2026-11-25 –, Drawing Room
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.
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.