Join Night School 2025 this January to explore urbanism, history and their intersection in the port city of Dubai. In this fourth season, led by architect and writer Todd Reisz, participants will trace the lifelines—the paths of movement that shape our environments.

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.

At Night School, we will consider taking time as requisite for taking care: of a place, of an object, and of life around us. We will meet with thinkers and practitioners who reveal the lifelines that run through our workaday lives and render the city we inhabit.

A series of public events will be held in January to give the public a chance to hear more about this year’s themes. The public events of Night School 2025 are:

• Saturday, January 11, 2024, 6:00–8:00 p.m..: Ecologies of Homemaking: Public lecture by Neha Vora.
  Sharing some of her latest research, anthropologist Neha Vora will explore how interspecies relationships keep urban spaces alive. More information here.
• Sunday, January 19, 7:00–8:15 p.m.: A Visible Silence: Public lecture by John Thabiti Willis.
  Willis’s work explores how heritage sites in the UAE and Bahrain embody histories of enslaved pearl workers from East Africa. More information here.
• Thursday, January 23, 2024, 7:00–8:30 p.m.: Tending to the Ruins: Conversation with Marvi Mazhar, moderated by Ayesha Qaisar.
  Questions and reflections about heritage preservation between the two port cities of Karachi and Dubai. More information here.
• Saturday, January 25, 2024, 6:00–8:00 p.m.: Unravelings: Film programme with Hind Mezaina.
  The screening and open discussion features four short films that reveal how film doesn’t ever move in just one direction. More information here.

Night School also offers closed seminars for which participants were selected in the fall of 2024 through an open call.

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Todd Reisz is the author of Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai (Stanford University Press, 2020) which explores architecture’s packaging to sell Dubai on a global stage. At Jameel Arts Centre, he curated the exhibition Off Centre/On Stage (2021), wrote the eponymous publication (Khatt Books, 2021) and led the first Night School (2022). He also co-edited with Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi Building Sharjah (Birkhäuser, 2021), an archival investigation of that city’s vanishing 20th-century landscape.

This year’s theme ‘Lifelines’ learns from anthropologist Tim Ingold’s work on lines.