archive of gesture. She’d moved to Italy from south London in 2005 because, as she puts it, she wanted a big kitchen and the only way to afford one was to leave the city. If you’re going to leave London, she reasoned, you might as well move somewhere sunny. She’d worked in international development for years, writing about food on the side. In 2014, living in Le Marche, she noticed something that troubled her: only older women still made pasta by hand. The younger generation—even in Italy, even in small villages—were buying dried pasta from shops. The women who knew how to make it were in their seventies, eighties, nineties. They were dying. And when they died, what they knew would die with them.

At first, Bennison thought she’d write a book. But then she filmed her neighbour Maria making pasta and watched it back, and realised that words—even a thousand words—couldn’t capture what was happening. There’s a rhythm to pasta-making, a meditative physicality that exists in motion. Describing it flattens it. So she kept filming. She put the videos on YouTube because that’s where videos go. She never imagined she’d build an audience. She just thought someone should make a record.

Ten years later, the Pasta Grannies channel has 1.05 million followers on YouTube alone and almost one thousand videos. The format hasn’t changed much: simple filming, minimal editing, little narration. Just the grandmother and her hands. Sometimes you hear her voice, explaining something, but mostly you watch. The videos are unexpectedly calming to watch. People say they remind them of their own grandmothers, even grandmothers who didn’t cook. There’s something about the unhurried pace, the competent hands, the sense of being in a kitchen where someone knows what they’re doing.

But what exactly is being recorded? Bennison calls herself a food anthropologist. She talks about preserving skills, sharing traditions. Yet the word “skill” doesn’t quite capture it. A skill is something you can be taught. What’s happening in these videos feels different—more embodied, more particular. These women aren’t demonstrating skills so much as revealing a knowledge that has become inseparable from their bodies. Their hands don’t follow instructions. They know.

The gap between knowing about something and knowing how to do it is wider than we usually admit. You can read a perfect description of how to make orecchiette—semolina flour, water, salt; knead until smooth, roll into ropes, cut into pieces, press with your thumb—and still produce misshapen lumps when you try. The instructions are accurate. They’re also insufficient. They tell you what to do but not what to feel for. When is the dough smooth enough? How much pressure is “press”? What does “ready” look like?

I know this because I tried. After watching several orecchiette videos multiple times, taking notes on thumb angles and rotating motions, I thought I understood. I made orecchiette. They were terrible. Thick in some places, torn in others, nothing like the delicate little ears the grandmothers produced. I watched again. Made another batch. Still wrong. By the fifth attempt, something shifted. Not in my understanding exactly, but in my hands. They started to sense something—not what those experienced hands know, but some small beginning of knowledge that couldn’t be written down. A feel.

This is what makes Bennison’s archive noteworthy. She isn’t recording recipes or even techniques, really. She’s recording something that resists recording: the accumulated knowledge of decades of practice, knowledge that lives in bodies. An archive typically preserves information that can be extracted and transferred. Recipes in cookbooks. Dances in notation. Songs in sheet music. But what gets recorded here is movement itself, gesture itself. And gesture, unlike notation, doesn’t translate. It can only be imitated, practised, gradually absorbed.

Some knowledge defies transmission entirely. On the island of Sardinia, in a remote village called Nuoro, there’s a pasta so rare that for generations only three women in the world knew how to make it. It’s called su filindeu—threads of God. The pasta is served twice a year at the Feast of San Francesco, after pilgrims walk twenty miles through the night to reach the village of Lula. For over three hundred years, the recipe has been passed down through the women of the Abraini family. The pasta is made from semolina, water, and salt. That’s it. Three ingredients. But the technique is so difficult that even documenting it hasn’t made it reproducible.

Paola Abraini is one of those women. When she makes su filindeu, she takes a cylinder of dough and stretches it, folding it again and again. After eight rounds of doubling, she’s left with 256 strands, each half as thin as angel hair pasta. She lays these across a wooden frame in three crisscrossed layers and sets them to dry in the Sardinian sun. The whole process looks impossible—like watching someone make lace out of dough.

