Ken Gale

Deleuzian Thought and Collaborative Writing: A Play in Four Acts

This article involves four writers exploring together the insights into collaborative writing that Deleuze can offer. Jonathan and Ken in the United Kingdom and Bronwyn and Sue in Australia have separate histories of collaborative writing, and in this collaborative project, they extend their thinking about Deleuze and work reflexively with his concepts to examine their own four-way collaboration. The thoughts of Deleuze provide a means of looking at collaborative writing as performance, as a means of becoming, each for the unknown other; selves as writers and academics but also sexed subjects living complex lives, in this case in worlds many miles apart. The article offers the collective and multiple senses of how the thoughts of Deleuze can be brought to life in collaborative writing.

Teacher education in the university: working with policy, practice and Deleuze

This paper is inspired by, and constructed around, a number of fundamental questions that are relevant to teacher educators working within the context of the government policy initiatives and implementations that are influencing Higher Education in the UK at the present time. Using teacher education practices as sites of inquiry, and a number of figures from the work of Deleuze, the paper investigates approaches to teaching and learning that are described as having an aesthetic and ethically sensitive character. Mindful of such approaches and of the pervasiveness of policy influences, the paper also encourages a careful and thorough re-thinking of the theory and practice of teacher education as a terrain of complexity, multiplicity and interconnectedness.

Inquiring Into Writing An Interactive Interview

This article is a transcript of an interview that the authors conducted via e-mail during a 3-month period in early 2005. The interview explores their experience of writing and came to life because the authors had been struck, in exchanging work with each other during their doctoral studies, by significant differences in their writing styles. The focus of the interview became the actual process of writing and its meanings to the authors, how writing both reflects and creates their selves. The authors also sought to explore the interview process itself. Framing theirs as a postmodern interview, the authors aim to collaborate, to blur the boundaries between interviewer and interviewee, and to consider the roles of narrator, interviewer, and outsider witness that they took during the process.

An Inquiry in to the Ethical Nature of a Deleuzian Creative Educational Practice

In introducing the work of Deleuze and Guattari Massumi says, “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” Therefore, in taking the Deleuzian view that concepts have no subjects or objects other than themselves and that the creation of concepts are acts, this article is conceived as a nomadic inquiry into the possible ethical, affective, and political aspects of the events with which these acts are associated. The article is informed by the author’s own collaborative and performative research practices, and the inquiry is sited within the context of his teaching and learning practices in postgraduate education and professional development in higher education in the United Kingdom at the present time. In short, the article explores the ethical implications and sensitivities of the use of creative practices of conceptualization within educational settings of this kind.

Communities of praxis? Scholarship and practice styles of the HE in FE professional

The Dearing Report advocated that the traditionally separate post‐compulsory education sectors of English higher education (HE) and further education (FE) should bring together the academic and vocational in a working partnership. This has led to significant changes in the working practices of colleges, lecturers and support staff. Drawing on the experiences of a sample of HE lecturers in colleges in south west England and a synthesis of relevant literature, this paper begins to examine the practice styles of HE lecturers working in FE institutions and the opportunities they are presented to engage with scholarship. The research acknowledges the issues involved in positioning HE in FE by considering the traditional roles of FE and HE lecturers, the competing demands of HE and FE and the necessary re‐conceptualisation of the HE in FE lecturer as a teacher, a researcher and a scholar.

Writing the Incalculable A Second Interactive Inquiry

In this article, the authors search for an understanding of where words lead us. By writing for each other, they look for the “promise of the text” (Cixous, 1998/2005, p. xiv). They explore the experience, at the moment of writing, of being immersed in multiplicities (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987) and the way a path can go anywhere. This article investigates the disturbances around the traditional intentionalities of writing: the absences of presence; the multiplicity of signifiers; that alluring attempt to trap experience, on one hand, but also the delight in articulating and metamorphosing it on the other. The authors discuss the rhizomatic complexities that fold and unfold thoughts and feelings.

Deleuze and Collaborative Writing Responding to/With “JKSB”

In this article, the authors respond to Deleuze and Collaborative Writing: An Immanent Plane of Composition. The book’s authors (Jonathan, Ken, Susanne, and Bronwyn) and two discussants (Elizabeth St. Pierre and Norman Denzin) consider questions such as the following: What does this book open up? How might it help us to think differently (e.g. about inquiry, about collaboration, about the ethics of reading and writing in such an assemblage)? And how does it contribute to the growing literature on collaborative writing as method of inquiry?

Gatecrashing the Oasis? A Joint Doctoral Dissertation Play

This article explores the institutional and individual struggles surrounding the submission for examination of a jointly authored doctoral dissertation at a U.K. civic university. Two of the article’s authors (Gale and Wyatt) were the dissertation’s authors, and Speedy, the article’s third author, is their supervisor. Joint doctoral dissertations are rare and the dissertation was unique in this department’s history. The article is written as play script, which allows for different points of view to be offered and juxtaposed and for key issues to emerge and be explored. These issues include the institutional and individual impact of challenging what counts as original doctoral scholarship, the supervision relationship, and aspects of the experience of the completion of a doctorate. With a nod to the Deleuzian concept of the nomad, a significant theoretical component of the joint dissertation, the play works with the metaphor of nomadic journeying across desert terrain toward the “oasis” of membership of the academy as an image of the doctoral process. The play begins as the dissertation’s two authors hand in their dissertation for examination, and ends on graduation day, with its primary focus being the eleven weeks between submission and the viva voce examination.

Working at the wonder: Collaborative writing as method of inquiry

This article offers a discussion concerning the future of collaborative writing as a method of inquiry. Taking the form of a dialogic exchange, we take up Isabelle Stengers’ notion of “wonder” as a creative and political lens through which to consider the disruptive, radical, and productive methodological capacity that collaborative writing as a research method potentially offers. Working particularly with Deleuze and Guattari, we argue that language in collaborative writing practices is deeply entangled with complex materialist practice, and through engagements with these “matterings” we make sense of collaborative writing as immanent event. We discuss—and experience—the challenges that collaborative writing has for research and this article pushes at established categories, works against the fixities of conventional theory construction, contests the humanist and phenomenological proclivities that arguably limit the process and effectiveness of collaborative writing as method of inquiry, and wonders at the immensities that are possible.

Intensity: A Collaborative Autoethnography

In this collaborative autoethnography, the five of us explore the experience and ethics of writing—and living—from/in intensity. We have been writing together since meeting at the Third International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI), when we made a commitment to write over the following year to, for, and with each other. It became an experiment in the craft of autoethnography, exploring questions of intimacy and connection manifested through collaborative writing, a series of texts exchanged via e-mail. This essays sequence of writing during July and August 2008 follows a period of silence. Senses of intensities emerged from our collaborative autoethnographic practice over this period: We remain unsure of what intensities might be, and in the fluidity of this lack of certainty we feel we can claim a pedagogical practice of inquiry that comes from this writing into our always not-yet-known.