869966

research-article2019
QIXXXX10.1177/1077800419869966Qualitative InquiryMazzei and Smithers

Research Article
Qualitative Inquiry

Qualitative Inquiry in the Making:

2020, Vol. 26(1) 99­–108
© The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
A Minor Pedagogy sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1077800419869966
https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419869966
journals.sagepub.com/home/qix

Lisa A. Mazzei1 and Laura E. Smithers2

Abstract
This article builds on Mazzei’s concept of minor inquiry to advance the concept of a minor pedagogy. We do so by folding
poststructural theory into the evidence of experience, spotlighting a collective enunciation of the pedagogical event among
individuated concepts, speakers, and moments. These pedagogical events are at once quotidian and more than one. In
this spacetime individuation falls away, and the production of qualitative research expertise becomes a function of the
entanglement of human and more-than-human pedagogues. At the level of the everyday, we recount our experiences in a
doctoral program as professor and advisor (Lisa) and student and advisee (Laura). These experiences are selections from
our (continuing) joint encounters with qualitative inquiry instruction. Enfolding these everyday pedagogical-theoretical
practices of qualitative inquiry produces minor pedagogy, and minor pedagogy produces these folds. As such, minor
pedagogy is a pedagogy of the ontological turn.

Keywords
minor pedagogy, minor inquiry, poststructural theory, qualitative inquiry, doctoral education