In 2016, Jamie Oliver went to Sardinia to learn from Abraini. He’s a classically trained chef who once owned forty Italian restaurants and learned Italian cooking from Antonio Carluccio. He watched Abraini work, tried it himself, and failed. Completely. The dough broke in his hands. He couldn’t get it to stretch. Afterwards, he had to admit—on camera, to millions of viewers—that he simply couldn’t do it.

The same year, Barilla sent a team of engineers. Barilla makes more pasta than anyone in the world. They have factories, machines, industrial processes. They sent their best engineers to Sardinia to figure out how to mechanise su filindeu. The engineers watched Abraini, took measurements, analysed the dough composition. They went back to their labs and failed. The pasta broke. They couldn’t replicate what one woman’s hands could do.

What’s interesting is that the recipe isn’t secret. Abraini has been filmed multiple times. The process is documented. Semolina, water, salt. Knead the dough. Stretch it. Anyone can watch. Yet watching doesn’t make it reproducible. There’s something happening in Abraini’s hands—some knowledge about exactly when the gluten has reached perfect elasticity, about which bowl to dip your fingers in (plain water or salted water) and how much and when—that can’t be externalised into rules. She says the only secret is in her hands. You have to feel it.

Abraini tried teaching girls from other families in Nuoro. They came to her kitchen, interested and eager. She showed them the process. They attempted it. And then, when they realised how much work it would take—years of practice for something most of them would never use—they left. None of them came back. Even Abraini’s own niece and sister-in-law, who do know how to make it, haven’t taught their children. The younger generation isn’t interested in learning something so difficult for something so particular.

For years, this seemed like the end of the story. A knowledge dying with the women who held it, despite documentation, despite interest, despite everything.

But then something shifted. After the Jamie Oliver video brought international attention, after journalists wrote about the impending extinction, Abraini made a decision. In 2016, she agreed to teach outsiders for the first time in generations. Not hobbyists—professional chefs who would commit properly. She set three conditions: every time you make su filindeu, you must explain it’s a sacred Sardinian dish; you must recount its history; you must not alter the traditional preparation. Two chefs learned: Sofia Longo in New York and Lee Yum Hwa in Singapore. They practised for a year. Now su filindeu is served in restaurants outside Sardinia, something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

The knowledge didn’t stay local, but it didn’t disappear either. It transformed. It’s becoming something new—a technique that travels whilst keeping connection to its origin. Some in the Abraini family see this as survival. Others see it as commercialisation, as taking something sacred and making it ordinary. Both might be right.

What interests me is how this differs from what’s happening with Pasta Grannies. Su filindeu requires direct teaching—you need Abraini or someone she’s taught to guide you, correct you, tell you when you’re getting it right. Bennison’s videos require something else. You watch. You try. You fail. You watch again. Gradually, through repetition, something starts to develop in your hands. Not the grandmother’s knowledge—you’ll never have that—but your own version, calibrated to your kitchen, your flour, your body.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent years studying how people learn to inhabit social worlds. He was interested in the subtle knowledge that gets transmitted in families—the way a child raised in a working-class household learns different ways of speaking and moving than a child raised in wealth, not through explicit lessons but through immersion. He called this habitus: embodied dispositions acquired through living in particular contexts. You don’t study habitus. You absorb it, the way you absorb an accent. By the time you’re aware of it, it’s already part of you, shaping how you see and move through the world.

Pasta-making is habitus of a different sort—not social class but craft knowledge, the kind that develops through years of repetition in a particular context. An elderly woman’s hands know things that can’t be made explicit. After decades of making orecchiette, the knowledge is sedimented in her body. She doesn’t think about where to press or how hard. Her hands know. This is what Bourdieu meant by embodied knowledge: understanding that exists in the body, that precedes conscious thought, that can’t be fully translated into language.

Traditionally, this kind of knowledge required proximity. You stood beside someone who knew, watched their hands, tried to copy the motion, received correction. You did this repeatedly, for months or years, until your hands developed their own understanding. Apprenticeship worked through presence. You couldn’t learn blacksmithing from a book, and you couldn’t learn it from watching once. You needed to be there.

