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Complicating Questions for the Two-Version Exercise

What If Version 2 Is More Violent?

You removed the category and described only “concrete details.”

But what did you describe? Physical appearance? Skin color? Clothing? Accent?

Question: Is describing someone as “a person with dark skin wearing a hijab speaking Arabic” less othering than saying “a Middle Eastern student”? Or is it actually MORE violent because now you’re forcing hyper-visibility of physical difference?

When you removed the category, did you just replace one kind of marking with another – trading political/regional categories for racial/physical ones?

Sit with this: Maybe the category “Middle Eastern” was doing some protective work – allowing identity without forcing physical description. Maybe removing it makes difference MORE visible, not less.

What if your “concrete description” is just as much about marking otherness – but now you’re doing it through bodies instead of geography?


What If You Can’t Write Version 2?

Some groups might have discovered: without the category, you can’t actually say what you saw.

If you observed e.g. “Middle Eastern students gathering in the cafeteria”:

  • Version 2: “Students gathering in the cafeteria”
  • But then… what were you even observing? What made it notable?

If you observed “Arabic books in the library”:

  • Version 2: “Books in a script I recognized but can’t read, organized under classification system XYZ”
  • But does that actually capture what you were seeing? Or are you just performing ignorance?

Question: If you can’t articulate your observation without the category, what does that reveal?

Does it mean:

  • The category was doing ALL the work (organizing your entire perception)?
  • Your observation was never really about what you saw but about what you already believed?
  • There WAS nothing there to observe except your own categorizing gaze?

Maybe you weren’t observing “Middle Eastern presence” at all. Maybe you were observing your own need to identify difference.


What If the People You’re Observing Want the Category?

You removed “Middle Eastern” from your description to avoid othering.

But what if the person you observed identifies strongly as Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian – and considers “Middle Eastern” an important part of their identity?

Question: By refusing to use the category, are you:

  • Respecting their complexity and refusing reductive labels?
  • OR erasing their identity and the political/historical significance they attach to it?

When you wrote Version 2 with “only concrete details,” did you just describe a generic student/person/space – effectively whitewashing them into neutral “German campus” space?

The tension: The category can be simultaneously:

  • A colonial imposition that others
  • A source of solidarity and political identity
  • A framework people in diaspora use to find each other
  • A way institutions manage and contain

You can’t escape this contradiction. Any move you make – using the category, refusing it, problematizing it – has costs.

What if there IS no ethical position here? What if every choice is compromised?


Provocation 4: What If Version 1 Reveals More?

You’re supposed to see that Version 2 is “better” – more specific, less reductive, more concrete.

But what if Version 1 (with the category) actually reveals MORE about how power works?

Example:

  • Version 1: “The Middle Eastern Studies Institute is located in the basement of Building X”
  • Version 2: “An institute focused on languages and histories of West Asia and North Africa is located in the basement of Building X”

Question: Which version actually shows you the power dynamics?

Version 1 immediately reveals: there IS a category called “Middle East,” the university HAS organized knowledge around it, and it’s literally BELOW ground level.

Version 2 sounds more sophisticated but might hide the fact that the reductive category EXISTS and HAS MATERIAL EFFECTS.

The problem: Sometimes using problematic categories is the only way to make their violence visible.

If you refuse to say “Middle Eastern Studies,” how do you critique how “Middle Eastern Studies” operates as an institutional structure?


What If You’re Just Performing Academic Virtue?

You removed the category. You wrote concrete descriptions. You avoided essentializing.

Congratulations. You’ve done the academic performance of anti-essentialism.

But ask yourself:

  • Did anything actually change?
  • Does writing Version 2 mean you’ve stopped categorizing people?
  • Or have you just gotten better at hiding the fact that you’re still doing it?

Are you genuinely trying to see people differently, or are you trying to prove you’re the kind of person who knows better than to use reductive categories?

When you wrote Version 2, were you thinking about the person you observed – or were you thinking about how sophisticated your description sounded?

Even more: This entire exercise might be training you to perform complexity while leaving your actual perceptions unchanged.

