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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.

What if they already knew?

You’re reading about plant communication now. Scientists “discovering” that plants send chemical signals through the air. That they warn each other about danger. That they share resources through underground fungal networks.

Here’s what Schlanger mentions briefly but doesn’t dwell on: traditional farmers have known this for centuries.

Intercropping. Companion planting. Don’t plant tomatoes near black walnut trees. Plant marigolds to protect your vegetables. Beans give nitrogen to the soil that corn needs. Everyone’s grandmother knew this. Indigenous peoples knew it. Ottoman agricultural manuals described it. Medieval Islamic botanists documented it.

But “Western” science “discovered” it in the 1980s. With chemicals. With lab equipment. With peer review.

So here’s my question: What’s the difference between knowing and discovering?

Traditional farmers couldn’t explain the chemistry. They didn’t have mass spectrometers to detect volatile organic compounds. They just knew: plant these together, they help each other. Plant these apart, they hurt each other.

Was that knowledge? Or just “folklore”? What’s the difference anyway?

Because if it was knowledge—real knowledge—then what does that say about the past 200 years of “Western” botany that ignored it?

Your task this week:

Find one thing in the book where scientists “discovered” something about plants. Then ask: Who already knew this?

Not in Europe. In the Middle East. In Indigenous communities. In agricultural traditions. In the knowledge systems you study.

Then ask harder: Why did it have to be “discovered” by “Western” science to count as true?

What does this tell you about:

  • Who gets to be a knowledge-maker vs. a folklore-holder?
  • What counts as evidence vs. what counts as superstition?
  • Why “discovering” (with instruments) is legitimate but “knowing” (from experience) isn’t?

This isn’t about romanticising traditional knowledge. It’s about asking: what knowledge exists right now, in the communities you study, that academics are ignoring because it doesn’t come in the right form?

What are we planning to “discover” in 2050 that someone’s grandmother knows today?

Keep reading. But read suspiciously.

See you in January.

Walk backwards

Not literally. But: retrace a walk you’ve already done.

Go back to a neighbourhood you visited in October or November. Walk the same streets. See what’s changed and what hasn’t.

The question: What did you miss the first time?

First time, you were scanning. Looking for “Middle Eastern presence,” for tensions, for things to notice. You were a tourist of your own attention.

Now go back. You know this place slightly. What do you see differently?

Tsing: What survival strategies did you miss when you were looking for the obvious ones? Scott: What was resisting legibility that you didn’t notice because you were looking at what was visible? Macfarlane: What relations existed that you walked right past?

One specific thing to notice: Look for something ordinary that you ignored before. A shop that’s been there forever. A tree. A bench where the same people sit. Something unremarkable.

Spend time with it. Why is it still there? What does its ordinariness tell you?

The interesting thing isn’t always the thing that catches your eye. Sometimes it’s the thing that doesn’t.

Walk backwards. See what you missed.

Short-Notice Assignment for Wednesday’s Session (Dec 3) – Reading Like a Writer

You’re reading an academic paper. But not for content. For craft.

What to read: Downloadable here: “Unveiled in Ashes: Hellblade and the Revelatory Collapse of the Self” by Victoria Mummelthei (game studies paper, 17 pages)

What to do:

  1. Read it. Don’t worry if you know nothing about video games or this game specifically. That’s the point.
  2. Print it if necessary and annotate as you read. Mark three things: X = Where you get lost (not “I don’t know this vocabulary” but “I have no idea what this paragraph is doing or why”) ? = Where you stop caring (“so what?” / “why am I reading this?”) ! = Where you start caring (something creates stakes, makes you want to keep reading)
  3. Write in the margins: What is each section DOING?
    • Setting up a problem?
    • Making a theoretical move?
    • Telling a story?
    • Asking a question?
    • Connecting two things?
    • Not doing anything specific at all?
  4. Note what strikes you as strange, confusing, “too essayistic,” “un-academic,” or just different from what you usually read in your field. Don’t judge whether it’s good or bad—just notice it.

Why this paper? It’s not about the Middle East. It’s maybe adjacent to your field but not in it. This lets you notice HOW it works instead of getting distracted by whether you agree with WHAT it says.