The video changes the terms of transmission. It reproduces the gesture—not perfectly, but recognisably. You can watch a grandmother making orecchiette as many times as you want. You can pause, rewind, study the exact angle of her thumb. The gesture travels to people who will never go to Puglia, who don’t speak Italian, who come from entirely different culinary traditions. But does the knowledge travel with it?

The answer seems to be: yes and no. Under the orecchiette videos, hundreds of people report trying to make them. Some succeeded on the first attempt. Most didn’t. They describe making batch after batch, getting a bit better each time, discovering small adjustments. Someone notices the dough needs longer to rest in humid weather. Someone else realises their flour absorbs water differently than Italian semolina. Someone figures out you can use the back of a spoon when your thumb gets tired.

What’s happening in these comment sections isn’t traditional apprenticeship—there’s no master present, no one to correct your form—but it isn’t solitary learning either. It’s something new: distributed practice, where people learn not just from the grandmother but from each other, building collective knowledge through shared experimentation. They’re developing what you might call distributed habitus: embodied knowledge that forms through engagement with mediated gesture and conversation with others doing the same.

This shouldn’t work, according to Bourdieu’s framework. Habitus requires immersion in a social context, years of unconscious absorption through proximity. But something is clearly being transmitted. Not the grandmother’s habitus—that remains hers, tied to her life, her kitchen, her decades of practice—but people are developing their own embodied knowledge. The video provides something between instruction and immersion. Not a recipe (too static) and not apprenticeship (too dependent on presence), but a third thing: gesture made visible, available for repeated study and gradual absorption.

Bennison didn’t anticipate this. She thought she was making a record, preserving something before it disappeared. What she created was this: an archive that functions as a teaching tool, not because it explains but because it shows. The grandmothers aren’t demonstrating techniques. They’re just making pasta as they’ve always made it, in their own kitchens, at their own pace. But being watched—being watchable, repeatedly, from anywhere—changes what their hands can do. Not for them (although maybe for them, too). For us.

There’s an essay by John Berger where he talks about how photographs change the meaning of what they show. A photograph of a forest isn’t a forest. It’s a forest made portable, made repeatable, made something you can study. The Pasta Grannies videos do something similar. They make gesture portable. They make habitus—which Bourdieu argued was tied to specific social contexts—available across contexts. An 86-year-old’s hands in Basilicata become watchable by people in Tokyo, São Paulo, Melbourne. The knowledge doesn’t transmit intact, but it does something. It starts something.

When I watch the videos now, after trying and failing and trying again to make orecchiette, I see different things. I see where pressure increases and where it releases. I see the rotation that keeps dough from sticking. I see a hundred small adjustments I couldn’t see before because I didn’t have any sense of what I was looking for. My failed attempts didn’t teach me how to make perfect orecchiette—I still can’t—but they taught me how to watch. They gave me enough embodied knowledge to recognise embodied knowledge when I see it.

Maybe that’s what this archive does. Not preserve knowledge in the sense of keeping it unchanged, but make it visible in a way that invites practice. The grandmothers’ hands show us what’s possible. What we do with that—whether we try it, fail at it, gradually develop our own version—is up to us. The videos don’t teach the way instruction teaches. They show the way presence shows. And showing, it turns out, is enough to start something moving from hands to hands, even across vast distances, even across time.

Bennison is 66 now. She says she can probably keep filming for another ten years. She wants to expand—to film Greek yiayiades, Italian grandmothers in the diaspora in America and Australia and Canada. She talks about setting up a foundation. The project keeps growing because people keep watching. More than a million of them. They come for the pasta, Bennison says, but they stay for the grannies. They stay because there’s something calming about watching competent hands at work, something reassuring about the knowledge that people still make things slowly, carefully, with attention.

But perhaps they also stay because they’re learning something that can’t be put into words. Not recipes or techniques—those are available everywhere—but something about what hands know, about what practice accumulates, about the kind of knowledge that lives in bodies and resists every attempt to extract it into language. They’re learning, as I’ve been learning, to see the difference between description and doing, between knowing about and knowing how, between having instructions and having feel.