What if the “good” version (without categories) just teaches you to hide your categorizing while still doing it?


What If There’s No Version Without Categories?

Here’s the possibility nobody wants to face: maybe Version 2 doesn’t exist.

You think you removed the category. But did you?

Every description creates boundaries. Every observation requires some framework for deciding what’s worth noticing.

Can you observe ANYTHING without organizing it through categories?

Maybe the problem isn’t the specific category “Middle East.” Maybe the problem is that human perception itself works through categorization. (Surprise, it does!)

If that’s true, then what? Do you just give up? Accept that all observation is compromised? Resign yourself to using problematic categories because there’s no alternative?

Or: Do you stay in the discomfort of knowing every description is imperfect, every category is violent, every observation is complicit – and do it anyway, as carefully as you can, acknowledging the damage?


What If the Category Is Doing Multiple Things Simultaneously?

You examined what the category was doing in Version 1. You probably identified one main function: organizing foreignness, or managing difference, or creating institutional structure.

But what if it’s doing ALL of these at once:

  • Recognizing identity (some people DO identify as Middle Eastern and want recognition)
  • Creating otherness (marking people as perpetually foreign)
  • Organizing knowledge (structuring how the university produces scholarship)
  • Enabling solidarity (giving people in diaspora a framework to find each other)
  • Containing threat (making the region legible for security purposes)
  • Distributing resources (determining who gets funding, jobs, institutional support)
  • Facilitating erasure (lumping distinct peoples/histories together)

The category is SIMULTANEOUSLY doing harm and doing necessary work.

It’s othering people AND giving them institutional visibility. It’s erasing specificity AND creating space for community. It’s organizing domination AND enabling resistance.

You cannot solve this. You cannot find the “right” way to use or not use the category because it’s fundamentally doing contradictory work.

So what do you do when every option is compromised and the category is both violent and necessary?

That’s the discomfort you take with you.

Create Instructions for Seeing

Session Preparation for February 10, 2026

Last week you walked the campus. You looked at how “the Middle East” appears at FU – in departments, on bulletin boards, in the library, in conversations, in spaces.

And then we asked: What if the category itself is the problem?

You were assigned to take one observation and write it two ways – with the category and without it. Bring both versions to this session. We’ll start there.

But here’s what I want us to do with the rest of our time together:

You’ve spent four months developing a way of seeing. Now teach someone else how to see what you see.


The Task: Create Field Instructions

You’ve learned to notice things that most people walk right past. You’ve developed literacies – ways of reading the city, recognizing patterns, seeing how things work that aren’t supposed to work together.

That knowledge exists in your body, in your attention, in the routes you take and the things you stop to look at.

Your task in preparation of the next session: Distill that embodied knowledge into instructions that someone else could follow.

Not an essay analyzing what you learned. Not a report on what you saw.

Actual instructions. A field guide. A set of directions for a walk or an observation exercise that would teach someone else to see what you’ve learned to see.


What Makes Good Instructions?

Specific enough that someone could actually follow them:

❌ “Go to Neukölln and notice how cultures mix”

✅ “Stand at the corner of Sonnenallee and Weserstraße for 15 minutes. Count how many languages you hear or see, e.g. on shop signs within eyesight. Then walk into the closest grocery store and count again – how many languages on products, on price signs, spoken by customers and staff? What’s the relationship between outside visibility and inside operation?”

Open enough that the person discovers something rather than just confirming what you tell them:

❌ “You’ll see that Turkish and Arabic businesses coexist”

✅ “Notice which shops have signs in multiple languages and which have signs in only one. What patterns emerge? Who’s the assumed audience?”

Concrete in location, action, and observation:

  • WHERE exactly should they go?
  • WHAT exactly should they do when they get there?
  • WHAT specifically should they pay attention to?

Provocative in what it makes visible:

Your instructions should make someone see something they wouldn’t have noticed on their own. They should create a kind of attention that reveals patterns, contradictions, systems, silences.


