Writing and Immanence: Concept Making and the Reorientation of Thought in Pedagogy and Inquiry (International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry ICQI Foundations and Futures in Qualitative Inquiry)

Writing and Immanence is a book that is attentive to the unabatingly potent, sometimes agonistic, forces at play in the continuing unfoldings of crises of representation. As immanent doing, the writing in the book writes to destabilise the orthodoxies, conventions and unquestioned givens of writing in the academy and, in so doing, is troubled by the ontogenetic uncertainties of its own writing coming into being.

In the always active processualism of presencing, the fragility of word and concept creation animates, what Meillassoux has described as ‘the absolute necessity of the contingency of everything’. In working to avoid the formational and structural linearities of a series of numbered consecutive chapters, the book is constructed in and around the movements of the always actualising capaciousness of Acts. In offering engagements with education research and pedagogy and always sensitive to the dynamics of multiplicity, each Act emanates from and feeds into other en(Act)ments in the unfolding emergence of the book. Hence, in agencement, the book offers multiple points of entry and departure.

Deleuze has said that a creator is ‘someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities…it’s by banging your head on the wall that you find a way through.’ Therefore, the writing of this book writes to the writing, pedagogic and qualitative research practices of those in education and the humanities who are writing to the creation of such impossibilities.

Ken Gale works in the Institute of Education in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business at the University of Plymouth, UK. His main philosophical and academic interests can be realised when speculation, invention, experimentation and concept making as creative and eventful doing are brought to life in pedagogical practices and research in education.