We write this as a collective, as it were. Thanks to our
reading(s) of Deleuze and Guattari, our participation
together in a series of classes, and Lisa’s role as Laura’s
doctoral supervisor, we have been thinking and reading and
writing through each other since 2014. There are other
accomplices of course—other students, other colleagues,
other texts—we are two particulars within this pedagogical
assemblage. This piece is co-written; therefore, its orienta-
tion will shift to name particular moments that we recognize
as productions of an entangled pedagogy.
It started with Laura’s participation as a student in the
qualitative methodology course sequence1 designed by
Lisa Mazzei and Jerry Rosiek. Organized around different
intellectual traditions, one that provides a rigorous explora-
tion of the theoretical underpinnings of the traditions in
question (e.g., interpretivist, postcritical, posthumanist),
the courses take up philosophical texts and research exem-
plars that illustrate the epistemological and ontological
assumptions of knowledge production. In all of the courses,
students are asked to put theory to work, or “think with
theory” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) according to the fram-
ing of the particular course.
In the call for this special issue, the editors “suggest that
what happens in qualitative inquiry instruction may pro-
duce both in-the-moment and future realities for our stu-
dents, ourselves, the academy, and perhaps even society at
large.” The fact that Lisa learned philosophy, or at least was
introduced to continental philosophy through her qualita-
tive methodology courses as a doctoral student, already
produced future realities for her and the group of students,
including Laura, who participated in these classes and a
special topics seminar, Deleuze and Education Theory2 that
Lisa discusses in the next section.
Scholars in the humanities, sciences, and other social
sciences who are working the ontological turn share a shift
from method to a reconsideration of what demands are
placed on objects (things) used in inquiry. This is a shift
from what we can know about an object (method and epis-
temology) to what a particular object does or becomes when
we enact inquiry—thus, objects of knowledge become
doings with ontological force, not inert things waiting to be
interpreted. Rather than an approach that adheres to pre-
scriptive methods that produce knowledge about some-
thing, this article explores how a group of learners engaged
Deleuzian concepts toward learning and inquiry as emer-
gent. Thus, we follow Jackson’s (2017) lead to “retreat from
a dogmatic image of thought and into the conditions under
which new concepts [and pedagogies] are created and
expressed” (p. 666).
In addition to Lisa’s history and future realities, this par-
ticular course was preceded by the readings/writings/doings
1
University of Oregon, Eugene, USA
2
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Lisa A. Mazzei, Department of Education Studies, University of Oregon,
Eugene, OR 97403-1215, USA.
Email: mazzei@uoregon.edu
100 Qualitative Inquiry 26(1)
that students brought to that setting: an entanglement of
cohorts, students at different stages in their program, differ-
ent motivations for taking the course, and so on. What we all
shared was a curiosity about the work of Deleuze and Guattari
and how, in thinking not about method, but instead about
philosophical concepts, something else might be produced.
We were “using concept as method” (Lenz Taguchi & St.
Pierre, 2017) although that practice was yet to be named.
Introducing a Minor Pedagogy
In a discussion about assemblage theory, Buchanan (2017)
urges the following:
We have to stop thinking of the concept of the assemblage as a
way of describing a thing or situation and instead see it for
what it was always intended to be: a way of analysing a thing
or situation. (p. 473)
In thinking about the entanglements and pedagogies that we
will explore, we go to the concepts of assemblage and
minor literature as a way to analyze the entanglements that
formed. What is it that brings these elements together in the
first place creating a different pedagogy and ontology, one
that we name a minor pedagogy.3
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the problem of expression
in both A Thousand Plateaus (1987) and Kafka: Toward a
Minor Literature (1986). In differentiating a minor literature
from a major language, they present three characteristics.
Key among these is that while formed by a minority, a minor
literature is constructed within a major language, enacting a
deterritorialization as resistance to striating practices. In a
minor pedagogy, we unsettle habitual pedagogies that sedi-
ment thought and method. The second characteristic is that
everything in a minor literature is political. The individual
concern is not confined to the individual but allied with the
collective as we will illustrate in our tellings that follow. All
things, all individuals, all stories are claimed in an entangled
territory of connection. The third characteristic is that in a
minor literature, all things assume a collective value, “There
are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation” (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1986, p. 17). In a minor literature, “Every state-
ment is the product of a machinic assemblage, in other
words, of collective assemblages of enunciation” (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1987, p. 37). While Lisa and Laura “tell their
tales,” such tales are not possible apart from the collective.
We frame them and present them as “our perspectives,” but
in reality, they are merely expressions or products of the col-
lective enunciated in this article.
Incitements, as Narrated by Lisa
The editors in their call for this special issue provided several
provocations, one of which was a posing of the question:
