Weaving learning ecologies in the city
Together with filmmaker Tom Stubbs (Biggerhouse Film), artist Eleanor Shipman, graphic novelist Joff Winterhart, and Dhek Bhal participants, we created a series of intimate films, drawings, and textile works. These creative pieces collectively examined the city as a dynamic space of memory, transformation, learning, and care—shaped by the people who inhabit and move through it.
The broader research project drew on Donna Haraway’s metaphor of the cat’s cradle to understand how learning in the city is woven through a complex network of social, material, and discursive practices. Over two years of ethnographic research, we engaged with a diverse range of Bristol residents —including adult education organisers, protest conveners, institutional leaders, refugees, artists and activists, healthcare workers, city farmers, mental health support groups and social activists.
This work revealed that a city’s learning ecology is profoundly influenced by these social practices, human infrastructures, and the controversies that actively reshape learning environments and its political possibilities.
The project culminated in Learning City: A Self-Portrait, an exhibition I curated in 2017 at Hamilton House Gallery, Stokes Croft.
Chapter on Learning in the Cat’s Cradle: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/182414831/Version_2_Correct_Learning_in_the_Cat_s_Cradle.pdf
Article on contention, care and affective materiality in the learning city: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ciso.12352
Special Issue on Learning Cities: Towards a new research agenda with Oxford Review of Education: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/core20/45/2
The project was part of Keri Facer’s Reinventing Learning Cities: https://www.learninginthecity.uk/projects/reinventing-learning-cities/