What we’ll do in session:

  • Compare what you noticed
  • Identify moves the writer makes that your field or your writing usually doesn’t make
  • Discuss what works, what doesn’t, what feels risky, what you’d never do, what you might steal
  • Practice experimenting with some of these moves in your own writing

Bring:

  • Your annotated printout or file
  • One paragraph from your own draft (any paragraph, printed or file)

Time estimate: 1-1.5 hours to read and annotate carefully.

See you Wednesday.

Give your draft to someone who will hate it

You’ve revised your draft. You know who your readers are supposed to be. You’ve made the instability visible (you think). The costs are clear (you hope).

Now test it.

But not with someone sympathetic. Not with a friend who studies the same thing you do. Not with someone who already cares about your topic.

Give it to someone who will hate it.

Someone who thinks your field is irrelevant. Someone who doesn’t care about Berlin or the Middle East or whatever tension you’re writing about. Someone who has no reason to keep reading past the first paragraph.

Ask them: “Where did you stop caring? What sentence made you think ‘so what?'”

Their answer is a truth. Not a truth about whether your work is good. A truth about whether your instability actually creates costs for readers who don’t already care.

Because here’s the thing: the readers who already care will read your work no matter what. They’re not the test.

The test is the reader who has no reason to care. Can you make them care anyway?

That’s what costs and benefits are for.

Find that reader. Give them your draft. Listen to where they stop.

Then revise.

When Frameworks Fail

November 19, 2025 | 10:15-12:45

This session of Beyond Human Language focused on a fundamental question: what happens when the frameworks we use to understand the world prove inadequate to what’s actually there? Using Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters as a lens, we explored how knowledge gets made, who decides what counts, and what we do when we encounter something our training can’t explain.


Opening: The 2012 Problem

We began with a passage from the book:

“In 2012, a group of scientists gathered at the University of Cambridge to formally confer consciousness on all mammals, birds, and ‘many other creatures, including octopuses.’ Nonhuman animals had all the physical markers of conscious states, and clearly acted with a sense of intention.”

The provocation: The internet is older than scientific consensus on animal consciousness.

What emerged in discussion:

We were struck by several things:

  • Scientists had been studying these animals for decades but couldn’t SAY they were conscious until 2012
  • The animals didn’t need the declaration—humans did
  • The declaration was permission: permission to see what was always there
  • Language matters: before 2012, scientists used terms like “behavioral flexibility” instead of “consciousness”

Key questions that surfaced:

  • What took so long? (Answer: not evidence—frameworks, careers, institutional conservatism)
  • Who was this declaration for? (Answer: scientists themselves, who needed permission to say what they’d been seeing)
  • Does recognition change reality? (Answer: not for animals, but it changes everything for how humans relate to them)

The connection to Middle East studies: We identified parallel moments where something was obvious but couldn’t be said until frameworks changed—Orientalism, Palestinian history, women’s agency in Islamic contexts.


Small Group Discussions: Three Problems

Students divided into two out of three groups, each working with a different passage from the book.

Group 1: The Parenthesis Problem

Passage: Ibn al-Nafis (Arab physician, Damascus, 13th century) accurately described pulmonary circulation 300 years before William Harvey. Harvey is in every textbook. Ibn al-Nafis is in a parenthesis.

What they discussed:

  • Why “first European” is a meaningful category (Answer: it’s not—it’s a linguistic trick to avoid saying “second”)
  • How colonial power determined whose knowledge counted as universal
  • Whether the pattern is fixable or structural
  • Examples from their own fields: Ibn Khaldun as “precursor” not “founder” of sociology; Islamic Golden Age as “preservers” not “innovators”

The provocation: What would your field look like if non-European knowledge wasn’t in parentheses?

Group 2: The Definition Trap

Passage: Scientists arguing against plant intelligence were using human-centric definitions of intelligence to prove plants aren’t intelligent—circular reasoning.

What could have been discussed:

  • How definitions exclude by design
  • Examples: “literature” excluding oral traditions; “history” requiring written records; “philosophy” starting with Greeks
  • Who benefits from narrow definitions (Answer: those who already fit them)
  • The political stakes of definitional battles (“terrorism” vs “resistance”)

The provocation: What if “intelligence” was defined by plants? What would count?

Group 3: The Decision Problem

Passage: Seeds have a “decision-making center” that integrates information and decides when to emerge. McClintock called it “the knowledge the cell has of itself.”

