This article sets out to diffract interdisciplinary learning and teaching by (re)locating it within a busy urban centre. For Karen Barad, diffraction is ‘not only a lively affair but one that troubles dichotomies, including some of the most sedimented and stabilized/stabilizing binaries’ (2014, p. 68). The troubling of binaries is at the heart of our project, but this is approached in a lively way by entangling a set of ideas, concepts, experiences and voices, which we then reconfigure in new, generative and agential formations. The aim is to demonstrate how the practice of interdisciplinary education can emerge through the destabilisation of established methods and knowledge practices in such a way as to open up new affordances and potentialities. There is an empirical basis to this research: a range of data from interviews with staff and students; self-recorded field observations; photographs and drawings; and autoethnographic records from the researchers. All of these provide valuable insights into the situated practices of interdisciplinary learning and teaching. However, the article takes an experimental approach by ‘re-turning’ this information and documentation (Barad, 2014, p. 168). We present an open text—an assemblage—that attempts to re-turn us to the fragmented, layered and complex learning environment of the contemporary city. As we go on to discuss, the method of diffraction offers a way of deferring synthesis of the learning experience, producing difference rather than practicing reflective or interpretive closures. This has been taken up as a productive methodology for education studies (Bozalek and Zembylas, 2018; Murris, 2022; Spector, 2015). This article aims to contextualise and practise diffraction as an emergent model for interdisciplinary learning and teaching.

Dominant models of interdisciplinarity learning and teaching are frequently directed towards meeting challenges, finding solutions and problem-solving (Gallagher and Savage, 2020, 2022; Leijon et al., 2022). While the modern university has embraced this version of interdisciplinarity—which has not been without valuable outcomes and progressive practices—there is a risk of utilitarian and reductive applications of learning when interdisciplinary collaboration is driven by challenges, at the expense of open, exploratory processes. We are here concerned with a different possibility. What if interdisciplinary learning and teaching could diffract models and patterns, turning them over and over again (re-turning) in order to generate multiplicities and differences, which are themselves open to new configurations and generative of unpredictable experiences and novel knowledge practices? Rather than approaching interdisciplinarity as the convergence of disciplinary approaches directed towards a particular challenge or problem, diffraction offers an alternative model for interdisciplinary practice, which cuts together-apart, establishing an ‘an infinity of moments-places-matterings, a superposition/entanglement, never closed, never finished’ (Barad, 2014, p. 169). The city offers a particularly appropriate site for this new materialist experiment to play out.

This article focuses on an undergraduate elective course at Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI), a centre for interdisciplinary study at the University of Edinburgh.Footnote 1 ‘Creating Edinburgh: The Interdisciplinary City’ invites students to conduct weekly fieldwork in the local urban environment, responding to a series of prompts and questions as they visit specific sites in the city.Footnote 2 For each of these field trips, students select a topic from a menu of options, each of which provides a range of resources, including introductory pre-recorded lectures, reading recommendations and suggested tasks and activities. Topics have included Sustainable Edinburgh, Decolonising Edinburgh, Wild Edinburgh and Performing Edinburgh, which are presented as field topics to explore rather than problems to solve. Each field topic includes a site visit and a planned route, which students follow in small groups of 3–4, unaccompanied by a tutor. For Decolonising Edinburgh, students visit the controversial Melville Monument in St Andrew Square and take a Black history tour of the city’s ‘Royal Mile’, which is also available online as a podcast. Tasks for this week invite students to consider recontextualisation of colonial urban histories, architectural traces of Black histories, and possible futures in contemporary Edinburgh. One of the key tasks is to ‘plan a project at any of these locations, which could include a performance, an artwork, a website, or an app’. Each of the field topics in the course is designed to prompt critical, questioning engagements with the city, but they are also focused on creative responses, exploratory journeys and speculative futures.

Creating Edinburgh is a popular elective course and enrolment is capped at 80 students, but the model could easily be scaled up due to its use of online resources and self-led fieldwork. A wide range of ‘home’ disciplines are represented, with students in the 2023/24 cohort joining the course from Arabic with Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Archaeology, Chemistry, Economics, English Language, Fashion, Film and Television, Fine Art, Geography, Geology, History of Art, International Relations, Italian, Linguistics, Psychology, Scottish Literature, Sociology and Sport Management, along with students from EFI’s undergraduate degree programme in Interdisciplinary Futures, on the first year of its delivery. A high proportion of international visiting students selected the course, with the 2022/23 cohort at the highest percentage of 74% visiting students. These students were studying at Edinburgh for a single semester or, most commonly, a full exchange year from institutions in a wide range of countries, predominantly in North America, Europe and Asia.

