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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.

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.

Who Are You Writing For?

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

This session marked the first draft sharing for the course. Rather than traditional feedback, we focused on the gap between what writers think they’re communicating and what readers actually receive—particularly around instability, costs, and readers.


Opening Discussion: What Do You Want When You Share Writing? (10:15-10:40)

We began by asking students to reflect on what they actually want when they share unfinished writing.

Responses included:

  • “Tell me if it makes sense”
  • “Tell me what’s missing”
  • “Tell me it’s good”
  • “Tell me whether to keep going”
  • “Find the problems”
  • “Understand what I was trying to say”
  • “Tell me if anyone would care about this”

The key insight: These are completely different—and often incompatible—asks.

Some requests assume the idea is right and just needs clarity (“tell me if it makes sense”). Others question whether the whole project is worth doing (“tell me if anyone would care”). Some ask readers to decode the writer’s intentions (“understand what I was trying to say”) while others ask readers to challenge the work (“find the problems”).

The tension: Most writers want readers to validate what they’re trying to do while also telling them what’s wrong. But you can’t have both simultaneously.

The discussion surfaced:

  • Feedback that serves writer anxiety vs. feedback that serves the writing
  • Feedback about what you meant vs. what readers received
  • Feedback that assumes your frame is right vs. questions the frame

The reframe for draft sharing:

Readers should NOT try to understand what the writer meant. Instead, readers report what they actually received.

Not “I think you’re trying to say X”—but “Here’s what I understood.”

Not “This is good/needs work”—but “Here’s where I saw instability” and “Here’s where I didn’t see why I should care.”

The writer’s job: Listen to the gap between intention and reception.


Pair Reading: Mark What You Receive (10:40-11:20)

Students paired up with someone whose topic was different from theirs.

Phase 1: Silent Reading (20 minutes total, 10 per draft)

One person reads the other’s draft in silence, marking three things:

  • Where you see the instability (what doesn’t fit, what contradicts)
  • $ Where you see costs/benefits (why this matters to readers, not to the writer)
  • ? Where you can identify who the readers are (who cares about this?)

If the reader reaches the end without marking all three, that’s important information.

Phase 2: Report What You Received (20 minutes total, 10 per draft)

The reader reports back—but with strict constraints: Only report what you marked. Don’t interpret. Don’t suggest fixes.

Examples:

  • “I saw instability here where you said X contradicted Y”
  • “I didn’t see costs until page 3, and even then I wasn’t sure if they were costs to me or to you”
  • “I couldn’t tell who I was supposed to be as a reader”

The writer’s job: Listen. Don’t explain. Don’t defend. Just hear the gap.

This phase made visible the often-significant distance between what writers thought they communicated (instability, costs, specific readers) and what readers actually received (confusion, vagueness, unclear stakes).


Small Group Pressure Test (11:20-11:40)

Groups of 3-4 (mixed topics) took turns reading their openings aloud (first 1-2 pages).

The group’s role: Be the skeptical reader. Push on everything.

Questions:

  • “Where’s the instability? I don’t see what doesn’t fit.”
  • “So what? Why does that matter to me as a reader?”
  • “Who am I supposed to be? What community cares about this?”
  • “Is this a gap (we don’t know X) or a problem (not knowing X costs us Y)?”
  • “At what sentence would I stop reading? Why?”

This phase pushed beyond politeness. Students practiced being honest readers—the kind who are busy, skeptical, and will stop reading if they don’t immediately see value.

What emerged:

  • Many drafts described interesting observations but didn’t establish instability
  • Costs were often implied rather than explicit
  • Readers were frequently unnamed or too generic (“people interested in Berlin”)
  • The gap problem vs. the gap itself remained unclear in many drafts

Assignment for December 3

You’ve now tested your draft with multiple readers. You know where the gaps are—between what you thought you were communicating and what readers actually received.

Revise your 3-4 pages based on what you learned today.

Your goal:

  • Make the instability visible in the first two paragraphs
  • Show costs that readers bear (not you)
  • Make clear who your readers are (even if implicitly)

The test: Between now and next session, give your revised draft to someone outside this class—a friend, a colleague, anyone. Ask them: “Where would you stop reading and why?”

If they stop before they see the instability and why it matters, keep revising.

Bring the revised draft printed on December 3. We’ll go deeper into how instabilities actually work and how to construct them effectively.