What they discussed:

  • Whether “decision” is metaphor or description
  • What we’d have to accept if it’s not metaphor (that decision-making doesn’t require brains)
  • What else might “decide” (rivers, immune systems, algorithms, ecosystems)
  • Whether there’s a politics to who/what we grant decision-making capacity

The provocation: What if decision-making is everywhere, and consciousness is just the version we recognize?

Cross-group connections:

  • The definitions (Group 2) are made by people whose knowledge already counts (Group 1)
  • If we can’t grant decision-making to seeds (Group 3), how do we grant it to non-Western knowledge systems?

Pair Work: Your Field’s Blind Spots

Students paired with someone from a different discipline to discuss:

  1. What’s one thing your field systematically cannot see—not because it’s hidden, but because of how the field is structured?
  2. What would have to change for your field to see it?
  3. Is there a version of the Ibn al-Nafis problem in your field—knowledge that exists elsewhere but isn’t recognized?

What emerged:

  • Fields are structured to miss what doesn’t fit their methods
  • Knowledge in the “wrong” language becomes invisible
  • Academic credentialing determines what counts as knowledge
  • The most interesting insights often come from people without PhDs

Closing: The Book and What’s Next

The assignment:

Read The Light Eaters before January 27. But don’t read it as a book about plants. Read it asking:

  • Where do I see this pattern in my own field?
  • What am I trained not to see?
  • Whose knowledge am I ignoring without realizing it?

The question for next session: What in this book made you most uncomfortable?

Not what you learned. Not what interested you. What disturbed an assumption. What made you question something you thought you knew.


Key Takeaways

  1. Recognition is political: Scientific “truth” depends on who has permission to say what. The 2012 animal consciousness declaration didn’t change reality—it changed permission.
  2. Frameworks filter reality: We don’t see everything that’s there. We see what our frameworks allow us to see. The rest is invisible—not absent, just unnameable.
  3. Definitions are power: Who gets to define “intelligence,” “knowledge,” “consciousness,” “decision-making” determines what counts as real and what gets excluded.
  4. The parenthesis problem is everywhere: Whose knowledge ends up in the main text and whose ends up in footnotes reveals the structure of power in knowledge production.
  5. You’ve already seen it: The thing you can’t name in your research—the pattern you noticed but couldn’t prove, the insight that didn’t fit—might be the most important thing. The question is whether you’ll find language for it or let your framework filter it out.
  6. This is happening now: In 2050, students will read about our moment and wonder why we couldn’t see what was obvious. The question is: what is it? And do we have the courage to name it?

Stop walking

You’ve been walking for weeks now. Noticing. Observing. Moving through neighbourhoods as an outsider looking in.

Stop.

Pick one place—a street corner, a shop, a park bench, anywhere—and stay there for an hour. Don’t move. Just sit. Watch what happens when you’re not moving through.

Here’s what I want you to notice:

Who belongs there and who doesn’t? How do you know? What makes someone look like they belong versus someone passing through?

Now the harder question: Do you belong there?

If someone watched YOU sitting there for an hour, what would they see? A student? A researcher? A foreigner? Someone with time to waste? Someone who doesn’t need to be anywhere?

Your stillness changes what you see. It also changes what you are.

Tsing would ask: what assemblages form when you stop moving? Scott would ask: what becomes legible when you stay still? Macfarlane would ask: what relations emerge when you stop being a passerby?

One hour. One place. Stop walking.

The Editor’s Hands

There is a café I dream myself to when writing isn’t working. The coffee is fine. What I like is the window. It faces a courtyard where an old woman waters her plants each morning. She touches the leaves as she goes. Not checking for anything. Just touching.

I think about her hands sometimes when I think about editors. What they do with a text. How it’s different from what readers do.

A reader tells you what they received. They are honest, if you’re lucky. They say: I got confused here. I stopped caring there. I didn’t understand who this was for. This is useful. This is data. But a reader leaves and takes their confusion with them. You’re alone again with the draft.

An editor stays.


I had an editor once who read a piece I’d written about my father. It was overwrought. I knew it was overwrought but I didn’t know what else it could be. She didn’t tell me it was overwrought. She asked me about the kitchen. The kitchen in the piece was described in one sentence. She wanted to know what the light was like in that kitchen. What it smelled like in the morning. Whether the chairs scraped when you pulled them out.