The cohort is divided into six tutorial groups and then organised into smaller, multi-disciplinary ‘field groups’, meaning there are over 20 groups comprised of students from different schools, conducting fieldwork on their selected topics in different orders, each week. The orientation week at the beginning of the course emphasises health and safety procedures, as well as accessibility issues. A detailed risk assessment is completed, which ensures a combination of physical and digital activities, allowing for shifting models of learning that might be necessary for those with limited mobility, for example. On each week of the course, following their fieldwork, students return to the academy for a 2-hour seminar led by a postgraduate tutor. These seminars include sharing documentation from the field trips—often in the form of videos and photographs—and students reporting on their insights and experiences.

As one of the co-authors has noted elsewhere, in collaboration with the teaching team of one of EFI’s postgraduate courses, Cities as Creative Sites, ‘[w]e see the act of return as a vital part of the learning journey […] we do not simply ask our students to head out into the city and respond to the prompts that we set them, we also create spaces for reflection, co-creation and curation of the findings that are generated’ (Overend et al., 2024). During the weekly seminars, interdisciplinary learning is encouraged, recognised and reflected upon. The learning outcomes for Creating Edinburgh include the ability to ‘evaluate and utilise knowledge and skills from a variety of disciplines to understand the city of Edinburgh’ and to ‘demonstrate an awareness of the complexities involved in interdisciplinary learning and collaboration to navigate any challenges that arise’. The weekly seminar is essential to these outcomes, as tutors work with the students to critically engage with documents and accounts of the fieldwork, building an understanding of the city as an inherently interdisciplinary space of learning, and, following the geographer Doreen Massey, engaging with the urban environment as a ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’ (2005, p. 9).

Importantly, the model of interdisciplinary education that is practised by Creating Edinburgh offers an alternative to the challenge-led learning of the interdisciplinary undergraduate degree programme at EFI. Interdisciplinary Futures aligns with the version of interdisciplinarity identified by Richard L. Wallace and Susan G. Clark, who argue that ‘[i]nterdisciplinarity is inherently “problem-oriented”—that is, its theory and methods are designed to address the complexity of social and environmental problems’ (2017, p. 222). This model of interdisciplinarity often involves collaboration between academia and external stakeholders, including partnerships with industry and international organisations (Klein, 2017). This wider movement towards problem-based interdisciplinarity has influenced research and education in the modern university. For example, the University of Edinburgh positions it as a key strand in its curriculum transformation project:

‘Challenge Courses’ will enable students to explore issues/problems that are unbounded, complex and resist straightforward definition. [… T]hese courses will provide an opportunity for students to explore and build understanding of themes and topics across disciplines. (University of Edinburgh, 2023)

This direct alignment of issues/problems with working across disciplinary boundaries is in line with Wallace and Clark’s position. However, it is important to remember that such dominant models are not the only way of practicing interdisciplinarity. While a range of positive learning outcomes can arise from ‘challenge-led’ and ‘problem-oriented’ approaches, there is a risk of a functional and solution-focussed experience, in which learning at its best can only interpret and reflect (on) existing dichotomies; at its worst could be co-opted into neoliberal agendas at the expense of creativity, open exploration and unpredictability.

To conceive of the educational experiences of Creating Edinburgh as interdisciplinary is to challenge utilitarian or instrumental models, arguing for a re-turning of concepts and practices in order to expand the field. The key aim of this article is to share a way of designing and delivering interdisciplinary learning experiences that move from reflection and interpretation toward diffraction. The following section reviews perspectives on challenge-led, interdisciplinary education. Barad’s key terms are then mobilised, demonstrating how the concept and method of diffraction can be applied to interdisciplinary education. Next, the multi-method research project is introduced, which frequently displaces students, teachers and researchers alike into the urban environment beyond the academy. This contextualises an experimental section, which attempts to practise diffraction on the pages of this article, re-turning our fragmented experiences of designing, teaching and researching Creating Edinburgh into an open text, which uses multiple voices and fragmented narrative, with the aim of ‘producing difference’ rather than documenting and reflecting existing conditions (Bozalek and Zembylas, 2018, p. 54, original italics). The article concludes with a series of questions, prompting tangible recommendations, which re-turn us from the city to the academy, where more of these diffractive experiments might play out.

