2026-11-25 –, Drawing Room
“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.
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.