The grandmothers’ orecchiette still look better than mine. They probably always will. But my hands know something now they didn’t know before I watched them. Something small, incomplete, entirely my own. That’s what travels: not their knowledge, but the possibility of developing knowledge. Not their habitus, but an invitation to build my own. The videos don’t preserve embodied knowledge so much as propagate it, sending it out into the world where it transforms in each set of hands that takes it up.

The knowledge in the hands, it turns out, wants to move.

Break + final session in January

We finished Session 8 (Cross-Disciplinary Reading) last week. Our next and final session won’t be until January 14, 2026.

Between now and then, you have time to actually write. That’s the point of the gap—space to think, draft, revise without constant feedback pressure.

Your final paper (5000 words) is due January 28, 2026.

What to do during the break:

Take the experiments you’ve been trying (McEnerney approach vs. personal approach, risky moves, reader-centered strategies) and actually use them. Write your draft. Revise it. Let it sit. Come back to it.

The assignment from last session still stands: Try rewriting one section two different ways and see what you learn. But don’t bring all versions to the final session—that’s too much.

Optional individual consultations:

If you want to talk through a specific problem or decision point in your draft, I’m offering individual consultations online in my personal webex room on Wednesday, December 11 and 17, 10:30-11:30 (10-15 minutes per person or in the group).

This is completely optional. Come if:

  • You’re stuck on something specific
  • You need to talk through a structural decision
  • You have competing ideas and need to think out loud
  • You’re not sure if you’re on a track to anything really

Don’t come if:

  • You haven’t started writing yet (that’s fine—just start)
  • You want general feedback (save that for January)
  • You think you need permission to do something (you have permission)
  • You have general ISME questions

To sign up: Just write me an email with one sentence about what you want to discuss.

What to bring to the final session (January 14):

  1. Your draft (whatever state it’s in—doesn’t need to be done)
  2. One specific question or problem you need help with

Examples:

  • “My opening doesn’t create instability—where is the actual tension?”
  • “I’m writing for everyone and therefore no one—who ARE my readers?”
  • “This section feels like I’m just proving I read things—what work should it do?”
  • “I have two competing arguments and don’t know which is mine”

What the final session will be:

  • Small group troubleshooting on specific problems (not general feedback)
  • Quick check-ins on finishing strategies
  • Making sure everyone has a plan for the final two weeks

It will be a practical session to help you finish.

Use the break well. Write. Let it be messy. You have until January 28 to make it work.

See you January 14.

When is it safe to emerge?

Chapter 3 of The Light Eaters: Seeds have “decision-making centers”—clusters of cells that communicate with each other about temperature fluctuations in the soil. They integrate information from multiple cells, weighing antagonistic hormones (one promoting dormancy, one promoting germination), to collectively decide when to emerge. The decision is risky: emerge too early, you freeze. Emerge too late, you miss the growing season. The cells can’t see above ground. They only have temperature data, and it’s fluctuating. They have to decide anyway.

Here’s what I want you to think about (not write—think, discuss with someone, sit with it):

Imagine a community that’s trying to decide whether it’s safe to emerge—to become visible, to claim space, to make demands. Like the seed, they can’t see the whole picture. They only have partial data. The environment is fluctuating. Some signals say “it’s safe now.” Other signals say “wait, not yet.”

Questions to sit with:

  1. The seed makes better decisions by having MULTIPLE cells weigh in, using antagonistic information. What would it mean for a political community to make decisions this way—integrating opposing signals rather than trying to reach consensus that one signal is correct?
  2. The seed’s decision is made by cells that have no awareness of “above ground.” What decisions get made by people who have no direct experience of what they’re deciding about? What information do they use instead? Is temperature data enough?
  3. If the seed emerges at the wrong time, it dies. If it never emerges, it also dies (eventually). How do communities weigh this impossible choice? What does “wrong time” mean when you can’t see what’s coming?
  4. Plants can’t move after they put down roots. The decision about when to emerge is ALSO the decision about where you’ll be permanently. What if you had to decide not just “is it safe?” but “is this where I want to be forever?” without being able to see what’s above the soil?
  5. Schlanger notes this decision-making structure is analougous to the human brain—antagonistic signals improving decisions in fluctuating conditions. But the seed has no brain, no centralised consciousness. What if political intelligence doesn’t require centralised leadership? What if collective decisions could be made through distributed signals, not through hierarchies?

