Lifelines convey the essentials. Over land and through the city, they deliver water and electricity. Thrown at sea, a lifeline brings you back to solid ground. A person can be your lifeline.

Lifelines may leave only a trace: the trail of one traveler’s past guides the next one’s future. Lifelines merge with more lines, interwoven through time and space.

Lifelines, unlike deadlines, are never completed. They are living tasks that we sustain and attend to.

Themed ‘Lifelines’ Night School 2025 participants traced the lifelines—the paths of movement that shape our environments.Time was considered as requisite for taking care: of a place, of an object and of life around us. The invited thinkers and practitioners revealed the lifelines that run through our workaday lives and render the city we inhabit.

Night School 2025 guests included: anthropologist and writer Neha Vora, writer John Thabiti Willis, architect Marvi Mazhar and archeologist and researcher Abdullah Alsharekh. Film curator Hind Mezaina returned to facilitate a film screening event responding to the themes.

Night School 2025 hosted four events that were open to the general public, to collectively engage and reflect on the programme themes.

January 11, 2025 | Ecologies of Homemaking – Public Lecture by Neha Vora
In her public talk, Neha Vora explored how human residents of the UAE’s cities—the vast majority of whom cannot settle permanently—produce ‘home’ alongside and through their interactions with cats, birds, plants and each other, all within the context of ever-changing urban landscapes.

January 19, 2025 | A Visible Silence – Public lecture by John Thabiti Willis
For this public lecture, John Thabiti Willis investigated the hidden narratives of Gulf pearl divers embedded in testimony, song and art. In his ongoing work, Willis examines the intersections of labour, African diaspora life and cultural memory in the Gulf during the early 20th century, centering on the experiences of enslaved pearl divers and their descendants. He argues that contemporary heritage practices often obscure the agency and lived experiences of pearl divers, while disproportionately elevating the roles of merchants and boat captains. Heritage performances of pearling music offer important insights into the development of the African diaspora in the Gulf.

January 23, 2025 | Tending to the Ruins – Marvi Mazhar in conversation with Ayesha Qaisar
Drawing from her work in Karachi and beyond, Marvi Mazhar champions heritage preservation as a means to sustain a city’s living networks. In conversation with architect Ayesha Qaisar, Marvi Mazhar contextualised her career and highlighted strategies for maintaining buildings not just as places to live and work, but as living environments in their own right.

January 25, 2025 | Unravelings – Film Screening curated by Hind Mezaina
The Night School 2025 film programme featured four films about the unravelings of: a Portuguese coastline; an American suburb; memories inside an ancestral house; and an express subway into symphonic jazz. The screening was followed by a discussion between Hind Mezaina and Todd Reisz, with audience participation. The following films were screened:

1. Daybreak Express (D. A. Pennebaker, 1953, USA, 5 min.)
2. Golden Jubilee (Suneil Sanzgiri, 2021, India and UK, 19 min., English, Konkani with English subtitles)
3. Coast (Francisco Dias, 2023, Portugal, 13 min., Portuguese with English subtitles)
4. The Instability of Clouds (Zazie Ray-Trapido, 2024, USA, 15 min., English)

—

Dr. Neha Vora is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of International Studies at the American University of Sharjah. She pursues interdisciplinary research in themes such as diasporas and migration, citizenship, globalised higher education, gender, and human-nonhuman encounters. Her books include Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Duke, 2013) and Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar (Stanford, 2018).

John Thabiti Willis is a scholar specializing in Africa’s social and cultural history in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Emory University, USA and is Associate Professor of African History at The Africa Institute, Sharjah. Previously, he served as Associate Professor of African History at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, USA. He was also a Carleton College Mellon New Directions Fellow, a position he held from 2020 to 2023. He facilitates student exchanges and academic partnerships, with recent collaborations including Carleton College, USA. Over the past decade, Willis has dedicated his research to uncovering the historical and cultural significance of Africa’s contributions to pearling in the Gulf. His research utilizes a range of sources, including museum exhibits, manumission records, and heritage performances. In his latest project, Willis is collecting oral histories through ethnography and geographic information system methodologies to analyze the biographies of individuals who were involved in the pearling industry.

Marvi Mazhar is an architect and researcher whose practice combines visual culture, spatial advocacy and interventions. She serves on several advisory boards in government and non-profit organisations. In 2021, she completed her masters degree at Goldsmiths, University of London and in 2022 began teaching at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Her present research focuses upon the representation and production of Karachi’s coastal periphery and its ecology. She co-edited Yasmeen Lari: Architecture for the Future (2023, MIT) with Elke Krasny and Angelika Fritz. Mazhar is currently lead architect at thirteen heritage sites in Kyrgyzstan, with a focus on developing infrastructural and management connectivity. She tweets at @marvimazhar.

Ayesha Qaisar is an architect and educator and practices in Dubai and Karachi. Like many who live abroad, she is curious about the notion of home and the material culture used to (re)create it. She feeds this curiosity by trying to understand the city through the stories and experiences of its various inhabitants.

Abdullah M Alsharekh is an academic in the Department of Archaeology at King Saud University in Riyadh. He earned his MPhil and PhD at Cambridge University and is co-leading a number of archaeological projects exploring the prehistory of Saudi Arabia. He has co-published many scientific journal articles and several books. Alsharekh has received many Saudi academic and cultural awards. He is an adjunct professor at York University and honorary Associate Professor at Griffith University in Australia.

Hind Mezaina is an artist, writer and film curator from Dubai. Working primarily in analogue photography and more recently in video, her practice delves into themes of collective memory, the notion of heritage, and depictions of the UAE in the media. Mezaina is also the founder of The Culturist blog; Moving Image Editor at Tribe, a non-profit publication and platform that focuses on photography and moving image from the Arab World; and the co-founder of Tea with Culture podcast. She has curated film screenings for local institutions, including Louvre Abu Dhabi, Manarat Al Saadiyat, Sharjah Art Foundation, The Africa Institute, Alliance Française Dubai and Jameel Arts Centre.