Key Takeaways

  1. Intention ≠ Reception: What you think you’re communicating and what readers receive are often very different.
  2. The gap is the learning: The distance between what you meant and what readers understood shows you what needs work.
  3. Readers report, don’t interpret: The most useful feedback describes what was received, not what the writer “really meant.”
  4. Instability must be unmissable: If readers have to work to find your tension, it’s not clear enough.
  5. Costs must be explicit: Implied stakes don’t work. Readers need to know specifically what they lose if this stays unresolved.
  6. Generic readers = no readers: “People interested in X” isn’t specific enough. Name the actual community.
  7. Skeptical readers are generous readers: Honest pushback helps more than polite validation.

The Readers Who Don’t Exist Yet: A Problem with Problems

Larry McEnerney’s insight—that academic writing exists to help readers understand better something they want to understand well—is more radical than it sounds. Most academic writing isn’t reader-centered at all. It’s résumé-centered. Look at what I know. Look at how smart I am. Look at my command of theory, my mastery of method, my original contribution. The text exists to credential the writer, not to help readers think.

So teaching reader-centered writing is already a corrective. It’s already asking writers to stop performing and start serving. To stop treating texts as monuments to individual brilliance and start treating them as tools for collective understanding.

But I keep thinking: What happens when the readers you need don’t exist yet?

McEnerney’s framework assumes a stable situation: there’s a community of readers who care about certain questions, and your job is to help them understand those questions better. You identify the instability they recognise (or should recognise), show them the costs of leaving it unresolved, and offer your work as a solution. The community’s interests are given. Your task is to serve them.

But what if you’re writing at a border?

What if you’re trying to understand something that doesn’t fit neatly into any existing disciplinary conversation? What if the readers who should care about your question are scattered across different fields, speaking different languages, asking questions that don’t quite connect? What if the very structure of how communities organise their care—what they think is worth understanding—is part of what needs to be rethought?

This isn’t a hypothetical problem. It’s the situation most interesting work finds itself in.

Think about writing that tries to hold Berlin and the Middle East together—not as separate objects of study (Berlin here, Middle East there) but as mutually constitutive, as folded into each other in ways that exceed disciplinary boundaries. Who are your readers? Middle East scholars? Urban studies people? Migration researchers? German historians? Each community has different stakes, different problems they recognise, different ways of deciding what counts as understanding.

You could write for one community, making your work legible to their concerns. But then you’d lose the other communities—and probably lose what’s most interesting about the work, which is precisely what exceeds any single disciplinary frame.

Or you could try to write for multiple communities at once. But then you face the translation problem: you’re constantly explaining to each community why they should care about what the other community cares about. The text becomes crowded with justifications, bridges, apologies for terminology. And still, readers from each community might feel like you’re not really writing for them.

Or—and this is what interests me—you could write for readers who don’t yet exist as a coherent community. Readers who are scattered across different fields but who might, if they read your work, start to recognise each other. Start to see that they’re asking related questions. Start to form a new community of concern.

But how do you write for readers who don’t exist yet?

This is where McEnerney’s framework strains. Because it assumes you can identify your readers, understand what they care about, and show them why your work matters to their existing concerns. But what if your work is trying to create new concerns? What if you’re not just helping readers understand better—you’re trying to change what they think is worth understanding at all?

McEnerney knows this problem exists. He mentions it briefly: sometimes a writer can change what a community cares about. But he’s clear this is “rare and difficult” and “carries serious danger.” Better to align your work with what readers already want to understand.

And he’s not wrong. Most work that tries to create entirely new problems fails. Readers don’t engage. Papers get rejected. Careers stall.

But if everyone follows this advice, how does intellectual change happen? How do new questions emerge? How do fields transform?

There’s a temporal paradox here. The work that most successfully serves existing readers’ interests is work that reinforces existing structures of attention. It makes incremental progress on problems the community already recognises. This is valuable—most knowledge advances this way. But it can’t disrupt. It can’t ask fundamentally new questions. It can’t point to instabilities the community doesn’t yet see as instabilities.

For that, you need writing that’s slightly out of phase with its moment. Writing that addresses problems readers don’t quite recognise yet. Writing that tries to create the community that would recognise it as valuable.

But this creates a cruel bind: that writing is most vulnerable to rejection precisely because it doesn’t meet readers where they are. It asks readers to become different kinds of readers. And that’s a hard ask when readers are busy, when they’re trained to scan for value quickly, when they’ll stop reading after two paragraphs if they don’t immediately see why your work matters to them.

So what do you do?

