This paper focuses on the development of a transdisciplinary feminist optics as an innovative approach to producing educational knowledge in and of the post-industrial city. The central arguments are that a transdisciplinary feminist optics: (a) supports the development of innovative, hybrid and radically experimental empirical work; (b) produces new insights into the politics of location and the situatedness of knowledge practices; and (c) helps re-imagine engaged pedagogic praxis and re-think the civic role of the University in the post-industrial city. Theoretically, the paper works across the disciplines of education, human geography, and material culture; and constructs its conceptual framework from working across new material feminism, visual culture studies, and sociology. It makes a material feminist contribution to the developing field of Critical University/ Higher Education Studies (Brown, 2011; Deem at al., 2008; Marginson, 2016; Petrina and Ross, 2014) The main part of the paper presents insights from a recent research project which worked across disciplines, theories and methodologies to develop a transdisciplinary feminist optics. As two feminist higher education researchers working in universities in two post-industrial cities (Sheffield, UK; Detroit, USA) we are interested in how the particularities of space and place inform and influence methodological choices, and so developed the project as a means of attunement to place, landscape, and environment. We used a variety of sensory and visual empirical approaches to explore how the elemental life of post-industrial places - water, air, metal - intra-acts with bodies of all kinds, producing unforeseen affective flows and entanglements of bodies, place, politics and history (Alaimo, 2016; Barad, 2007). Collecting data in this way entailed us in a process of 'diffracting photo-elicitation' as data-collection method, moving away from seeing photography as 'capturing' and representing a 'slice of real life' and towards the visual as an already more-than-human world entanglement. We work across understandings of diffraction. Thus, from Barad (2007: 73) we diffract photographs in order to 'produce a new way of thinking about the nature of difference, and of space, time, matter, causality, and agency', and from Haraway (1988) we diffract the masculine logics of linear thinking and omniscient knowing in order to privilege knowledge as situated, in-relation, and as embodied praxis. The insights we arrive at suggest that a transdisciplinary feminist optics - as a diffractive mapping of interference of educative differences that matter (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1992) - help shed new insights on the civic role of the University in the post-industrial City.

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