Fatima Iftikhar
Fatima Iftikhar is a designer, educator and researcher whose interdisciplinary practice sits at the intersection of textile art/design, pedagogy and urban learning. She is currently pursuing her PhD at Deakin University, where her research explores the potential of places to become active learning assemblages that can foster embodied learning experiences for art and design education and beyond. Her practice brings together visual and spatial thinking, participatory approaches and creative research methods, with a particular interest in history, lived experience, storytelling, materiality, and the generative relationship between human and more-than-human. Alongside her research, she maintains an active engagement with design and creative practice across Pakistan and Australia.
Sessions
This short film opens with a question that is at the heart of my doctoral study:
What might it mean to learn with the city?
Cities, meaning more than mere backdrops, are envisioned as entangled partners in designing possibilities for learning among art and design learners in higher education. Within the larger umbrella of post-qualitative enquiry, the city is considered an assemblage of human, material, historical, infrastructural and more-than-human actors that shape what can be sensed, noticed and known. Posthumanism and Barad's concept of intra-action attune the researcher and city as they "become" through encounters and relational entanglements.
From this theoretical grounding, the film turns to the study's methodological enactment: Becoming with the City: An assemblage walk. The researcher enacts a loosely bounded activation in the city of Lahore. The site is held long enough to ask what happens and what dialogue and exchanges take place between the walker, place and the more-than-human.
The method unfolds through four fluid phases of attunement. The first phase is an open-ended invitation to traverse the city, calling walkers to immerse themselves in its surroundings and question its layers and turns – following a sound, a colour, a shadow, or perhaps a section of the walkway, without a predetermined route. The second phase moves to documenting three locations, each explored long enough to ask what is at play there: what dialogues, exchanges, or collaborations are unfolding between walker, place, and the more-than-human. Parallel to this, the third phase gathers five fragments from the city - photographs, textures, found objects, audio-video recordings, and traces of movement - each interpreted in a single sentence: This fragment matters because…
The walk concludes with its fourth phase: a period of sustained reflection, a continuous ten- to fifteen-minute writing prompted by the line, 'During this walk I did not move through the city; rather, the city and I discussed, experienced, and engaged together…
Rather than describing the walk from a distance, the film narrates the process of walking, wandering, and embodied noticing with the city: material entanglements, layered histories, and a shift in attention from the visual towards the sensory and the affective and beyond.
In doing so, the film argues that embodied and entangled post-qualitative methodology offers access to relational and affective urban knowledge that conventional research instruments cannot reach. It further renders legible the city's potential for pedagogical becoming through sustained, attentive encounter. It closes with an invitation extended to the viewer: to question, consider and explore their own cities and their potential to establish a reciprocal, fluid and relational pedagogical exchange.
“An assemblage woven with materials, entangled with stories, knotted with people and stitches to the fabric of place is what composes a city.” (Personal Journal, 16.06.2026)
Cities, as urban assemblages, compose our environments through relational and emergent entanglements of human and more-than-human agencies constantly in motion (Facer & Buchczyk, 2019); their continuous movement is what constitutes their aliveness. This poster presents the research design and preliminary findings from the first two phases of a doctoral study grounded in post-qualitative research, exploring cities as active pedagogical partners in art and design higher education.
Cities serve as a nexus of architecture, material, culture, history, narratives, and human and more-than-human interactions; the exchange among these actors is what brings our everyday reality to life. Drawing on place-based education (Gruenewald, 2003), posthuman theory (Thrift, 2007; Ingold, 2011; Braidotti, 2013), and Barad's concept of intra-action, this research reframes the learner as an embodied subjectivity engaged in relational, multimodal encounters (Kress, 2010) with urban environments, addressing the limitations of predominantly human-centred approaches to urban learning. The research asks, “How can post-qualitative, participatory design-based research foster Lahore as an active pedagogical agent in the collaborative constitution of knowledge, critical thinking, and meaningful engagement with cities as emergent learning assemblages?” With this, the study aims to reimagine learning workshops beyond conventional boundaries, employing place, space, material, human and more-than-human entities as relational means of learning and of becoming part of the vast, pedagogically rich fabric of the city.
In a post-qualitative approach, methods are generative, seeking to create knowledge rather than extracting it. In Phase One of this iterative ethics-approved workshop series, eight undergraduate art and design students undertook a self-directed exploration of Lahore. Participants were guided by curated photo-based toolkits and midway prompts that interrupted habitual looking, redirecting attention towards emergent and relational noticing. The data included field notes, sketches, impressions, photographs, audio-video recordings, group-generated concept maps, and future activation ideas.
Findings pointed to a marked shift in attention from eye-level to ground-level, embodied noticing, with the term "participant" no longer limited to humans but extended towards more-than-human actors and encounters with materiality, impressions, craft, infrastructure, history and stories. Participants shared heightened sensory and affective engagement, an uncanny familiarity within unfamiliar places, and a productive tension between old and new architecture, describing the everyday environment as newly "narrative-driven."
In Phase Two, in Lahore, a newly recruited cohort, alongside returning participants, undertook three themed workshops — Impressions, Storytelling Tour, and Craft Mapping — extending this relational attunement towards material study, mark-making, listening, narrative fragments, and craft ecologies. Early responses echo and deepen Phase One's findings: participants described recognising the labour and generational knowledge embedded in everyday craft, valuing unplanned encounters, and engaging in emergent dialogue with shopkeepers and artisans, while also noting a productive tension between the city's continuity and change. Several also reflected that longer, repeated engagement would deepen these outcomes.
Together, these findings inform the design of subsequent workshop phases, contributing towards a relational and transferrable toolkit for art and design educators. More broadly, the study contributes to reimagining the city not simply as a context for learning, but as an active participant in pedagogical becoming. The poster presents this emerging learning design alongside participant data, inviting dialogue on relational, more-than-human, place-based approaches to learning across diverse urban and institutional contexts.