Interdisciplinarity, problem-solving and challenge-based learning

It is frequently noted in the literature on interdisciplinarity that the term has taken on multiple definitions since its inception in the 20th century, giving rise to an array of related concepts and shifting terminology (Klein, 2017; Bammer, 2013; Lattuca, 2001). For some commentators, this complexity is a crucial strength, because it allows the conceptualisation of interdisciplinarity to resist the confinement of traditional disciplines and methods (Moran, 2010). The many variants, debates and slippages in defining interdisciplinarity are beyond the scope of this review, but a helpful point of departure is provided by Klein (2015), who traces the term to its first documented appearance, which was specifically in ‘problem-oriented’ research. It is striking that the notion of interdisciplinarity was aligned, even from its coinage, with the concept of problem-solving. This remains evident in recent accounts of interdisciplinary scholarship, for example, in the notion of ‘problem-based research’ which may respond to the needs of society (Repko and Szostak, 2020), or environmental challenges (Wallace and Clark, 2017).

In the development of transdisciplinary scholarship, the concept of problem-solving has been considered a ‘trendline’ in its own right (Klein, 2017); it is also evident in the related notions of challenge- or mission-oriented research (Vienni-Baptista et al., 2023), and in ‘wicked problems’ as a focus for transdisciplinary endeavour (Pohl et al., 2017). This, in turn, has influenced models of interdisciplinary pedagogies, particularly in higher education, which has seen a shift towards interdisciplinary learning and teaching, both nationally and internationally (Lyall et al., 2015). The use of problem-solving has been cited as a key benefit of interdisciplinary teaching (van der Waldt, 2014); it has been proposed as a locus for the development of integrated knowledge, teamwork and self-reflection (Haynes et al., 2010). The ability to respond to global challenges through interdisciplinary learning is also seen as beneficial for students’ communicative competence during and after their university studies (Woods, 2007).

DeZure (2017) includes problem-solving in a taxonomy of interdisciplinary pedagogies in higher education, showing how this approach to interdisciplinarity allows universities to collaborate with external stakeholders beyond academia, including government, industry and other professional organisations. The related concept of challenge-based learning is also regarded as effective in developing a range of creative and collaborative skills relevant to a range of societal and planetary issues in multidisciplinary learning contexts (Gallagher and Savage, 2020; Leijon et al., 2022).

However, problem-solving approaches may rely on an instrumental model of interdisciplinarity, where interdisciplinary research serves the needs of particular disciplines or stakeholders (Klein, 2017; Lattuca, 2001). Various critical responses to such approaches have been proposed. These include the view that problem-solving is reductive in pursuing instrumental, clear-cut solutions to complex and troubling problems (Klein, 2021); it may also be perceived to be insufficiently theorised (Vilsmaier et al., 2023). In the humanities, philosophers Derrida and Lyotard, among others, expressed scepticism about the use of interdisciplinarity to solve problems that serve the needs of mechanised production (Klein, 2015). In addition, Vienni-Baptista, Fletcher and Lyall observe that problem-solving model may be less welcoming to researchers from the arts, humanities and social sciences, pointing to ‘a lack of status of AHSS disciplines in relation to STEMM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine] contributions’ (2023, p. 5).

It is clear, then, that despite the well-documented effectiveness of a problem-solving model, an alternative conceptualisation of interdisciplinary learning and teaching is possible. Klein anticipates this in a discussion of critical responses, including feminist theorisations from the humanities, which question ‘resolution in theory and in practice as well as institutional forms’ (2021, p. 45), including the critical concept of diffraction in science, explored from various perspectives. The concept of diffraction is a central element of the theory of agential realism, as proposed by Barad (2007), which is adopted as the theoretical framework for this paper. The following section outlines some of the key concepts in agential realism, before exploring examples of its application in the practice of learning and teaching in universities.

Karen Barad’s agential realism

In a bold re-working of classical philosophy and science, Barad calls into question established notions of ontology, epistemology and ethics, proposing a feminist ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’ (Barad, 2007) which recognises the entanglement of phenomena. Working across disciplines, Barad reads insights from poststructuralist theory in the humanities—notably Butler’s notion of performativity (see Barad, 2003) and Foucault’s critique of representationalism—through the philosophical and scientific writings of physicist Niels Bohr. This allows for a theoretical model which encompasses the ‘discursive’ and the ‘material’ (Barad, 2007, pp. 234–245). Further, Barad proposes ‘respectful engagements with different disciplinary practices’ (93) as inherent to agential realism.