Some Possible Forms

Your field instructions could take various forms:

A timed observation: “Sit on this bench for 20 minutes. Every 5 minutes, write down one thing you notice that you didn’t notice before. By minute 20, you should be seeing the space completely differently than at minute 5.”

A specific route with stopping points: “Start at X. Walk to Y. At Y, stop and [specific observation task]. Then walk to Z without stopping. At Z, compare what you see now with what you saw at Y. What changed?”

A question-driven walk: “Walk any route through Kreuzberg asking this question: [provocative question]. Stop whenever something interrupts your ability to answer. Document what interrupted you and why.”

A comparative observation: “Find two [similar things – two restaurants, two shops, two streets]. Spend 10 minutes observing each. Document every difference, no matter how small. What do the differences reveal?”

A material trace: “Pick one object you can buy in both a German supermarket and a Middle Eastern grocery. Trace backwards: where does each version come from? What route did it take? What does its presence in each store reveal?”

A conversation-based investigation: “Go to [specific location]. Ask [specific question] to three different people. Don’t analyze their answers. Document exactly what they said and how they said it. What does the range of answers reveal?”

An archival task: “Go to the library. Look up [specific topic] in the catalogue. Notice how it’s classified. What’s nearby? What’s far away? What does the organizational system reveal about how knowledge is structured?”


What You’re Teaching

Think about what you’ve actually learned to see over these months. Not just “Middle Eastern presence” but:

  • How to read spatial politics (who’s visible where, who’s been displaced, what’s marked as foreign vs. normal)
  • How to see economic systems (supply chains, informal economies, labor that’s invisible)
  • How to recognize temporal layers (what remains, what’s been erased, what’s emerging)
  • How to notice material traces (objects that carry histories, translations, transformations)
  • How to see contradictions (things that shouldn’t coexist but do)
  • How to read institutional power (who defines categories, who decides what counts)
  • How to spot erasures (what’s absent, what’s been made invisible, what resists visibility)

Your field instructions should teach one of these literacies.

Not all of them. Pick one. Make it specific. Make it doable.


What to Bring to the Session

1. Your two-version observation (with category / without category) – printed or on a device

2. Draft field instructions – doesn’t have to be perfect, but have something written down:

  • Where should someone go?
  • What should they do there?
  • What specifically should they notice?
  • What question or provocation frames the observation?

We’ll spend the session testing these instructions on each other, revising them based on feedback, and then compiling them into a collection that future students can actually use.


The Goal

By the end of this session, we’ll have created a field guide – a collection of instructions for seeing that encodes what this group learned over four months of walking.

Not an archive of your observations. Not a catalogue of what you found.

An archive of practices. A toolkit of attention. Instructions that future students can follow to develop the same kinds of literacy you’ve developed.

This is what survives the course: not your individual insights but the transferable practices that made those insights possible.


See you on Tuesday (Feb 10).

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.

Walk the Campus: Looking for the Middle East at FU

January 20, 2026

You’ve been walking Berlin’s neighborhoods for months – commercial spaces, residential streets, restaurants, shops. You’ve learned to notice how “the Middle East” appears in the city.

But what about here? What about this campus?

Today, walk Freie Universität Berlin for about 90 minutes with this question: How does the Middle East appear at FU, and how is it framed?


What to Look For

Don’t just look for “where is the Middle East” – look for how it appears as a category in this institutional space.

Buildings, institutes, departments, programs:

  • Which ones deal with the Middle East?
  • How are they named?
  • Where are they located on campus – central or peripheral?
  • What does the architecture communicate?

Bulletin boards and posters:

  • What events are advertised?
  • Whose events get space?
  • What languages appear?
  • How is content categorized or framed?

The library:

  • How are Middle East materials organized?
  • What classification systems are used?
  • Which floor? What’s shelved nearby?
  • What does the organization reveal about how knowledge is structured?

Student spaces:

  • Which languages do you hear?
  • Which groups meet where?
  • Who’s visible? Who’s invisible?
  • What spaces feel marked as “Middle Eastern” vs. unmarked as “German” or “international”?

