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

Abstract

Abstract 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, which is comprised of unpredictable connections between disciplinary perspectives. Following Karen Barad, the aim is to diffract interdisciplinary higher education in order to recognise and work with a multiplicity of meanings and experiences. This article explores an alternative to the dominant model of challenge-based learning in the interdisciplinary classroom. Creating Edinburgh: The Interdisciplinary City is an undergraduate elective offered by Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh. It provides students with opportunities to explore the city of Edinburgh in small groups of students from a wide range of degree programmes. Groups are invited to engage with a selection of themed fieldwork topics throughout the 11 weeks of the course, visiting specific sites and responding to a series of tasks and questions. These include themes such as Sustainability, Decolonisation and Wildness, which are presented as interdisciplinary field topics to explore rather than problems to solve. This article develops a research methodology that sets out to travel with students as they navigate their way through the city during their weekly field trips. Combining first-hand autoethnographic accounts with walking interviews, it offers an 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, members of the research team accompany students during their fieldwork, equipped with audio recorders, cameras and notebooks. The documents of these research journeys are then diffracted within a new materialist framework. The article concludes with questions and prompts for working with the agency and the affordances of a field-based education practice.