Agential realism shares with other new materialisms (see Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012; Coole and Frost, 2010) a critique of traditional dualist ontology, notably the traditional mind-body dualism of classical Cartesian philosophy. It also critiques the representational optics of Newtonian physics, where the observing subject is perceived as detached from the object of observation. In agential realism, by contrast, the experimental apparatus is always entangled in the phenomenon of the experiment, not separate from it (Barad, 2007). In this way, agential realism questions not only binaries: material–discursive; philosophy–physics; subject–object; together–apart; it also troubles any notion of defined entities or ‘things’ that exist prior to their relations. In this theoretical framework, individual entities do not pre-exist separately but rather come into being through what Barad terms intra-actions, as opposed to interactions (the latter term implies the pre-existence of defined entities).

Rather than traditional methodological approaches, which depend on detached observation and representation, Barad proposes a ‘diffractive methodology’. The notion of diffraction had previously been explored by feminist theorists Trinh Minh-ha and Donna Haraway, in the development of a ‘more critical and difference–attentive mode of consciousness and thought’ (Geerts and Van der Tuin, 2021, p. 173). Barad develops the concept further, drawing on notions of diffraction from physics, as noted in wave patterns in water, or electrons passed through diffraction gratings. Crucially, Barad’s proposed methodology does not depend on representation, nor on reflection; rather, diffraction involves ‘reading insights through one another’ (2007, p. 71) in order to trace patterns of difference and understand how these differences matter.

Central to Barad’s diffraction is the notion of ‘re-turning’, which they distinguish from the traditional concept of returning to one fixed point in the past: ‘re-turning as in turning it over and over again—iterative intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities’ (2014, p. 168). Thus, a diffractive approach takes account of ever-evolving complexity: in ‘re-turning’, patterns of difference occur in an iterative, ongoing process across time and space, without clear-cut separations or fixed endings. In this way, agential realism can be aligned with discourses of inter- and trans-disciplinarity which attempt to go beyond ‘assumptions about how systems operate and the expectation science delivers final answers with certainty’ (Klein, 2021, p. 45), making it an apt framework for this article.

Despite significant challenges in conceptualising new materialist enquiry, perhaps most strikingly articulated by St Pierre (2021), experimentation with agential realism is increasingly evident in practice-based research across disciplines. It has been proposed as a framework for understanding education, including higher education (Murris, 2022; Bozalek and Zembylas, 2017; Bayley and Chan, 2023). Dunk (2020) provides an account of the emerging use of agential realism in interdisciplinary social sciences; in practice-based settings, agential realism has already been adopted as a framework for understanding outdoor learning in ecology studies (Sanders and Davies, 2023), environmental education (Brown et al., 2020) and creative learning spaces (Sheridan et al., 2020).

As well as this, diffraction and diffractive methods are increasingly being put to work in a variety of forms. Van der Tuin (2016) sets out a theoretical basis for reading diffractively; Murris and Bozalek (2019) propose an approach to diffractive readings in which one text is read ‘through’ another. Various approaches to the diffractive analysis of textual data have been proposed (Taguchi, 2012; Mazzei, 2014) as well as the use of ‘diffractive cuts’ in mixed-methods research (Uprichard and Dawney, 2019). Chappell et al. (2019) use a diffractive methodology to investigate entanglements between arts and science disciplines in interdisciplinary education.

Barad’s notion of intra-action has also been taken up in the education research practice, specifically in theorisations of the ‘intra-view’, as opposed to traditional qualitative interviews. Kuntz and Presnall (2012) explore material-discursive practices in walking ‘intraviews’, which represent ‘more than simply an exchange of words’ but afford an encounter with ‘assemblage of multiple historical, present and future encounters’ (p. 736). Further examples of new materialist approaches to interviewing include the consideration of material entanglements in transformative interviews in university settings (Marn and Wolgemuth, 2017); the use of visual methods within a new materialist interview (Warfield, 2017) and a reframing of the active role played by recording devices in the interview process (Nordstrom, 2015). These approaches have informed the design of our own diffractive methodology.

Methodology

The data that inform this article were collected through multiple methods over the first three years that Creating Edinburgh was offered, between 2021 and 2023. One of the co-authors, who also has the role of course organiser, led the course design process during the lockdown years of 2020 and 2021 and curated the resources provided to students to guide them in their fieldwork, which we take up as part of the empirical assemblage. Autoethnographic texts produced by another of the co-authors were a result of her role as a teaching assistant on the inaugural version of the course. Beyond direct pedagogical involvement in the course, we also collected additional data in the 2023/24 iteration. This included the facilitation of creative activity at the start of the course (Fig. 1), students’ self-recording of their fieldwork, tutorial observations, a walking intraview with a student, and a walking autoethnographic intraview (Kuntz and Presnall, 2012).