Campus maps and signage:

  • How is the Middle East represented, if at all?
  • What gets labeled? What doesn’t?
  • What languages are used?

Memorials, plaques, building names:

  • Who gets remembered?
  • What histories are marked on this campus?
  • What connections to the Middle East are commemorated (or absent)?

Classrooms:

  • Where do Middle East courses happen?
  • What do these spaces look like?
  • Are they in specific buildings or scattered?

Your Task

Document 3-5 specific moments/places/things where you notice something about how the Middle East appears (or doesn’t) in this institutional space.

Be specific:

❌ Not just: “I saw Arabic”

✅ But: WHERE did you see it, in what CONTEXT, how was it FRAMED, what was NOTABLE about it?

Example of specificity:

  • “In the lobby of Building X, there’s a bulletin board. Left side: German student group posters. Right side: International student posters, including one in Arabic for a Palestinian solidarity event. The Arabic poster is smaller and in the corner. Next to it: a university regulation, in German only.”

Take photos. Take notes. Notice details.


The Question to Carry With You

Is FU Berlin a space where the Middle East is:

  • Studied?
  • Present?
  • Absent?
  • Produced?

Or maybe: What work is “the Middle East” doing as a category in this institutional space?


Walk alone or with one other person. Meet back at 2.2058 at 12:15 (take 11:45-12:15 as a break).

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.

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.

On Not Knowing the Difference: Academic Walking and the Tourism We Deny

“What’s the difference between what you’re doing and tourism?”

I asked this during the session and watched discomfort ripple through the room. We’ve been walking Berlin’s neighbourhoods for weeks—observing, noticing, thinking with books about survival and legibility and relation—and suddenly we had to defend what we’ve been doing.

We tried. “We have a purpose.” “We’re studying it seriously.” “We have frameworks.” “It’s not just consumption.”

But then someone said: “Don’t tourists also have purposes? And urgency? And frameworks—guidebooks, travel blogs, Instagram aesthetics?”

And someone else: “Don’t we both share this outsider perspective? This sense of being anonymous toward our subjects?”

And then, more uncomfortably, I thought: “What if studying IS consumption?”

The discussion spiraled. Tourism versus travel versus research versus lived experience. Who’s extracting what from whom. Whether pleasure delegitimises inquiry. Whether frameworks make attention more legitimate or just more elaborate. Whether the people who live in Neukölln can tell the difference between a student with a book about precarity and a tourist with a Lonely Planet guide.

I want to sit with that last question, because I don’t think we can.


We’ve built an entire apparatus of distinction—academic vs. tourist, research vs. consumption, serious vs. superficial—and I’m not sure the distinction holds.

Both involve temporary presence. Both involve moving through spaces you don’t inhabit. Both involve selective attention—you notice some things and not others. Both involve frameworks that precede the encounter—the tourist has expectations from Instagram, the researcher has concepts from seminars. Both produce accounts that circulate elsewhere—photos on social media, papers in journals. Both claim to be learning something. Both benefit the observer more than the observed.

The usual academic response is to insist on depth. Tourists are superficial; researchers go deeper. Tourists consume; researchers analyse. Tourists seek pleasure; researchers seek understanding.

But what if depth is just slower consumption? What if analysis is just more elaborate extraction? What if the distinction between pleasure and understanding is itself part of how we legitimate certain forms of attention over others?

I’m not trying to collapse all distinctions. There are differences between spending three hours in a neighborhood and spending three months. Between walking once and returning repeatedly. Between looking and actually talking to people who live there. Between writing for other outsiders and writing in conversation with insiders.

But those differences are about degree, not kind. They’re about how much time you spend, how many return visits you make, how careful you are—not about a fundamental difference in what you’re doing.

And the students noticed this, too. They noticed that both tourism and academic observation share what one called “hyperfocus on surroundings.” Both involve deliberate attention. Both create a heightened state of noticing. The difference isn’t that one notices and the other doesn’t—it’s that one is legitimated differently or at all and the other isn’t.