The standard moves are:

  • Frame your radical question as an answer to a recognised problem (smuggle in the new under cover of the familiar)
  • Build enough legitimacy through conventional work that you’ve earned the right to take risks
  • Find the one or two readers who already get it and write for them, hoping they’ll evangelise to others
  • Write at the border between fields where neither field fully controls what counts as legitimate questions

All of these can work. All of them are partial solutions.

But I wonder if there’s something else—something about the form itself.

What if you wrote texts that worked at multiple registers simultaneously? Not dumbing down for different audiences, but creating multiple entry points, multiple ways of caring about the question?

A text that could be read by Middle East scholars as a contribution to understanding diaspora. Could be read by urban studies people as a contribution to understanding how cities layer histories. Could be read by anthropologists as a contribution to understanding how people make homes in displacement. Could be read by German studies scholars as a contribution to understanding how Berlin carries its Eastern origins.

Not because you’re diluting each claim to make it palatable to everyone, but because you’re working at a level of complexity where the question genuinely matters across multiple frameworks.

This isn’t the same as interdisciplinary writing that tries to translate between fields. It’s something more like writing that thinks from the border itself—from the place where disciplinary languages break down and you have to find new ways of describing what you’re seeing.

Maybe the “problem” with McEnerney’s framework isn’t that it’s wrong, but that it assumes a stability that doesn’t exist for the most interesting intellectual work. It assumes you can identify your readers, understand their problems, and meet them where they are. But what if the most important work happens precisely when you can’t do that—when you’re writing for a community that doesn’t exist yet, when you’re trying to articulate problems that readers don’t recognize as problems, when you’re pointing to instabilities in the very structure of how we organise intellectual attention?

This isn’t an argument against reader-centered writing. Reader-centered writing is infinitely better – I think! – than ego-centered writing. But maybe we need a more complicated temporality. Maybe we need to ask: reader-centered for which readers? The readers who exist now, or the readers your work is trying to call into being?

And maybe we need forms that can work across that temporal gap—forms that meet some readers where they are while simultaneously inviting other readers to become something different. Forms that serve existing communities while also seeding new ones. Forms that are strategic enough to survive the present moment but ambitious enough to change what the next moment cares about.

I don’t know what those forms look like. I’m watching students walk Berlin, holding tensions that don’t yet have disciplinary homes, and I wonder what it would mean to teach them to write not just for existing readers but for the readers they’re trying to create. Not to abandon readers—that way lies irrelevance—but to understand writing as a practice of community-building rather than just community-serving.

Maybe that’s what all good academic writing has always done, quietly, without theorising it. Maybe the texts we remember aren’t the ones that most efficiently solved recognised problems, but the ones that changed what we thought was worth solving. The ones that created new readers by teaching us to care about questions we didn’t know were questions.

If that’s right, then McEnerney’s framework isn’t wrong—it’s incomplete. Yes, write for readers. Yes, help them understand better. But also: write to create new structures of attention. Write to change what counts as understanding. Write for the readers who will only exist if you write for them.

This is harder. More uncertain. More likely to fail. But maybe also more necessary—especially now, especially at the borders, especially when we’re trying to understand things that exceed the ways we’ve learned to organize knowledge.

Why Should Anybody Care About Your Tension?

November 5, 2025

Today’s session focused on a crucial shift in thinking about academic writing: moving from explaining what we know to creating problems that readers care about solving.

Opening Discussion: What IS the Function of Academic Writing?

We began by asking students what they think the function of academic writing is. The whiteboard captured a rich range of responses:

Students suggested academic writing functions:

  • To think
  • To express clearly
  • To present “objective” research
  • To prove/select ideas
  • To share new info/data
  • To open perspectives
  • To convince people
  • To add to conversation
  • To archive (what is wanted to be known)
  • For career/prestige/credibility
  • To show expertise
  • As control (of people)
  • To make money
  • To fill gaps
  • To entertain?

Bigger questions that emerged:

  • Is academia isolated from society?
  • What does academic writing matter to?
    • Individuals?
    • Institutions?
    • “The field”?
  • Why write at all?

Key tension identified: The difference between:

  • Writer’s purpose: to think about something (uses text as thinking tool)
  • Reader’s purpose: to learn about/understand something (uses text as learning tool)

This gave way to the core insight from Larry McEnerny’s writing programme at the University of Chicago: The function of academic writing is to help readers understand better something they want to understand well.

