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when and what

Research Conversations

Knowledge about the Middle East is never just knowledge. It arrives already shaped — by funding priorities, by geopolitics, by what counts as a legitimate question in a Western university, by whose archives are accessible and whose aren’t. Every researcher working in this field inherits those conditions, whether they acknowledge them or not.

At some point in the ISME program, students are asked to sit down and produce a piece of that knowledge themselves. To claim a question. To find someone willing to supervise it. To write something original inside a field that is anything but neutral.

That’s a genuinely strange position to be in. Not just difficult — strange. And it rarely gets acknowledged directly.

This colloquium is a place where it can be. We meet regularly across the semester without a fixed agenda. Students come with something: a question they can’t quite formulate, a source that opened something unexpected, a direction that feels interesting but doesn’t sound serious enough yet, a tension between what they want to research and what seems supervise-able, a concept borrowed from one discipline that doesn’t quite fit another. The room stays with it together — not to evaluate it or fix it, but to think about what it’s actually doing. What is this question really asking? What does it assume? Who has asked something similar, and under what conditions? Why this, why here, why you?

Regular attendance is expected. So is arriving with something — a problem, a fragment, a doubt. The colloquium only works if people are honest about where they actually are rather than where they think they should be.

By the end, students write a short exposé. Not because the document is the point, but because at some stage the thinking has to land somewhere.


Week 2 (April 23, Thu 10-2): individual sessions

Week 3 (April 29, Wed 10-12): come prepared with ideas and questions; this will not be a guided path towards a master’s thesis, but a space to ask questions and discuss matters ranging from administrative stuff to questions of methods, sources, etc.

Week 4 (May 6, Wed 10-12): no session on campus, work on your proposals

Week 5 (May 13, Wed 10-12): Your topic is not your question.
You have a topic. Somewhere underneath it is a question you can’t stop returning to. Those are not the same thing — and the exposé requires the second one.

Week 6 (May 20, Wed 10-12): The field can’t say everything.
Every field has things it systematically cannot say. The most important thing about your literature is not what it argues — it’s what it assumes doesn’t need arguing.

Week 7 (May 27, Wed 10-12): Your methodology is a politics.
What you can access determines what questions are even possible. Your method is not neutral — it is a map of what the institution allows you to see.

Week 8 (June 3, Wed 10-12): Why you, why here, why now?
Your positionality is not a disclaimer you put in the introduction. It is a research instrument — the thing that gives you access to something a different researcher would walk past.

Week 9 (June 10, Wed 10-12): Making the question supervisable.
A question nobody will supervise is a question that won’t exist. That is a political fact about the academy, not a personal failure — and there is a skill in translation that doesn’t betray the question.

Week 10 (June 17, Wed 10-12): What the exposé is actually promising.
The exposé is not a plan. It is a commitment to a way of seeing — and the committee reading it is asking not ‘will this work?’ but ‘does this person know what kind of claim they’re making?’

Week 11 (June 24, Wed 10-12): no session on campus, work on your proposals

Week 12 (July 1, Wed 10-12: What counts as a contribution.
You do not need to say something no one has ever said. You need to say something that matters in a room that hasn’t heard it said like this, from this position, with these sources.

Week 13 (July 8, Wed 10-12): Where you actually are.
The exposé you will write is not the one you imagined in September. That is not failure. That is what thinking looks like from the outside.

Week 14 (July 15, Wed 10-12): no session on campus, work on your proposals

Week 15 (July 22, Wed 10-2): individual sessions

Week 16 (July 29, Wed 10-2): individual sessions


The exposé/proposal will be due July 31, as a first deadline, or Aug 14, as a second deadline.