Outputs from a recently completed student project seminar on the Anglophone literary field in Berlin are published on The Literary Field Kaleidoscope. A zine, a podcast, an ethnographic diary, and an academic poster explore questions of subtle (or less subtle) forms of exclusion in the lively English-speaking Berlin book world. Students undertook their own fieldwork, explored venues, places, and interviewed agents in the field from book buyers to booksellers. Gesa Stedman functioned only as advisor and chair of the feedback meetings. They each chose an output, learned how to produce it, chose their own methodology and then presented the results to their fellow students. Debates on ethical research, on research and morality, on the lack of diversity and the presence of double standards in Berlin’s English-speaking “parallel society” followed these presentations which are made available here – we hope you enjoy listening and reading, and perhaps you want to follow in the students’ footsteps and explore new bookshops and unfamiliar titles.
We start with a zine on what book buyers and readers of Anglophone books know about white settler cultures in former British colonies and how this translates into reading habits. Link to the zine: Zine_Ceto-Turek