The thought:

We study decision-making in political contexts as if it’s about rational actors with full information making conscious choices. But what if emergence—political visibility, claiming rights, making demands—works more like seed germination? Distributed information. Antagonistic signals. Fluctuating conditions. No way to see the whole picture. And the decision is irreversible.

What to bring to next session:

Your thinking. Not written—just be ready to discuss: What political or social or cultural or relational situation are you thinking about when you read this? (Don’t name it if you don’t want to.) What changes if we think about it as emergence rather than strategy? What does the seed’s decision-making tell us about collective political intelligence?

Document a contamination

You’ve been walking. Observing. Noticing tensions. Now I want you to document something different: a specific moment of contamination.

Tsing writes: “We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others… Contamination makes diversity.”

Scott writes about metis—practical knowledge that develops through encounter, that cannot be codified into rules, that emerges from “knowing this river” not “rivers in general.”

Macfarlane writes about rivers as persons, as beings with rights, asking: “Ko wai koe?” (Who are your waters?)

Your task (do this, don’t just think about it):

Find ONE specific place in Berlin where something that “shouldn’t” be mixing IS mixing. Not metaphorically. Actually.

But here’s the warning: Don’t look for “Turkish” meeting “German” or “Syrian” meeting “European.” Those categories are already contaminated. Someone who grew up in Berlin speaking Turkish and German isn’t “mixing” two pure things—they’re already the contamination as much as everyone and everything is.

Instead, look for:

  • A building material from elsewhere patching a local structure in a way that changes both
  • A word borrowed into local German that now means something slightly different than in its origin language
  • A tree species introduced decades ago that now hosts insects that weren’t “supposed” to be its partners—or maybe an invasive plant
  • A Cold War structure being used for something it was never designed for, changing what that structure means
  • Children playing a game that’s neither “from here” nor “from there” but something new entirely
  • A business practice that works only because it’s adapted to this specific street, this specific mix of people

Document it:

  1. Take a photo or draw it
  2. Describe SPECIFICALLY what’s mixing (not cultural categories but actual practices, materials, languages, uses)
  3. What has been CHANGED by this contamination? (Not what’s been added—what’s been transformed? What can’t go back?)
  4. Whose metis made this mixing work? (Someone had to figure out HOW to make incompatible things coexist—what did they have to know?)
  5. If this place/moment had personhood (like Macfarlane’s rivers), what would its rights be?

What to think about for the next session: How did looking for contamination risk reifying the very categories (German/foreign, local/immigrant, authentic/adapted) that contamination is supposed to dissolve?

The point: Tsing says contamination makes diversity but also: “The diversity that allows us to enter collaborations emerges from histories of extermination, imperialism, and all the rest.” So contamination isn’t innocent. What you’re documenting isn’t “cultural mixing” (too clean). It’s something messier, more historically loaded, less celebratory.

Reading Like a Writer

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

What We Discovered

We read a paper from outside our field—game studies, psychosis, apocalypse, embodied experience. Most of you finished it. Some of you were surprised by that. The question was: what made you keep reading when you didn’t care about the topic?

The answers pointed to something interesting: the text does things academic writing isn’t supposed to do. It blurs boundaries. Between academic and personal voice. Between analysis and experience. Between argument and uncertainty. One of you said it felt like “the subjective experience IS the paper”—not the object being analyzed but the method itself.

We noticed:

  • An “I” that doesn’t apologize for being there
  • Theory referenced but not explained (trusting you to either know it or not need it)
  • Questions that open doors without walking through them
  • A structure called “fragments” that either works or doesn’t depending on what you think structure is for
  • Long paragraphs that sometimes irritate, sometimes pull you in
  • Positionality that’s stated but not defensive

Someone asked: is this even reviewing? Is it analyzing? Or is it something else—invitation, narration, revelation?

What We Examined

In small groups, you looked at how different moves function:

The “I” group noticed the writer isn’t just inserting themselves—the “I” does different work in different moments. Sometimes confessing (“my hands shake”), sometimes analyzing, sometimes questioning. You asked: does this serve the argument or is it self-indulgent?