That’s only one way to look at it, of course 😉

Here’s a session with Larry McEnerny; you’ll see I cite him alot:


Key Examples Analysed

Example 1: The Clonal/Sexual Co-existence Problem

We looked at two versions of the same academic opening to see which created more value:

Version 1a (flat?):

As a consequence of the “cost of sex,” the theoretical probability of clonal and sexual co-existence is low; observation of co-existence in vertebrate taxa has been reported. Within the frozen niche-variation (FNV) model, the relevant parameter is difference in overall niche breadth. A wider niche breadth for the sexuals than for the clones is predicted in performance in monocultures; performances in mixtures do not indicate such a relationship. Switching of behaviors or resource-use patterns between mixed and pure cultures may be the cause. The proposed study will examine this prediction of the FNV model.

Version 1b (creates problem?):

As a consequence of the “cost of sex,” the theoretical probability of clonal and sexual co-existence is low. Nonetheless, observation of co-existence in vertebrate taxa has been widely reported. Within the accepted model of frozen niche-variation (FNV), co-existence is explained by difference in overall niche breadth. However, although the FNV model correctly predicts wider niche breadth for the sexuals than for the clones, its predictions are inconsistent with reported performances in mixtures. The proposed study will examine whether the anomaly may be explained by the switching of behaviors or resource-use patterns between mixed and pure cultures.

What makes 1b work differently?

  • Uses instability language: “Nonetheless,” “However,” “although,” “inconsistent,” “anomaly”
  • Creates tension between what we expect and what we observe
  • Shows that current models don’t fully explain the phenomenon

Example 2: William Sewell on Historical Events

We didn’t analyse this one during the session, but I think it’s a brilliant example of how to create a problem that looks like background but actually destabilises existing knowledge:

Ever since Herodotus, historians have written about events. Battles, alliances, scandals, conquests, conspiracies, revolts, royal successions, reforms, elections, religious revivals, assassinations, discoveries: momentous events have always been the bread and butter of narrative history. But despite the prominence of events in historical narratives, the event has rarely been scrutinized as a theoretical category. Traditional narrative historians who reveled in the contingency and particularity of events generally refused on principles to engage in explicit theorizing. Meanwhile, historical sociologists, along with the minority of historians who turned to the social sciences in order to escape the hegemony of political narrative, generally disdained the study of mere events and sought instead to discover general causal patterns underlying historical change. This was true of the “Annales school” in France from the late 1920s forward and of the ‘new social history” that blossomed in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s the old antagonisms between narrative history and historical sociology had begun to fade; yet theoretical work on historical events has remained relatively rare…

What’s happening here:

  • Looks like historical background
  • But actually creates instability: “despite the prominence… rarely scrutinized”
  • Shows cost: historians can’t adequately theorize major turning points
  • Identifies specific readers: historical sociologists

Example 3: The Erasmus Chronology Problem

It is a perennial paradox of Erasmus studies that neither the wealth of autobiographical information that the Dutch humanist has left us nor the enormous mass of scholarly literature that has grown up around his life and works has ever given us a firm grip on the year of his birth and the chronology of his youth. We do not know with certainty, for example, how old Erasmus was when he entered Steyn monastery…

Key move: The instability is already recognised by the community (“perennial paradox”), so the writer just reminds readers of it.


Example 4: Caribbean Foreign Policy

What is missing [in the study of the international relations of the Caribbean] are the same things that are missing in the study of Third World or Latin American foreign policy and international relations as a whole: Most of what is written is country-specific or issue-specific rather than general and comprehensive; most is descriptive rather than theoretical. The challenge is to put together what we know into a plausible whole, within a suitable theoretical framework, as a first step in developing theory…

But readers may well ask: Why is it important to… to study Third World policy with some rigor… Is it of any great significance…? Apart from the obvious value of supplying knowledge to those who want it, the study of Third World foreign policy should assist in the building and refining of international relations “middle-range” theory. The sub-field of international relations that is most clearly linked to such study is that of comparative foreign policy… Also of relevance is the field of decision-making…the realm of process…

What’s happening:

  • Identifies gap/instability
  • Anticipates reader skepticism: “But readers may well ask…”
  • Has to work harder to show costs/benefits because it’s a gap problem
  • Names specific theoretical benefits to specific sub-fields

Example 5: The Book of Amos – De-stabilizing Stasis

In recent years several attempts have been made to discover an overall structural pattern in the book of Amos. Certainly inspired by the burgeoning interest in “literary approaches” to the Bible, these studies have divided Amos into a relatively small number of extended sections, each of which (it is claimed) has a high degree of literary integrity. A comparison of these studies, however, soon reveals considerable diversity among them. Thus, to look no further than the authors mentioned in footnote 1, the following divergent analyses of chaps. 3-6 have been proposed:

Hayes: [pattern #1]
Andersen and Freedman: [pattern #2]
Dorsey: [pattern #3]

The only points these scholars are all agreed on are that 5:1 begins a new section (although I shall argue below that in fact it does not) and that 6:14 closes a section (which has long been recognized by all commentators).