I told her. She said: write that.

The next draft was better. Not because she fixed anything. Because she saw something I hadn’t finished seeing.


Feedback tells you where you are. Editing helps you get somewhere.

This is not a small difference. It’s the difference between a mirror and a companion. A mirror shows you your face. A companion walks with you and points at things. Look at that. Have you noticed this. What if you went that way instead.

A good editor is curious about your work in a way that makes you curious about it again. They ask questions you didn’t know to ask. Not because they’re smarter. Because they’re outside. They see the shape of the thing. You’re inside, too close, your nose against the wall. They stand back and say: did you know there’s a door over there?


I think about the old woman with her plants. She’s not checking if they’re healthy. She knows they’re healthy. She grew them. She’s in conversation with them. The touching is part of the growing.

Editing is like that. It’s not assessment. It’s cultivation.


When I teach writing, students want feedback. They want to know if it’s good. They want to know what’s wrong. These are reasonable wants. But they’re not the wants that make writing better.

What makes writing better is someone who sits with your mess and sees something in it you couldn’t see. Someone who asks: what’s this doing here? Not accusingly. Curiously. Someone who says: this sentence—I keep coming back to it. I don’t know why. Do you know why?

And you look at the sentence and you realize you don’t know why either. But now you want to find out.


The best editors I’ve had made me want to write. Not made me feel bad about what I’d written. Made me want to keep going. Made me believe there was something in the draft worth finding.

This is rare. Most feedback makes you want to hide. Most feedback says: here’s what’s wrong. Fix it. The fixing feels like punishment. The draft becomes a problem to be solved rather than a thing to be grown.

But an editor says: there’s something here. I can feel it. It’s not quite visible yet. Let’s find it.

And suddenly the draft is alive again. Suddenly you’re not fixing. You’re discovering.


There’s a scene in a film I love. Two people are cooking together. One is experienced, one is learning. The experienced one doesn’t give instructions. She puts her hand over his hand on the knife and they cut together. The motion transfers. The knowledge moves through touch.

This is what editing feels like when it works. Not instructions from outside. A kind of doing-together. The editor’s hand over yours. The cut becomes possible because you’re not alone in making it.

Feedback is someone watching you cook and telling you the onions are burning. Editing is someone at the stove with you, tasting the broth, saying: more salt, and handing you the salt.


I don’t mean to be harsh on feedback. Feedback has its place. You need to know when things aren’t landing. You need the honest reader who says: I stopped caring on page three. That’s valuable. That’s necessary.

But it’s not sufficient.

Because after the reader leaves, you still have to write. You still have to figure out what page three could be. And for that you need something more than data. You need a kind of faith. Faith that there’s something worth finding. Faith that the mess can become something.

An editor holds that faith for you when you can’t hold it yourself.


The old woman finishes watering. She stands for a moment looking at her plants. Not inspecting. Just looking. The way you look at something you’ve been in relationship with for a long time. Something you know isn’t finished. Something still becoming.

She goes inside. The plants stay in the sun. Growing.


I think the difference is this: feedback is a transaction. You give me writing, I give you reaction. We’re done.

Editing is a relationship. We’re in this together. We’re both trying to find out what this thing wants to be. Neither of us knows yet. But we’re looking. And the looking together changes what we find.


There’s a loneliness to writing. You sit alone. You make choices alone. No one can tell you if the choices are right because no one knows what you’re trying to make. Sometimes you don’t know either.

An editor doesn’t fix the loneliness. But they witness it. They say: I see you in there, trying. And they reach in a hand.

Not to pull you out. To be with you in the dark.

Until slowly, something starts to take shape. Something neither of you made alone.


I went back to the essay about my father. The one my editor asked about the kitchen. I wrote three pages about the light. About the smell of toast. About the scrape of chairs and the particular blue of the gas flame on the stove.

My father was barely in those pages. And yet he was everywhere.

She didn’t tell me to do this. She asked me about a kitchen. I answered.

That’s the difference. Feedback tells you what isn’t working. An editor asks a question that opens a door. You walk through it. What’s on the other side—that was always yours. You just couldn’t see it from where you were standing.

Now you can.