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

