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

The paper investigates how interdisciplinary learning and teaching can be reconceptualised through Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology when situated in the complex, lively environment of the contemporary city. It challenges dominant challenge-led or problem-oriented models that risk utilitarian, reductive applications of learning, proposing instead an approach that embraces multiplicity, openness and the generativity of differences. Using the undergraduate course Creating Edinburgh as an empirical site, the authors seek to demonstrate how destabilising established methods and knowledge practices in urban field-based education can open new affordances and potentialities. The purpose is to enact and contextualise diffraction as an emergent model for interdisciplinary education, deferring synthesis and producing difference rather than closing experiences through reflection or interpretation. This approach positions the city as an inherently interdisciplinary assemblage and frames students’, tutors’ and researchers’ entanglements with it as central to learning.

The review traces interdisciplinarity’s historical alignment with problem-solving from its coinage and its development through problem-based, challenge-based and mission-oriented research and pedagogy (Klein; Bammer; Repko & Szostak; Wallace & Clark; Gallagher & Savage; Leijon et al.). While noting benefits such as collaboration with external stakeholders, teamwork, and communicative competence, the authors synthesise critiques that problem-solving can be instrumental, reductive, insufficiently theorised, and less inclusive of arts, humanities and social sciences (Klein; Vienni-Baptista et al.). The paper introduces feminist and new materialist critiques, especially Barad’s agential realism, which questions binaries, representationalism and the imperative to integrate disciplines toward a single synthesis. It reviews applications of diffraction and related new materialist methods in higher education and research practice, including diffractive reading, diffractive analysis, and the re-conceptualised ‘intra-view’ (Taguchi; Mazzei; Murris & Bozalek; Uprichard & Dawney; Kuntz & Presnall; Nordstrom), as well as practice-based and outdoor learning contexts (Brown et al.; Sanders & Davies; Sheridan et al.). This establishes diffraction as a viable alternative framework for interdisciplinary learning and teaching.

A multi-method, practice-based study was conducted across the first three years of the Creating Edinburgh course (2021–2023). Data sources included: interviews and walking ‘intra-views’ with students; a walking autoethnographic intra-view; students’ self-recorded field observations; photographs and drawings; tutorial observations; creative exercises at course start; and autoethnographic accounts from researchers/teaching staff. The course structure served as an empirical assemblage: weekly self-led fieldwork by small interdisciplinary groups (3–4 students) across themed urban routes (e.g., Sustainable, Decolonising, Wild, Performing Edinburgh), supported by pre-recorded lectures, readings and tasks; and a weekly 2-hour tutor-led seminar to share documentation and reflect. The cohort was divided into six tutorials with over 20 field groups; enrolment capped at 80, drawing students from a wide array of disciplines and with a high proportion of international visiting students. Risk assessments enabled combinations of physical and digital activities to support accessibility. Analytically, the study adopted a Baradian diffractive methodology: rather than representing or synthesising, researchers ‘re-turned’ materials by reading insights through one another to trace patterns of difference. The article’s layout and narrative are designed as a performative diffractive assemblage (montage, fragments, composting), bringing the multidimensional entanglements of urban learning onto the page and deferring linear closure.

- The city functions as an inherently interdisciplinary learning assemblage, enabling students to engage with complex, dynamic, and contested urban material-discursive entanglements without being constrained by problem-solving imperatives. - Diffractive pedagogy—emphasising re-turning, cutting together-apart, and producing difference—offers a viable alternative to challenge-led and synthesis-oriented models of interdisciplinarity. - Weekly seminar ‘returns’ are vital sites where students share fieldwork artefacts (e.g., photos, videos) and diffract experiences through peer questioning, generating new field topics and insights rather than converging on fixed solutions. - Field topics presented as explorations (e.g., Decolonising Edinburgh via the Melville Monument plaque; Wild Edinburgh; Performing Edinburgh) cultivate critical, creative and speculative engagements, including proposals for performances, artworks, websites or apps. - Student-created topics (e.g., Witchcraft Edinburgh, Queer Edinburgh, Haunted Edinburgh, Eatinburgh) are published as open educational resources, enabling ongoing re-turns and future diffractive learning. - The researcher's presence in walking intra-views is acknowledged as entangled and agential, altering experiences while providing embodied, multisensory understanding. - Course structure and participation: enrolment capped at 80; six tutorial groups with over 20 small, mixed-discipline field groups; field groups of 3–4 students; in 2022/23, 74% of the cohort were international visiting students, with broad disciplinary diversity. These contextual data illustrate scalability, inclusivity, and the feasibility of self-led fieldwork supported by digital resources. - Diffractive practice intentionally defers synthesis and comprehensive integration, aligning with Barad’s agential realism and Massey’s view of urban space as perpetually emergent; this re-orients assessment and learning away from closure toward ongoing inquiry and creation.

The findings demonstrate that situating interdisciplinary education in the city and analysing it diffractively shifts the pedagogical focus from solving predefined problems to engaging with the city’s ongoing, emergent entanglements. This approach addresses the paper’s core question—how to enact an alternative to dominant challenge-based models—by showing that re-turning (iterative revisiting, questioning, and patterning) produces new meanings and practices without forcing integration or synthesis. The weekly seminar ‘return’ enables a structured yet open-ended space where student artefacts and accounts are read through one another, amplifying difference and generating new field topics and speculative futures. This model supports inclusivity across disciplines (including AHSS), legitimises multiple outputs (creative, performative, digital), and recognises the agency of materials, sites, and technologies in learning. The entanglement of researcher, student and city reframes ethics and method, embracing the performativity of data generation (e.g., walking intra-views). Educationally, diffractive pedagogy nurtures dispositions—questioning, attentiveness to difference, comfort with uncertainty—that are relevant beyond Edinburgh, potentially transforming how learners meet complex worlds without reducing them to problems requiring closure.

The paper contributes an empirically grounded, theoretically informed model of diffractive pedagogy for interdisciplinary higher education, enacted through urban field-based learning. It articulates how Barad’s agential realism can inform course design, data collection, analysis and writing, demonstrating a performative alternative to synthesis-driven interdisciplinarity. Creating Edinburgh shows that presenting themes as exploratory fields, centring the act of ‘return’, and publishing student-generated topics as OER can sustain ongoing re-turns and future diffractions. The authors intentionally resist a conclusive synthesis, instead offering prompts: encounter the city as a diffraction machine; embed Baradian concepts and practices early in curricula; continually diffract ‘findings’ rather than finalising them; and consider developing explicit ‘Diffracting Edinburgh’ topics. Future work could scale and adapt the model to other cities and contexts, deepen explicit diffractive facilitation tools for seminars, and examine longer-term learner transformations as diffractive practices travel beyond the course.