The main reason for this diversity, in my view, is that insufficient attention has been given to the criteria for making such analyses. In particular: (i) Formal criteria, such as introductory and closing formulas, have been given much greater prominence than they merit. (ii) Literary criteria, such as palistrophic structuring and inclusos, have often been employed too loosely and impressionistically.

In the present article, I shall offer a new analysis which, through giving particular attention to thematic considerations, will argue that Amos consists of a…

What’s happening here:

  • Sets up what looks like stable knowledge: “several attempts have been made”
  • Then de-stabilises it: “however, soon reveals considerable diversity”
  • Shows the cost: scholars can’t agree because their methods are flawed
  • This is a stasis → de-stabilising move rather than just pointing to an existing instability

The Three Components of a Problem

1. INSTABILITY

  • Something doesn’t fit
  • Something contradicts something else
  • Something is inconsistent
  • Signal words: however, although, nonetheless, but, paradox, anomaly, inconsistent, reported, widely accepted

2. COSTS/BENEFITS (to readers)

  • What can’t we understand if we leave this unstable?
  • What would we gain by resolving it?
  • NOT “I won’t finish my degree”
  • NOT “I find this interesting”
  • But: “This prevents us from understanding X that the community cares about”

3. READERS

  • Specific communities
  • Who cares about this?
  • Whose understanding needs to be better?

Gap vs. Problem: The Crucial Difference

Gap thinking: “No one has written about Syrian grocery stores in Neukölln.” → SO WHAT? There are infinite things we haven’t written about.

Problem thinking: “We think we understand how diaspora communities maintain identity through food practices, but the Syrian groceries in Neukölln challenge this model because…” → NOW you’re showing that the gap has consequences for something readers care about.

Gap = “here’s something we don’t know” Problem = “here’s why not knowing hurts our understanding of something we care about”


Work to Do During the Next Week (November 6-18)

Since we won’t meet next week, use this time for two activities:

Activity 1: Find the Problem Language

Take 2-3 published articles related to your field or topic. Read just the introductions and:

  • Circle the instability words: however, although, nonetheless, inconsistent, paradox, anomaly, reported, widely accepted
  • Locate where costs/benefits are articulated
  • Identify who the readers are

Notice the patterns. What language does your field use to create problems?

Also notice that maybe many academic papers do not use problem language at all – and maybe that’s a problem 😉

Activity 2: Test Your Own Tension

Write responses to these three questions about your Berlin tension:

  1. Instability: What exactly doesn’t fit in your tension? (Use instability language: however, although, but…)
  2. Costs: What can’t we understand if we leave this unresolved? (What intellectual cost does the COMMUNITY bear – not you personally?)
  3. Readers: Who are three specific people/groups who would care about resolving this tension? Why would they care?

If possible, share your answers with a fellow students and test whether your costs actually land with readers. Does someone else see why this matters?

A note: You might discover as you do this that the topic you want to write about is actually more about what you’re interested in, or what you want to use to demonstrate your knowledge, qualifications, or expertise. That’s completely okay. That’s how most of us have been trained in academia, and we can do this well.

But in this course, I’m asking you to try something different: to experiment with reader-centered writing. To see what happens when you start from what readers need to understand rather than what you want to show them you know. It’s a different muscle, and it takes practice. This course is the space to try it.

Then: Write your 3-4 page draft (see full assignment details above)


Assignment for November 19th

Write a 3-4 page draft

NOT necessarily the beginning of your paper. Instead:

Pick one moment from your walking where your tension became visible. A specific place, observation, encounter, reading, source etc. that made the tension real.

Write 3-4 pages describing that moment and exploring what made it a problem of understanding – not just something you noticed, but something that created instability in how we think we understand Berlin or/and the Middle East // the Middle East in Berlin.

As you write, keep asking:

  • What doesn’t fit here?
  • Why should readers care that it doesn’t fit?
  • What can’t we understand properly if we leave this tension unresolved?

Don’t worry about:

  • Perfect structure
  • Citations yet
  • Whether this is “academic enough”
  • Starting at the beginning

DO worry about:

  • Making the instability visible
  • Showing why it matters
  • Writing toward specific readers (even if you’re not sure who they are yet)

Bring this draft in a format that you can share with fellow students on November 19th.