We give ourselves institutional permission to walk neighbourhoods as observers. We call it research. We frame it as “understanding complex layerings of presence.” We cite books that give us sophisticated languages for what we’re seeing—assemblages, legibility, agency.

But from the street, from the perspective of someone who lives there? We’re just people walking through, looking at things, taking notes, going away again.


Someone in the discussion said: “Maybe there’s a difference between tourism and travel?”

This is the move we always make. When we’re uncomfortable with being tourists, we promote ourselves to travelers. Travelers are different. Travelers are more respectful, more open, more genuinely interested. Tourism is what other people do—people who follow guidebooks, who stay in hotels, who take selfies. Travel is what we do—we’re more authentic, more curious, more serious.

But who decided this? Who gets to claim the category of traveler versus tourist? Usually the people with more cultural capital, more education, more ability to frame their consumption as something else.

And researchers? We’ve created an even more elevated category. We’re not tourists OR travelers—we’re scholars. We have methods. We read theory. We cite sources. Our attention is legitimate because it’s situated within institutional frameworks.

But what if those institutional frameworks are just more elaborate forms of the same basic act: going somewhere you don’t live, looking at things, extracting experience, taking it back to your own world to process?


Here’s where it gets even more uncomfortable: the books themselves.

We walk with Tsing, Scott, Macfarlane. These books give us frameworks for seeing—survival in damaged landscapes, resistance to legibility, agency beyond the human. The books are supposed to make our attention more sophisticated, less naive, more theoretically grounded.

But what if the books are also a form of consumption? What if we consume theoretical frameworks to consume neighbourhoods more elaborately?

Think about it: we read Tsing on precarity and assemblage, and then we walk Neukölln looking for precarity and assemblage. We find it, because the framework makes it visible. We feel smart because we’ve connected theory to observation. We write papers about how Tsing’s concepts illuminate Berlin’s complexities.

But whose precarity? Whose assemblages? And who benefits from our newly sophisticated ability to name them?

The people living in Neukölln don’t need Tsing to understand their own lives. They’re living the precarity we’re theorising. They’re forming the assemblages we’re analysing. Our frameworks don’t help them—they help us. They help us organise our observations. They help us write papers. They help us get degrees.

This doesn’t make the frameworks wrong. It makes them ours. Tools for our own sense-making, our own credentialing, our own careers.


So what do we do with this?

The easy answer is: stop walking as observers. Only write about communities you belong to. Only theorise your own experience.

But that answer forecloses a lot. It means you can never try to understand anything outside your immediate world. It means all borders become walls. It means attention is only legitimate when it’s turned inward.

And that’s its own kind of poverty.

The other easy answer is: walk anyway, but be reflexive about it. Acknowledge your positionality. Name your privileges. Be humble about your interpretations.

And yes, fine. But reflexivity can become its own form of absolution. “I know I’m implicated, therefore I can keep doing what I’m doing.” Naming privilege doesn’t eliminate it. Acknowledging extraction doesn’t make it not extraction.

So maybe there’s no clean answer. Maybe the question is: can you walk as an observer in ways that don’t just serve yourself?

Can you pay attention that actually helps the people you’re paying attention to? Can you use your institutional position not just to extract experience but to amplify voices, to shift resources, to change what counts as knowledge?

Can you write in ways that people who live in these neighbourhoods could actually use—not just papers for other academics, but texts that serve communities, that contribute something back?

Can you build relationships that outlast your research timeline? Can you show up not just when you need observations but when communities need support?

I don’t know. These questions are easier to ask than to answer.


But here’s what I do know: we can’t keep pretending there’s a clear line between academic observation and tourism. We can’t keep claiming that institutional frameworks automatically legitimate our attention. We can’t keep extracting experience from neighbourhoods and calling it understanding.

The students were right to be uncomfortable. They should be uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable.

Because maybe the uncomfortable truth is this: walking neighbourhoods as an observer is always going to involve some degree of consumption, some degree of extraction, some degree of using other people’s lives as material for your own sense-making.