The theory group noticed citations that don’t explain themselves. Shildrick, Merleau-Ponty, Anzaldúa, Barad—they appear and then vanish. Some of you could follow without knowing them. Some couldn’t. You asked: is this trusting readers or excluding them?

The structure group wrestled with whether “fragments” is a meaningful category or just an excuse for lack of organization. You noticed the paper tells you it’s fragments, which is itself a move. You asked: does calling something experimental make it experimental?

The questions group counted unanswered questions and got uncomfortable. Academic writing is supposed to answer things. This paper asks and then… keeps asking. You asked: is uncertainty intellectual honesty or intellectual cowardice?

What We Didn’t Resolve

We ran out of time before we could build the comparison chart or locate the exact moment where “experimental” becomes “self-indulgent.” But that incompleteness might be the point.

Because the real question isn’t whether this paper is good or bad. The real question is: what is academic writing FOR?

If it’s for delivering definitive knowledge, then this paper fails. It admits it has “no answers, only questions.”

If it’s for demonstrating mastery, then this paper fails. The writer keeps saying “I don’t know.”

If it’s for maintaining professional distance, then this paper fails. It’s intensely, almost uncomfortably personal.

But if academic writing is for making readers think—for creating experiences that change how you see—then maybe this paper does exactly what it’s trying to do.

Someone made a distinction between “sentimental” and “gaining knowledge”, and that’s a good question whether there is such a distinction at all. What counts as knowledge? Can experience be knowledge? Can uncertainty be knowledge? Can asking questions you don’t answer be a form of knowing?

What This Has to Do With Reader-Centered Writing

We’ve spent weeks on McEnerney’s framework: make instability visible, show costs readers bear, know who your readers are, deliver on promises.

This paper does some of that. It makes you care about a game you’ve never played (reader-centered). It trusts you with complexity without over-explaining (reader-centered). It keeps you oriented even through fragments (reader-centered).

But it also does something McEnerney doesn’t talk about: it makes the writer’s uncertainty and personal stakes the reason you keep reading. McEnerney says make it the reader’s problem. This paper says: what if my problem IS interesting to readers precisely because it’s MY problem?

So there are at least two ways to serve readers:

  1. Deliver what they need (McEnerney)
  2. Invite them into genuine uncertainty (Hellblade paper)

These aren’t necessarily opposed. But they’re not the same. And understanding the difference might change what you think writing can do.


Assignment for FINAL Session (Jan 14)

This is our last meeting before the deadline. The assignment is designed to help you finish, not to create more work.

The Experiment (for your own benefit):

Take some of the time until Jan 14 to work on the paper (the examination for the module “Studying the Middle East”).

Take one section from your draft that isn’t working yet—where you feel stuck, where the argument isn’t landing, where you’re not sure what you’re saying.

Try rewriting it two different ways:

Version 1: McEnerney approach – make instability visible, show costs readers bear, deliver clearly

Version 2: Personal approach – start with your actual stakes, admit uncertainty, ask real questions

See which version helps you figure out what you’re actually trying to say. Keep whichever works better (or combine them).

What to bring to final session:

  1. Your full draft (whatever state it’s in)
  2. One specific question or problem you need help with

The session will be: quick peer feedback on specific problems, troubleshooting, and making sure everyone has a plan to finish.

Two Books I Want to Read With Others

in the summer term 2026

I keep returning to Claire Dederer’s Monsters. Not because it answers anything, but because it doesn’t. She loves Polanski’s films. She knows what he did. She can’t make those two facts resolve. The book is her circling that failure, again and again, refusing to pretend she’s figured it out.

I find that honesty unbearable and necessary.

And then there’s Simon Stjernholm’s Sensing Islam—a book about what happens when religion enters through the ear, the skin, the breath. Sufi practitioners in a cold London prayer hall. The Prophet’s sweat in devotional poetry. The contested ground around a saint’s grave.

What draws me is the question underneath: what do we miss when we treat knowing as something that happens in the head?

I want to read both of these books slowly, with others, in conversation. Not seminars that dissect. Just thinking together. Letting the questions land where they land.

More soon.