Fig. 1: A student’s creative response to a prompt to conceptualise ‘interdisciplinarity’.
figure 1

This work is openly licensed via CC BY 4.0. Permission granted for reuse © 2024.

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In preparing our assemblage, we utilised layout/format and content/narrative, in Barad’s words, to ‘manifest the extraordinary liveliness of the world’ that is central to the Creating Edinburgh experience (2007, p. 91). The layout/form engages the reader as an embodied engager of the text, where the reader’s eyes track its unorthodox shape, mimicking a kind of ‘looking around’ one might engage in when exploring urban spaces. In this way, we bring to the two-dimensional page/screen spacetimemattering’s multidimensional entanglements and disrupt the linearity of chronological time. The content/narrative places the reader in the position of an unattached onlooker, a researcher, a student and a teaching assistant on the course, drawing together various texts produced by the authors—some as transcribed from recordings made in the field, some relocated from related documents written at different times and collated by the authors as part of the research process. These include PhD manuscripts, course feedback and poetic responses to the research process, which are folded into each other, producing an openness and expansiveness, from which innumerable threads can be pulled.

As with some of Barad’s experimental diffractive writing, the section that follows avoids ‘a straight narrative, a linear unfolding of a particular storyline’, instead ‘experiment[ing] with montage and fragmentary writing, diffractively reading insights through one another, allowing the reader to explore various crystalline structures that solidify, if only momentarily in the breaking of continuity’ (Barad, 2017, p. 22). Taking our cue from feminist theory, the following section might be understood as a process of composting, which Barad adopts in their project of diffraction:

We might imagine re-turning as a multiplicity of processes, such as the kinds earthworms revel in while helping to make compost or otherwise being busy at work and at play: turning the soil over and over— ingesting and excreting it, tunnelling through it, burrowing, all means of aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it. (Barad, 2014, p. 168)

The creation of the assemblage is itself a diffractive re-turning practice for us and a provocation to participate in re-turning as readers because, as Barad emphasises, diffractive practices are not representational but performative, embodied and dynamic. Having collected these experiences and insights, and developed an understanding of diffraction in the context of interdisciplinary learning and teaching, it seemed important to find a way to re-turn the texts that were generated. Our approach follows Uprichard and Dawney in ‘welcoming the emergence of disjunctures, lacunae, difference and diversion as a means of troubling the research case as a bounded, isolated unit’ (2019, p. 27). This allows us to practise diffraction as part of the writing process. An experiment in diffractive pedagogy is re-turned through the following section, which cuts diverse voices together-apart, representing a dynamic process of making words matter.

Diffracting Edinburgh

The diffractive experiment in the following section presents the reader with an assemblage of fragments, following Barad’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: 'a collection of fragments, including reflections of various lengths and individual passages from various texts copied down as individual notes and assembled in constellations suggesting multiple reverberations or diffraction patternings among the fragments’ (Barad, 2017, p. 38). As Barad explains, just as there is no singular interpretation of quantum theory, there is no singular interpretation of these fragments of text: time is dis/continuous, resisting any notion of ‘linear narrative’. Rather, the reader is invited to become entangled with the experimental assemblage by reading the fragments ‘through’ one another, in a diffractive reading process (Barad, 2007). We acknowledge that leaping from fragment to fragment may be unsettling, even destabilising for the reader, but this unsettling and re-turning of thought is precisely what we are striving to achieve in this diffractive experiment; we hope that the reader will be open to the experience.

The fragments in our diffractive experiment are drawn from diverse intra-actions that occurred in the process of learning and teaching on Creating Edinburgh, including creative responses written by students during the course, photographs of spaces in Edinburgh, which are the focus of course assignments, excerpts from the researchers’ reflections during the research process. Following Barad’s example, we have provided explanatory footnotes, which give context for each fragment.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely facing the screen

Or page

Head onFootnote 3

But if you were standing

On Princes Street in Edinburgh

At the bottom of Lothian Road

Facing East

You’d find the high street on your left

And the gardens on your right

With Edinburgh Castle looming above

There are tourists taking photos

And a group of students exploring the grounds together

You emerge from the bowels

Of Waverley,

Adjusting to the brilliant blue,

The crisp autumnal air,

The majesty of Castle Rock,

The dynamism of Edinburgh

Laid out before you

In all her splendour.

On Waverley Bridge,

Behind you,

Laughter erupts sporadically,

Punctuating the comings and goings…

To your right,

A circle of students,

Bundled up against the October chill.

A researcher among them.

Beyond, the commercial aorta:

Princes Street abuzz, tram bells, busses, totes.