The question isn’t how to avoid that entirely. The question is: what are you giving back? Who benefits from your attention? What changes because you walked through?

And if the answer is “mostly me”—if the main beneficiary of your observation is your own education, your own paper, your own degree—then maybe you are a tourist after all.

Just a tourist with better footnotes.


I don’t have a resolution. I don’t think there is one.

But I think we need to stop pretending that academic frameworks automatically make our attention more legitimate. We need to stop using “research” as a way to avoid the ethical questions that tourism raises. We need to stop acting like institutional affiliation exempts us from the basic question: what gives you the right to interpret someone else’s neighbourhood?

Maybe the most honest thing we can do is admit: we don’t have a right. We have a privilege. And privileges aren’t legitimated by frameworks—they’re just privileges.

What we do with that privilege—whether we use it purely for our own advancement or whether we find ways to make our attention accountable to the communities we’re observing—that’s where the ethics live.

Not in the distinction between academic and tourist.

In what we do with the fact that we’re both.

What Has Been Catching Your Attention?

November 18, 2025 | 10:15-13:45

Session Overview

After weeks of independent walking through Berlin’s neighbourhoods, students gathered for an intensive session to share, examine, and complicate their observations. The session was designed not to discuss the books directly, but to explore how attention works, what it reveals, and what it hides.


Opening Provocation: Tourism or Research? (10:15-10:40)

We began with an uncomfortable question: What’s the difference between what you’re doing and tourism?

Two quotes on the board framed the tension:

  • “As a researcher, I walk these neighborhoods to understand the complex layering of Middle Eastern presence in Berlin.”
  • “These are our streets. We live here. We’re not your research subject.”

The discussion revealed surprising overlaps between academic observation and tourism:

  • Both share an outsider perspective
  • Both involve selective attention and deliberate focus
  • Both create “hyperfocus on surroundings”
  • Both extract experience that gets processed elsewhere
  • Both involve frameworks (guidebooks vs. academic theory)
  • Both claim legitimacy through different languages

Key tensions that emerged:

  • Is there a difference between tourism and travel?
  • Does having a “serious purpose” make observation less extractive?
  • Who decides what counts as legitimate attention?
  • If pleasure delegitimises, why should studying be different?
  • Can local residents tell the difference between an academic observer and a tourist?

The question was left unresolved but stayed uncomfortable throughout the day—which was the point.


Solo Mapping: Making Attention Visible (10:40-11:10)

Students worked individually to map what has been catching their attention over weeks of walking.

The task: Not a geographic map, but a visualisation of attention patterns:

  • Places that kept pulling them back
  • Moments that felt charged or strange
  • Things that repeated in different forms
  • Contradictions they couldn’t resolve
  • Questions that got bigger instead of smaller
  • Things they expected but didn’t find
  • Things they didn’t expect but kept encountering

This silent solo work gave students space to see their own patterns before sharing with others. The maps took various forms: diagrams, clusters, timelines, word clouds, drawings—whatever made the structure of attention visible.


Pair Exchange: Seeing Through Different Lenses (11:10-11:45)

Students paired with someone who had read a different book (Tsing, Scott, or Macfarlane) to explore how different frameworks shape attention.

Phase 1: Each person walked their partner through their attention map

Phase 2: Looking at both maps together—where do attentions overlap? Where do they completely diverge? What did one see that the other didn’t?

Phase 3: The key question: What is your partner’s attention showing you that you didn’t see?

Not “what did they notice that you missed”—but what does the way they were looking reveal about what’s there to be seen?

This phase surfaced how books function as lenses: Tsing-readers noticed precarity and survival; Scott-readers saw legibility and resistance; Macfarlane-readers attended to agency and relation. But the question remained: Are you discovering Berlin, or confirming what you expected to find?


Break (11:45-12:30)


Small Group Provocations (12:30-13:00)

Groups of 4-5 (mixing books) spent 10 minutes on each provocation:

Provocation 1: “Think of a specific moment while walking—a shop, a street corner, a conversation you overheard, a building—where you thought you understood what you were seeing, and then suddenly weren’t sure anymore. What made you uncertain? What did you think you were looking at, and what interrupted that?”

