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Author: Victoria Mummelthei

The Knowledge in the Hands

In the videos, their hands move with such certainty that it looks effortless. Press and turn, press and turn. The rhythm is hypnotic. An 86-year-old woman making fusilli ricci, fingers twisting strands of dough that seem impossibly thin. A 95-year-old in Sardinia braiding lorighittas—pasta shaped like tiny hoop earrings—so quickly…

The Editor’s Hands

There is a café I dream myself to when writing isn’t working. The coffee is fine. What I like is the window. It faces a courtyard where an old woman waters her plants each morning. She touches the leaves as she goes. Not checking for anything. Just touching. I think…

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…

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…

A Reflection After Starting The Light Eaters

I’m hoping you’ve begun reading the book by now. If you have, something has probably unsettled you. Maybe it was the fern with swimming sperm that sabotages its competitors. Maybe it was the realisation that every thought you’ve ever had was built from glucose manufactured by a plant. Maybe it…

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…

When Footnotes Kill the Argument

I was reading a paper on contemporary horror cinema last week when I hit footnote 47. The main text had just made this elegant point about how the final girl trope in slasher films subverts traditional gender expectations—a genuinely sharp insight, right? But then I made the mistake of looking…

Starting an Experiment in Unfinished Thinking – 42 Texts of Negative Space @ substack

Yesterday, I watched a colleague explain a simple concept to students for twenty-seven minutes. The idea itself could have been grasped in three. But academia has trained us to believe that understanding requires exhaustion, that clarity emerges only after we have suffocated every possible ambiguity. We have become cartographers of…

The Subtle Art of Crafting Researchable Questions: Beyond Academic Formulas

I’ve been thinking a lot about research questions lately—not just as academic exercises, but as genuine attempts to make sense of the world. Last week, as I was guiding my graduate students through their thesis proposals, I realized something: most of us struggle profoundly with formulating questions that are both…

Writing, Why “No One Has Studied This” Is Scholarly Writing’s Most Dangerous Comfort Zone

Let’s talk about one of academia’s most cherished myths: that identifying an unstudied area automatically creates a valuable research problem. We’ve all done it. Faced with the need to justify our research, we fall back on that comfortable phrase: “While scholars have extensively studied X, there is a gap in…

Writing, The Art of First Paragraphs: What We Learn When Students Review Each Other’s Writing

Today, I ran a peer review session for “Writing the Middle East for Your Daily Read.” The setup was simple: Students exchanged their papers and read just the first few paragraphs. What emerged was a fascinating pattern that writing teachers see constantly but students rarely notice until it’s pointed out.…

Explorations, Beyond Location: Rethinking Cultural Heritage in an Age of Global Flows

When Nefertiti gazes out from her vitrine in Berlin’s Neues Museum, where exactly is she looking? To Egypt, her place of origin? To the thousands of tourists snapping photos? Or perhaps to a future where questions of cultural heritage transcend our obsession with fixed locations? Her presence in Berlin has…

ai and the Middle East, The Algorithmic Ghosts of Empires Past

When we talk about artificial intelligence in the Middle East, we cannot untangle it from the region’s long and tumultuous history with power – the lingering spectres of colonialism, the brutalities of military occupation, the revolving hierarchies of ethnic and sectarian oppression. AI does not exist in a vacuum, but…

ai and the Middle East, data and the Middle East

In the ‘Data’ chapter, Crawford highlights how datasets used to train AI systems often decontextualize and dehumanize the people and cultures represented, treating them as mere ‘raw data’ to be extracted. From a Middle Eastern cultural studies perspective, how might we analyze this ‘extractive logic of data’ playing out in…

ai and the Middle East, Laboring Under Old Hierarchies: AI’s Fraught Inheritance in the Middle East

Kate Crawford’s incisive analysis in the “Labor” chapter of Atlas of AI reveals how technologies like artificial intelligence carry forward long-standing logics of exploitation inherent to industrial capitalism. When viewed through this lens, the Middle East emerges as a region where AI’s impact on labor is inseparable from enduring historical…