To your left,

A couple poses,

One click to capture,

To immortalise the moment.

One tap to transport,

To digitise a vista.

But for you,

Immersed as you are,

This is no two-dimensional plane.

This is your reality.

Stimulating activity in the same motor-neurological regions as physically enacted movements (Barsalou et al., 2005), reading is an embodied experience that invites not only a visual representation, but a broad range of multimodal responses, including any, or a combination of, the five senses, interoceptive reactions, proprioceptive responses and kinaesthetic sensations (Rokotnitz, 2017). In reading the multimodal imagery contained in these fragments the past experiences of research participants, course tutors and researchers with(in) the city ‘flash up’, diffracting spacetimes and ‘de(con)struct[ing]… the continuum of history… [to bring] the energetics of the past into the present and vice versa’ (Barad, 2017, p. 23). The reader is as phenomenologically immersed and materially connected—as entangled—as the participants and researchers.

You walk through the city, across Princes Street, to the New Town.

The infamous statue of Henry Dundas—1st Viscount Melville—stands 150 feet above St Andrew Square. Between 1791 and 1805, Dundas was Home Secretary, Minister for War and Colonies and First Lord of the Admiralty. He is also argued to have significantly delayed the abolition of slavery.

To begin the Decolonising Edinburgh field week, students are invited to watch a film by Sir Geoff Palmer, interviewed for Edinburgh Futures Institute (2020). Palmer introduces this controversial figure and reflects on strategies for decolonising public monuments. Palmer is Scotland’s first Black professor. He is now Professor Emeritus in the School of Life Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.

As a result of campaigning by Palmer and others, a new plaque has now been installed at the site. Students visit the monument together to read the new inscription and to critically reflect on the text (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: The plaque at Melville Monument.
figure 2

The plaque was replaced in March 2024 after its removal by a group led by a descendant of Henry Dundas (BBC, 2024). This work is openly licensed via CC BY 4.0. Image by David Overend © 2024.

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Does the plaque go far enough? Do you feel that the statue should be removed? If so, should something else be put in its place?

The ResearcherFootnote 4

You arrive.

Waverly North Bridge.

Unable to discern the students

From other passers-by.

An approach:

Are you…?

Yes!

Smiles.

Introductions.

Research Ethics.

Expectations.

Invitations.

Phones out.

Recorders on.

You follow,

Neither a part

Nor apart.

Liminal.

Present.

You observe.

You reflect.

You diffract,

Becoming

Complicit

And in doing so

You are irrevocably

Entangled,

Altering the experience

Fundamentally.

What does it mean

To be here?

To inhabit,

To embody,

To be of

A city,

And for a city

To be of you?

Questions structure the discussion in the seminar room. Tutors facilitate the exchange of ideas between students, drawing out tensions and contradictions, prompting intra-action. The ‘tools’ that tutors use might be understood in Baradian terms, although they have yet to be framed explicitly in this way. Students share the documents and outputs of their fieldwork, which are then explored by students in other groups. Questions are invited to turn experiences over and over, troubling binaries and opening up reflections into new, generative responses. This includes the creation of new field topics, which are submitted for assessment as digital portfolios comprising images, maps, tasks and questions. As Karen Spector argues, ‘[i]f nothing new that matters is produced, then diffraction hasn’t occurred’ (2015, p. 449). With a topic as contested and emotive as decolonising monuments, diffraction might be utilised more explicitly as a way to read meanings through each other without the pressure to move toward resolution. The ethics of diffractive pedagogy are informed by feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway, who argues that ‘it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories’ (2016, p. 12). Creating Edinburgh emphasises the ways in which learning and teaching matter to the city and its continual creation through stories, journeys and intra-actions.

If you had been in this exact spot some years ago, a personal protective equipment (PPE) mask may have obstructed your peripheral view.

Students on the inaugural version of Creating Edinburgh sat in cold seminar rooms (windows open for air circulation even in the winter). Pandemic Edinburgh has never been a popular field topic.Footnote 5

‘I’ was teaching two seminars that year

Each week, I greeted students as they filtered in, sitting in their groups

“How was your fieldwork?”

“Where did you go?”