Provocation 2: “You’ve been walking neighborhoods with visible Middle Eastern presence—Arabic signs, Syrian restaurants, Turkish grocery stores, mosques. But who decides what counts as ‘Middle Eastern presence’? What if there are forms of Middle Eastern Berlin that you’re walking right past because they don’t look like what you expected to see?”

Provocation 3: “Pick one specific place you kept returning to, or one thing you kept noticing in different locations. If you showed that same place or thing to three different people—a longtime Turkish-German resident, a recent Syrian refugee, an urban planner from the Senate—what would each of them see that the others wouldn’t? What does that tell you about what you’re seeing?”

These provocations created productive discomfort, pushing students to question the legitimacy and limits of their observations.


Whole Group Discussion: What Are You Actually Looking At? (13:00-13:45)

The final discussion centered on a concrete question: When you see a restaurant that is labelled as “Syrian” or “Oriental” in Berlin, what are you actually looking at?

The provocation: What if you’re not looking at something “Syrian” at all? What if you’re looking at something “German”?

That restaurant exists because of German asylum policy. Its location is shaped by German housing policy. Its customers include German gentrifiers. Its aesthetics might be performing “Syrian-ness” for German consumption. Its survival depends on German economic structures.

Questions that remain:

  • Are we seeing the Middle East, or are we seeing German policy wearing Middle Eastern signs?
  • If Berlin removed all Arabic signs tomorrow, would Middle Eastern presence disappear—or just become more invisible to us?
  • Who decided certain neighbourhoods count as “Middle Eastern Berlin”? The people who live there, or the people who write about them?
  • What if “the Middle East” we’re finding is a category that only exists from the outside?

The discussion revealed deep tensions about:

  • Whose categories we’re using
  • What visibility means and who controls it
  • Whether presence can be separated from the structures that shape it
  • The difference between describing and imposing

Assignment: Walking Until January 20

Your task for the next two months:

Stop looking for what you expect to find.

You chose books. You developed frameworks. You learned to see certain things. Fine. Now walk looking for what contradicts your frameworks. What doesn’t fit. What your books can’t explain. What your training makes invisible.

Specifically:

  • Keep walking regularly (at least once a week)
  • Look for what breaks your patterns of attention
  • Notice what resists your interpretation
  • Find what your frameworks miss
  • Stay with contradictions—don’t resolve them

I’ll send occasional email provocations to keep your attention unsettled.

When we meet January 20, the question will be: What patterns are you noticing?

But not the patterns you went looking for. The patterns that found you despite your frameworks. The patterns that emerged when you stopped trying to confirm what you already thought.


Key Takeaways

  1. Observation is never neutral: Academic frameworks don’t eliminate extraction—they make it more elaborate.
  2. Attention is trained: Your discipline, language, background, and books all shape what you can see and what stays invisible.
  3. Visibility is constructed: “Middle Eastern presence” is a category created by particular structures of power, policy, and attention.
  4. Frameworks enable and constrain: Books help you see certain things but may prevent you from seeing others.
  5. The ethical question persists: What gives you the right to interpret someone else’s neighborhood? Who benefits from your attention?
  6. Discomfort is productive: The goal isn’t to resolve tensions but to stay with them, to let them complicate your thinking.

Kreuzberg, collaboration

Quick thought for your walk this week: Kreuzberg is famous for its contradictions. But what if they’re not contradictions at all?

Where do things collaborate that aren’t supposed to?

Tsing would say: look for the assemblages. Scott would say: look where the grid breaks down. Macfarlane would say: look for unexpected relations that generate life.

Start anywhere—Kottbusser Tor, the canal, the backstreets. Notice what shares space: activist centers and luxury flats, informal economies and official ones, memorials and nightlife, languages that coexist on the same wall.

Don’t collect examples. Just walk with the question. See what finds you.