Looking Ahead to November 19th

Next session focus: Who are you writing for, and can they see why this matters?

We’ll work in pairs or groups or alone to:

  • Identify who your specific readers are
  • Test whether your instability creates costs they actually care about
  • Practice addressing instabilities that help readers understand something better

The question we’ll be asking: Does your writing fulfill its function of helping specific readers understand better something they want to understand well?


Key Takeaways

  1. Function over form: Academic writing’s job is to help readers understand better, not to explain what you know.
  2. Problems, not gaps: Don’t just identify what we don’t know. Show why not knowing matters.
  3. Instability language matters: Words like “however,” “although,” “inconsistent” signal to readers that there’s a problem worth solving.
  4. Costs must be to readers, not writers: “I need to graduate” is not a reason for readers to care. “We can’t adequately theorise X” might be.
  5. Background creates stability, problems need instability: Don’t start with what we all agree on. Start with what doesn’t work.

Writing Berlin: On Disciplinary Seeing

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

There’s something strange about asking people to name their discipline and say how it looks at cities. The strangeness is that most of us don’t realize we have a discipline until someone asks us to articulate it. We just think we’re looking at the world. We don’t notice we’re looking *through* something.

Today we made that looking-through visible. And what became clear is that disciplines aren’t just different areas of expertise—they’re different forms of attention. Anthropology trains you to see power and exclusion. Sound studies trains you to hear what others walk past. History trains you to notice what persists and what gets erased. Each discipline is a technology for rendering certain things visible while making other things recede into background noise.

This matters because we’re asking a question that every discipline thinks it can answer: What survives in cities? But “survival” means completely different things depending on which disciplinary lens you’re wearing.

For someone trained in economics, survival is about market durability, about businesses that persist through waves of rising rents. For someone trained in literary studies, survival is about whose stories continue to be told, whose voices remain audible. For someone doing ethnographic work, survival is about everyday practices that continue even when everything visible seems to have changed. For someone thinking about heritage and memory, survival is about what gets marked, memorialized, acknowledged as having been here.

These aren’t complementary answers to the same question. They’re different questions masquerading as the same one.

What always strucks me is a certain anxiety around claiming disciplinary expertise. People start with qualifications—”Well, I’m sort of in anthropology but…” or “I guess you could say I’m working in the humanities, though…” This hedging isn’t just modesty. It’s uncertainty about whether you’re allowed to speak from within a discipline if you’re also questioning it, borrowing from elsewhere, working across boundaries.

But that uncertainty is productive. It means people are already sensing the limits of their frameworks. They’re already aware that their discipline gives them permission to see certain things but also restricts what they’re capable of seeing.

When people shared their initial writing, the gaps became audible. “Wait, you noticed the memorial plaques? I walked past those every day and never registered them.” “You’re asking about economic relationships? I was only thinking about social function.” The blind spots weren’t failures—they were the inevitable result of having trained attention in one frequency while becoming deaf to others.

This is what disciplinary training does: it gives you high resolution in certain frequencies and renders you nearly deaf to others. You become exquisitely attuned to particular kinds of evidence, particular forms of change, particular types of relationships. And you stop registering what falls outside that bandwidth.

The question is whether we can become conscious of this without trying to transcend it. Because you can’t study everything from everywhere. You can’t attend to all frequencies simultaneously. You need the discipline to see anything at all. But you also need to know what your particular bandwidth leaves out.

The word *Stadtbild* came up—cityscape—and it hung in the air differently this week because of what’s happening in German politics. Chancellor Merz suggesting there’s a “problem in the cityscape” that requires deportations. Protests responding “We are the cityscape.” The controversy makes visible what’s usually invisible: that describing what you see in a city is never neutral description. It’s always already a claim about what should be there, whose presence counts as normal, whose presence registers as disruption.

This is what happens when frameworks become invisible to themselves. When one particular way of seeing—nationalist, rooted in imagined ethnic coherence—presents itself as just describing what’s there rather than making a political claim about what should be there. When the discipline stops being a lens and starts pretending to be reality itself.

So we’re asking people to stay conscious of their lenses. Not to abandon them—you need them to see anything at all. But to recognize them as choices, not inevitabilities. To know what they illuminate and what they obscure. To be honest about the partiality of their view while still doing rigorous work within that partial perspective.

Because cities are too complex for any single approach to capture. You need economic analysis and attention to practice and historical perspective and sensitivity to narrative. You need all of it. But you can’t do it simultaneously. So you choose where to focus, you follow a specific question, and you acknowledge what your choice leaves out.

