Schlagwort: the thesis

Before next week, write one page (max 400–500 words total) structured as follows:

1. My current thesis (5–6 lines only)

Describe your thesis as you currently understand it. No improvement. No refinement. Just the working version in your head.

2. The weakest point

Answer honestly: Where does my project stop being convincing — even to me? This is not about “problems in general,” but a specific pressure point, for example:

I don’t actually know if I can access the sources I assume exist
I am relying on categories I haven’t questioned (e.g. “community,” “literature,” “Islam,” “migration”)
my method doesn’t actually match my material
I am assuming a stability in my object that might not exist
I cannot clearly say what counts as data

Be concrete. One main weakness only.

3. What I am secretly avoiding

One short paragraph: What part of this project do I keep postponing thinking about?

This can be:

methodological difficulty
political discomfort
lack of material
fear of narrowing down
uncertainty about relevance
dependence on ideal sources that may not exist

No moral framing. Just description.

4. One fragment of evidence (very important)

Bring ONE concrete thing from your project world:

a paragraph from a text
a quote an interview fragment
a source title a media example
a case detail

And answer in 2–3 sentences only: Why is this here at all in my project?

Not interpretation. Just positioning.

Before we meet, a word about what this colloquium is — and isn’t.

I have taught versions of this course for long enough to know what happens when a thesis colloquium runs on the usual logic: the instructor presents a timeline, explains the genre conventions of the exposé, offers a template or a model, and students leave knowing what is expected of them. The administrative scaffolding is in place. What is rarely in place, at the end of such a session, is any honest accounting of where anyone actually is.

Where students actually are, in my experience, tends to involve one or more of the following: a topic that interests them genuinely but that they have been told, or have told themselves, is not academic enough; a question they can articulate in conversation but that falls apart on paper; a field they are trying to enter that keeps refusing their question because it doesn’t fit the existing categories; a supervisor they need to find and no clear idea of how to find one whose work touches theirs; a suspicion that their angle on the Middle East is somehow too personal, too political, too located to be legitimate; or simply the vertigo of being asked to produce original knowledge in a field that is anything but neutral, inside an institution that was not designed with their question in mind.

None of that gets addressed by a timeline and a template or a required presentation of a potential topic. So I am not offering those on Wednesday — or at least, not leading with them.

What I want instead is for the first session to begin from wherever you actually are. Which means you have to come having thought about that. Not having prepared a presentation, not having already resolved the difficulty into something manageable — but having sat with it long enough to be able to name it, roughly, in a room with other people who are in adjacent versions of the same position.

The sessions from there will be shaped by what you bring. I have no fixed agenda beyond the dates and the final deadline. If three people are stuck on the same methodological problem, we spend a session on that. If someone’s question keeps dissolving under scrutiny, we spend time on why. If the room needs to talk about what it means to research the Middle East from inside a German university in the current moment, we talk about that. The shape of the semester belongs to what you bring to it.

This is not a way of avoiding structure. It is a different kind of structure — one that starts from the actual situation rather than from an imagined ideal student moving smoothly toward a finished document. The document will come. But first, Wednesday.