“What did you see?”Footnote 6

Years later Creating Edinburgh found its way into my PhD Manuscript:

The figure of the witch has been a constant companion to my PhD process. In my final semester of teaching at the University of Edinburgh, I was working on a brand-new course called ‘Creating Edinburgh’.Footnote 7 The course design loosely mimics a ‘choose your own adventure’ novel, wherein the students opt for certain topics from a list of offerings at the beginning of the semester. The course is an interdisciplinary approach to the city of Edinburgh itself and engages with themes like, ‘Decolonising Edinburgh’, ‘Digital Edinburgh’, ‘Literary Edinburgh’, ‘Deep Time Edinburgh’, etc. The main assessment for the course is for students to create their own theme to be added to the cache for future cohorts. One of my groups chose to pursue Witchcraft in Edinburgh, and it is to them I owe much of my knowledge about witch hunts in Scotland. Thank you, Eleanor, Aimee, Sadie and Andrew. It is because of them that I learned that the Mercat Cross, located in the market centre of Medieval Edinburgh, served as an execution site for accused witches. According to a plaque at The Witches Well, a memorial to those accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736, hundreds of witches were publicly executed during this time. The plaque was placed in 1912 and states

This fountain, erected by John Duncan, R.S.A., is near the site on which many witches were burned at the stake. The wicked head and serene head signify that some used their exceptional knowledge for evil purposes while others were misunderstood and wished their kind nothing but good. The serpent has the dual significance of evil and wisdom.

Witches then, were condemned regardless of which direction they aimed their powers; ‘the “good witch”, who made sorcery her career, was also punished, often more severely’ (Federici, 2004, p. 200). This lack of discrimination concerning the morality of witches is perplexing; if witches were not hunted and killed for their wickedness, what were they persecuted for?

The situatedness of this knowledge struck me, as I had been working with the text, Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation for years and had not investigated the history of witch trials in Edinburgh, the city in which I lived and studied in.

Witchcraft EdinburghFootnote 8

Artistic Edinburgh

Literary Edinburgh

Music Edinburgh

Deadinburgh

Eatinburgh

Haunted Edinburgh

Legendary Edinburgh

Queer Edinburgh

For their final assessment, students work in groups to create their own field topic. These are then made available as an open educational resource on the University’s website so that they can be accessed publicly and used by students in subsequent years of the course as a re-turning of practice.Footnote 9 The course avoids closing down the experience into interpretive or analytical assignments. Rather, new experiences are generated, new paths are followed and new questions are raised. The questions that students have asked through this assessment task exemplify the kind of diffractive approach that we are advocating in this article. Barad’s argument about the inseparability of entangled phenomena tells us that ‘separability is not taken for granted and this means that all phenomena—all the entanglements—are open to analysis and questioning’ (Barad and Gandorfer, 2021, p. 51). Applying this principle to an educational experience in the city suggests that the questions that are asked (which include the prior questions that structure the fieldwork on the course) matter to Edinburgh. This is because active questioning ensures that multiple components are kept open, malleable and subject to change. This is the meaning of the course subtitle, ‘the interdisciplinary city’.

Does the surrounding area reflect what we have learned about Edinburgh and its level of safety for the LGBTQ community?

How are educational institutions and their buildings important for a city other than just classrooms?

How does food serve as a social tool in this community?

Why are ghost stories ingrained in Edinburgh, and how might they add to the culture of the city?

Because diffraction is an ongoing process, these questions are not only about a specific encounter with the city of Edinburgh; they also have the potential to shape ways of being, thinking and relating in other contexts.

The majority of students on the course are exchange or international visiting studentsFootnote 10

After weeks of oscillating between seminar room and fieldwork, they would return to their country of study or home

What did they bring with them? What did they leave behind?

Were they changed by Edinburgh? Is Edinburgh changed by them?

Perhaps they did not return. They re-turned.

There are things about which

We educators and researchers

Have no knowledge,

No control.

What was happening

In the ‘margins’ of the students’

Lives?

Living as they were

Beyond the parameters of

This ‘Creating Edinburgh’.

Learning as they were

Beyond the boundaries of

This ‘Education’.

How to divest oneself

Of the assumed responsibility

Of the learning and knowing

Of others?

Vital contemplation.

You peer down a nearby close (those narrow, steep alleyways branching off the Royal Mile)

And you feel the wind rush through it, over you

Its particles and physics.

Diffraction (deferring conclusion)

The particular form of interdisciplinarity that Creating Edinburgh develops, which is also practised through the fragmented text in this article, can be understood as a Baradian deferral of synthesis. This is counter to dominant models of interdisciplinarity.Footnote 11 For example, Newell’s influential theory claims a commonly accepted tenet that ‘interdisciplinary study draws on more than one discipline’s perspective to synthesise a more comprehensive understanding’ (2001, p. 2). Noting the synonymity of synthesis and integration, Repko and Szostak also state that ‘comprehensive understanding’ is the ultimate aim for interdisciplinarity, which relies on integration as ‘the cognitive process of critically evaluating disciplinary insights and creating common ground among them’ (2020, p. 223). There are countless examples of this well-established argument: interdisciplinary learning and teaching must involve the synthesis of two or more disciplines, in order to comprehensively understand a topic. In this view, it follows that any activity, object of study, or educational model that works against synthesis and integration cannot be interdisciplinary. Barad questions this imperative for integration, troubling the idea of ‘a synthesis or a joining of the Humanities and the Sciences as if they were always already separate rather than always already entangled’ (interviewed by Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012, p. 51).