The work ahead is partly about developing these specific questions—making them sharp, making them matter. But it’s also about learning to see your own seeing. Learning to recognize when your discipline is giving you insight and when it’s giving you blindness.

That’s harder than it sounds. Because disciplines don’t just shape what we look at. They shape what we’re capable of looking at. They structure perception itself.

Assignment for November 5

Write 2-3 pages responding to:

Why should anyone care about your question? What’s at stake if we ignore this tension? What might we understand differently if we pay attention to it?

Don’t just say “it’s interesting.” Make a case for why it’s important.

Think about:

  • What larger patterns or processes does your specific question illuminate?
  • Who is affected by ignoring this question?
  • What assumptions might we need to reconsider if we take your question seriously?
  • How might answering your question change how we see cities, survival, community, or power?

Three References Worth Knowing

Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991): On creating temporary spaces of autonomy outside state control. Useful if you’re thinking about how communities create their own spaces and practices in the gaps of official structures.

Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001): Ethnographic account of daily life in a small Chinese city undergoing rapid transformation. Useful if you’re interested in how everyday observation can reveal larger patterns of change, loss, and survival.

Jean Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1948): Exploring the idea of committed literature (littérature engagée).

You don’t need to read these, but they represent different approaches to urban space, time, and agency that might inform your thinking.

Next session: Wednesday, November 5, 10am-12pm

Writing Berlin: What we discussed + next week’s assignment

Dear all,

Thank you for the engaged conversation today about writing as discovery. It was fascinating to hear the different tensions you’re noticing about urban life—from questions of visibility and erasure to patterns of displacement and belonging to the persistence of certain stories over others.

What We Explored Yesterday

We started with the question of what writing actually does—not just as a way of communicating what we already know, but as a tool for discovering what we think. Writing helps us see patterns we hadn’t noticed, make connections that weren’t obvious, and find questions we didn’t know we were asking.

The central question for this course is: What survives in cities?

Each of you will investigate this question from your own perspective and background over the semester, developing a substantial piece of writing (4,000-6,000 words) that approaches the question through your particular lens, using Berlin as your case study.

You may work and write in teams. The piece of writing is open to many different formats.

The early weeks (the next 4-5 sessions) will help you find your specific angle on this shared question. Then the course opens up—we’ll meet every few weeks to share drafts, problems, and discoveries, functioning more like a research community than a traditional seminar.

For Next Week (Oct 22, Wed 10-12)

Assignment: Bring one example of how your field studies cities—or a field that you like or in which you are interested.

This could be:

  • A book chapter or article that exemplifies the discipline’s approach to urban spaces
  • A specific method or framework the field uses
  • A key concept or theory
  • Even just a way of asking questions that’s typical of the discipline

Come prepared to share it briefly (5 minutes) with the group. We’ll discuss: What does each approach try to answer? What does it reveal? What might it miss?

You don’t need to prepare a presentation—just be ready to talk about it conversationally.

Looking Ahead

Our schedule for the next few weeks:

  • Oct 22: Disciplinary approaches to cities
  • Oct 29: Identifying your specific tension
  • Nov 5: Why should anyone care? What’s at stake?
  • Nov 12: Continue development

Then we’ll meet every 2-3 weeks as you work independently on your writing.

A Reminder

If you’re thinking “I don’t know enough about Berlin yet” or “I’m not sure what my discipline would say about this”—that’s completely normal. You don’t need to know yet. That’s what the semester is for.

Keep the question with you this week: What survives in cities? Let it follow you around. Notice what it makes you pay attention to.

See you Wednesday, Victoria


P.S. If you’re having trouble finding an example from your field, or if you’re not sure what “your field” even is yet, that’s fine—just bring your uncertainty and we’ll work with it.

Writing, new topic on Jan 21, new task for Jan 30

Freie Universität’s AI guidelines (in German) can be found here:

13 – Tue Jan 21 1–2 PM – co-producing texts with the help of ai

Key Session Content:

  • Understand the fundamental differences between human writing processes and AI text generation
  • Avoid getting trapped in AI-dependent workflows that bypass critical thinking
  • Structure your writing process to maximize human insight while critically evaluating potential AI assistance

    Core Concepts:
    1. Human Writing Process vs. AI Generation
  • Writing as thinking vs. writing as pattern matching
  • The value of struggle and uncertainty
  • When clarity emerges through writing process
    2. Critical AI Workflows
  • Identifying when AI seems tempting (language barriers, writer’s block, time pressure)
  • Understanding what you lose by outsourcing different parts of writing
  • Developing criteria for justified vs. convenient AI use
    3. Community-Based Writing Strategies
  • Building peer support networks
  • Collaborative writing and editing practices
  • Shared resources and knowledge banks