“If we could teach and learn intra-actively without restraints,
what would we imagine?” In January of 2015, I was asked to
develop and teach a special topics doctoral course that was
based on my current research to be offered April through
June of 2015. So was born the course, Deleuze and Education
Theory. What a dream! I was reading and thinking with
Deleuzian concepts in preparation for a keynote I was to
deliver at the 8th International Deleuze Studies Conference
to be held in Stockholm that July. They weren’t exactly beat-
ing the doors down, but seven students answered the call and
signed up for the class.
Following their exposure to thinking social science
inquiry and philosophical concepts together, those who
enrolled were eager, or at least curious, to consider what
Deleuze might have to offer in their writing/thinking/doing.
The “post qual vibes” as Laura refers to the thinking made
possible throughout the first-year sequence of methodology
courses lead to this seminar as a possibility, to these rela-
tions as thinkable.4 Having read an earlier research exem-
plar by Lenz Taguchi and Palmer (2014) and been given a
taste of Anti-Oedipus in the third course of the Qualitative
Methodology sequence, the spark was there. Although I had
already been infected by the ideas presented by a Deleuzian
ontology, the students were just coming to terms with an
entirely new vocabulary and ontology.
I did have a syllabus which we mostly followed, although
it was entangled with my project, the projects that the stu-
dents were creating, the teaching of other classes we were
all engaged in, and so on. We read snippets of primary texts,
corresponding secondary texts, and research exemplars that
all contributed to our reading list. One of the assignments
for the course was for students to find a book chapter or
article in which the author said they were putting Deleuze
and Guattari to work and that connected to their own inter-
ests if possible. The topics studied each week were driven
by concepts as we examined how others were trying to put
concepts to work. Concepts, Deleuze and Guattari (1994)
tell us, are “not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly
bodies” (p. 5) but instead are “connected to problems with-
out which they would have no meaning and which can
themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution
emerges” (p. 16). They must be created, and in their cre-
ation, they enable new contours and lines of flight. The stu-
dents connected with/to concepts that became known as
they plugged them into the problems being posed in ques-
tions they were asking in their own research contexts.
The students latched on to concepts that might enable
them to unsettle and destabilize how they thought they were
thinking about their developing research projects. They/we
found concepts, tried to make sense of concepts, discarded
concepts, and started all over again. We entered into a minor
relationship with our classroom assemblage (itself more
than one): things, beings, doings, knotted together. One of
the hallmarks of Deleuze and Guattari is their creation of a
Mazzei and Smithers 101
new language to stretch possibilities and rupture ways of
thinking. I wanted this rupture to occur, but I was also wary
of a tendency to appropriate words like rhizome and desire
without sufficient attention to a radical shift in being that
these concepts portend. We created a word map (how I wish
I had a photo of that), and attempted definitions, with the
understanding that these too had to be constantly revisited
and unsettled. We resisted (not always successfully) merely
appropriating language without serious engagement with
the different ontology being posed.
We used these words, not as “order words” that function
as a command (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 79), but
as incitements, and sparks. Deleuze’s conceptual play with
the idea of the zigzag is useful here (Deleuze & Parnet,
1987/2002). The zigzag is the lightning bolt spark of cre-
ation and the “crosscutting path from one conceptual flow
to another,” a path set off by the spark of creation, unpre-
dictable, undisciplined, anti-disciplinary, non-static
(Stivale, 2003, p. 32). With this mapping, our new assem-
blage sparked an unpredictable and messy flow.
Even though we approached our reading and thinking
from different perspectives in terms of our theoretical
understandings, something else was becoming in this minor
pedagogy. These pedagogies produced “not only what we
know, but also who we are, how we live, and what we do in
the world” as described by the editors in their call for sub-
missions. One of the reasons I think this course was so fruit-
ful for both me and the students is that we were all working
on our own projects, but in a Deleuzian sense, as a collec-
tive assemblage in which all things, all individuals, all sto-
ries were claimed in a territory of connection (see, for
example, Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 37). We cre-
ated a minor pedagogy (and it created us) that extended far
beyond this seminar that Laura and I will both discuss fur-
ther in the subsequent sections of this article.
Queering the Research Sequence, as
Narrated by Laura
A thought comes to mind from the end of both my first year
of doctoral study and the first three qualitative methods
courses, a sentence unthinkable just eight months prior: I
am for real not sure why we were talking about shitting and
fucking machines last class, but I think I am starting to vibe
with a few of these not-metaphors5 (Barad, 2007; Deleuze
& Guattari, 1972/2009; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Tuck &
Yang, 2012). Students are made and remade by the mea-
surement regimes made meaningful in their lives. Of
course—and in my area of study, this has radical implica-
tions for the pursuit of perfected accountability regimes in
undergraduate education. What works is a question in search
