Creating Edinburgh: diffracting interdisciplinary learning and teaching in the contemporary city

This article follows an experimental interdisciplinary undergraduate course in the busy, unpredictable space of the contemporary city. It locates practice-based research of interdisciplinary higher education in a dynamic learning environment, comprised of unpredictable connections between disciplinary perspectives. Following Karen Barad, the aim is to diffract interdisciplinary higher education to recognise and work with a multiplicity of meanings and experiences. The article explores an alternative to dominant challenge-based learning in the interdisciplinary classroom. Creating Edinburgh: The Interdisciplinary City, an undergraduate elective at the University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh Futures Institute, enables small, mixed-discipline student groups to explore themed fieldwork topics (e.g., Sustainability, Decolonisation, Wildness) presented as fields to explore rather than problems to solve. The authors develop a research methodology that travels with students through weekly field trips, combining autoethnographic accounts with walking interviews to provide insight into interdisciplinary learning and teaching in the expanded field of the contemporary city. Conceiving urban space as an assemblage of digital and non-digital objects, events and activities, researchers accompanied students with audio recorders, cameras and notebooks. Research documents were then diffracted within a new materialist framework. The article concludes with questions and prompts for working with the agency and affordances of field-based education practice.

Clare Cullen, David Jay, David Overend, M. Winter