In a complex, dynamic learning environment such as the contemporary city, the pursuit of ‘comprehensive understanding’ and ‘common ground’ is problematised. If urban space—indeed, any space—can be understood as an unresolvable set of materials, processes and activities, that are perpetually emergent (Massey, 2005), then one way of approaching education in such spaces is to enter into entanglements with these in-process assemblages, rather than attempting to establish commonalities in order to know them comprehensively. This recognition of the inseparability of the researcher from the experiment—the student from the city—is fundamental to agential realism.

The walking artist Phil Smith refers to a ‘Masseyspace’ of trajectories, which is encountered through a ‘suspended dialectic’ in which ‘the parts never actually reach a synthesis, for this is always (purposefully) delayed’ (2010, p. 177). This is enacted throughout Creating Edinburgh, as the objective is not integration of the various field topics, which remain distinct but matter to each other in various ways. This is suspended through the continual re-turn to the city with different questions and concerns, with the aim of diffracting differences through processes of questioning, patterning, cutting and intra-acting. Diffraction patterns emerge through this methodology, which sometimes evolves through entanglements that reach temporally and spatially beyond the interdisciplinary classroom.

The liveliness of the ‘composting’ process is maintained in this article, which centres around a multi-authored assemblage of accounts, impressions, reflections and documents from Creating Edinburgh. We have re-turned these fragments into a playful, exploratory text that creates openings for further practice and future diffractions that matter in different ways. By working with Baradian theory, we are accepting the premise that ‘mattering is about the (contingent and temporary) becoming-determinate (and becoming-indeterminate) of matter and meaning, without fixity, without closure’ (2010, p. 254). In this conclusion, we, therefore, remain consciously inconclusive. It is important to avoid folding our experiment in diffraction back into a reflective or interpretive analysis. We are continuing to work with ‘loose ends and missing links’ (Overend et al., 2024, after Massey, 2005). In this final section, we offer a set of prompts, provocations, tools and tasks for re-turning, that will hopefully be of value to other practitioners of interdisciplinary education, who may be inspired to open up and breathe new life into their learning and teaching practices.

In what ways can the city be encountered as a site for interdisciplinary learning and teaching? Take your students or peers into the urban environment and ask them to work with the dynamic, messy, contradictory spaces of the contemporary city. Urban environments are inherently interdisciplinary. They cannot be experienced as discrete, autonomous units of knowledge. Rather, cities are places where ideas, experiences, cultures and worldviews come into contact—merging or conflicting. New ways of being and knowing the world are created. Cities are diffraction machines. To approach the city as a site of interdisciplinary education is to make use of these interstitial affordances. This can be achieved very simply by asking others to follow you out of the door of the university building to recontextualise a learning experience and to look for new resonances and applications.Footnote 12

What are the different ways of working with agential realism, and diffraction, to develop interdisciplinary practice and research? Diffract and diffract your diffractions: Whenever a learning process results in ‘findings’, ‘solutions’, ‘products’ or ‘outputs’, do not be content to leave it there. Barad offers a collection of concepts, methods and practices that invite a continual process of intra-acting with dynamic forces and agencies, such as those that comprise the contemporary city and determine the practice of interdisciplinary learning and teaching. Spending time at the beginning of any educational experience by engaging with these Baradian concepts might prompt new ways of learning and teaching interdisciplinarity. The field topic of Diffracting Edinburgh is yet to exist, but there would be great value in its inclusion in the course.

As educators, can we listen and learn, becoming with our students as they intra-act with each other and their environments? Asking students to report back from their experiences beyond the classroom has been a valuable way to do this, which opens up interdisciplinary education to a process of diffraction, as we re-turn those experiences into something new. The act of return is vital. By re-turning (to) the academy, the learning experiences of the fieldwork can be disseminated, reconfigured and diffracted into new agential assemblages. The aim of a course like Creating Edinburgh is not to solve problems or overcome challenges. Rather, it is to meet the world in all its complexity and to become part of the things that matter. Baradian diffraction offers a way to practise this way of being, within and beyond the modern university.