14 – Tue Jan 28 12–2 PM – improving your text // independent writing time // peer-review

Trade paper drafts and examine them through the lens of AI co-production. Each reviewer should:

  1. Identify sections where AI assistance might be tempting but would bypass crucial thinking work
  2. Suggest alternative approaches that maintain intellectual sovereignty
  3. Find opportunities where limited AI use might be justified by clear social/academic benefit

TASK #7: Critical Writing Process Analysis
After peer reviewing each other’s drafts, submit a reflection (1-2 pages) that:

  • Takes 1-2 examples from the papers you reviewed
  • Analyzes specific passages where AI tools might be commonly used (e.g., language polishing, transitional phrases, literature summaries)
  • Discusses the tradeoffs involved (environmental cost, thinking process, accessibility needs)
  • Proposes concrete alternative strategies for addressing writing challenges through peer support and collaborative work

Submit your analysis as a PDF by e-mail from your zedat or @fu-berlin.de address to my email address, using the subject “porcupine”. Deadline Thu Jan 30 6 PM.

The Comfort of Context: A Critical Self-Reflection on Academic Writing’s Addiction to Background

As I sit here, staring at yet another introduction that begins with “Scholars have long debated…”, I find myself confronting again something uncomfortable about academic writing—our peculiar addiction to creating stability through excessive background and definitions, a practice that actually undermines the very purpose of scholarly discourse. This compulsive need to establish firm ground before making any claims reveals something essential about our relationship with academic writing and perhaps our own insecurities as scholars: We build elaborate foundations of context not because our readers need them, but because we need them, like a security blanket that shields us from the vulnerability of making bold claims in an intellectual landscape where critique is currency.

The ritualism of the academic introduction has become so deeply ingrained in our scholarly consciousness that we barely question its necessity anymore—especially when teaching academic writing to graduates. We meticulously lay out historical trajectories, carefully define every term as if our readers were novices in their own field, and construct elaborate methodological fortresses—all before daring to merely whisper what we actually want to say. This performance of erudition, while comforting to write, creates a peculiar form of what I would call intellectual procrastination. Instead of engaging directly with the tensions and problems that make our research vital, we spend precious pages establishing our membership in the academic club through citation parades and definitional displays. It’s as if we believe our readers won’t trust us to challenge existing knowledge until we’ve proven we can recite it verbatim.

Perhaps most telling is our collective resistance to abandoning these practices even when we intellectually understand their limitations. We know our readers—they are often accomplished scholars in their fields unless we cater our texts explicitly to other audiences—don’t need a Wikipedia-style overview of basic concepts. We recognize that starting with “Since ancient times…” rarely serves any purpose beyond demonstrating our ability to use JSTOR. Yet time and again, we find ourselves falling back into these patterns, like comfort food for the academic soul. This behavior suggests something more than mere habit; it reveals our deep-seated anxiety about academic authority and our place within scholarly discourse. Each carefully constructed paragraph of background becomes a talisman against potential criticism, a way of saying “Look how thoroughly I’ve done my homework!” before daring to contribute an original thought—if at all.

The irony, of course, is that this obsession with stability and stasis often achieves the opposite of its intended effect. Rather than strengthening our arguments, these lengthy preambles dilute them. Rather than engaging our readers, they exhaust them. Rather than demonstrating our mastery of the field, they suggest we’re not confident enough in our contributions to let them stand on their own merits. The real intellectual courage lies perhaps not in proving we know everything that’s come before, but in daring to challenge it directly, to create productive instability that advances our understanding. When we finally do allow ourselves to write introductions that foreground problems rather than background, that challenge assumptions rather than recite them, we often find our writing becoming not just more engaging but more honest about what we’re actually trying to accomplish in our research.

Breaking free from this addiction to context requires more than just technical writing advice—it demands a shift in how we conceive of our relationship with our readers and our role in academic discourse. Instead of viewing our introductions as credentialing exercises, we might reimagine them as invitations to productive discomfort, to the kind of intellectual instability that generates new insights. This means trusting our readers enough to skip the historical tours and definitional parades, and trusting ourselves enough to make bold claims without first constructing elaborate defensive fortifications. Only then might we transform our academic writing from exercises in stability-building to genuine contributions to knowledge that challenge, provoke, and advance our understanding.