of a solution; what makes and is made is a problem in search
of problematization, experimentation, creation.
I came back to graduate school with a burning question
to explore. In my years as a student affairs practitioner, I
was asked a question over and over that I just could not
figure out how to answer: How do you know your program
works? How do you know your program positively impacts
your students? I tried my own ideas, I talked with faculty, I
helped bring a “what works” speaker to campus, I partici-
pated in an assessment learning community . . . and yet,
none of the ideas I heard satisfied the rigors of scientific
knowledge as I had been taught. These ideas were not legi-
ble to me. I got tired of shrugging my shoulders about the
impact of programs on which I worked so hard on behalf of
our students. I decided to put even more time into learning
how to know what works; I entered an education PhD pro-
gram that specialized in quantitative methods. I thought that
maybe at the end of all of this, I would know impact scien-
tifically, and be able to help other practitioners gain the leg-
ibility within student affairs that I once sought to no avail.
Shitting and fucking machines do not shock my con-
scious by May of 2014, especially given that just a few
months prior we were genderfucking6 (quantitative? quali-
tative? all?) research with a cishet man—Jerry Rosiek—in
Qual I. That was a shock, and not because this queer one is
unappreciative of the genderfuck. Qual I as taught by Jerry
emphasized above all that there was no such thing as quali-
tative research, which as a quantitatively oriented student,
was disorienting. As I think about this now, this statement
emerges as the first deterritorialization I encountered of the
major language of social science research, a major language
that I came back to graduate school to learn and that I
thought would provide the tools I needed to measure “what
works.” Wasn’t qualitative in the course title? Why was this
class a degree requirement if its subject matter didn’t exist?
Isn’t qualitative research just coding anyway? Here we
were, embracing all sorts of embodied entanglements with
the world as research, no metaphors. Did I enter doctoral
work to help other practitioners to be legible within the cur-
rent system, or to help change the current system into some-
thing beyond current legibility?
Two quarters into doctoral work, I was asking how I
might be able to transfer into this other doctoral program—
the one that attempted a dismantling of the old tired binaries.
How did I get through three previous degrees without read-
ing about borderlands or performativity? (Anzaldúa, 2012;
Butler, 1990). Should I have pushed myself to take different
courses, or pursued more critical programs? Was it the fault
of my programs? Should I have been a better queer and
learned this on the streets? Three quarters in, I was in Qual
III with Lisa, a course that had a mix of students in this other
program who were also first-year students, as well as third-
year and fifth-year students needing to finish up a research
sequence that morphed as they were taking it. I remember
being so struck by how much those more advanced students
102 Qualitative Inquiry 26(1)
knew, how much they brought in with them to the program,
and all of the different directions their readings and experi-
ences took them. And their words, they used all of these
words and discussed all of these authors that were so foreign
to me! They talked with Lisa in a language with which I had
only a tenuous connection. I googled these words in class,
connections that took me to other readings, deeper within
course readings, to different ideas for class assignments and
writings. I began to break open their words and connect to
flows of content and expression (Deleuze, 1986/1988). (I)7
was beginning to be moved along by concepts. In the lan-
guage I now still only tenuously grasp, Lisa and these other
students seemed to be placing order-words in near-continu-
ous variation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). Three quar-
ters in to coursework, I submitted an application for
admission into this different doctoral program with these
qualitative methods faculty and students; they somehow
convinced me that the way to produce the research I wanted
was a program that rejected the qualitative-quantitative
binary and sought to challenge the underlying assumptions
of research, period. Thirteen quarters in, I submitted a paper
for publication that I started in this very class, a paper about
college student transitions in which I reference a beautiful
quote by Judith Butler (1990) about becoming-shit.8
Why not cap off a second year of mess (Law, 2004) with
a course on Deleuze? Five quarters in, there were even more
qualitative methods courses, a few philosophy courses, and
productive encounters with all sorts of proper nouns: Rosi,
Michel, Stacey, Emily, Asilia, Colin, Paul, Annemarie,
Allyson, Anna, Stephanie, Jane, Kathleen.9 I wasn’t sure I
wanted to add Gilles (or Felix) to the list. They were intrigu-
ing to be sure, but they seemed utterly unintelligible, and I
already had a long list of people and proper nouns with
whom to think. Deleuze and Education Theory was a course
in which I was beginning again in a struggle to understand
the terminology and (un)ending with radical entanglements
of thoughts, directions, students, exemplars, possibilities. I
entered the course a skeptic. Asilia, Emma, and Jessica
helped me think with becomings (Renold & Ringrose,
2011). Lisa and Eve helped me think through breaking up
with Gilles before we even really knew each other like that
(Tuck, 2010). Despite Allyson, Lisa, Asilia, Emily, Liz, and
Francisca’s best efforts, I never quite came into relation
with time and duration (de Freitas & Ferrara, 2015). We
started with a focus on the words, and in doing so began to
work with the enunciations; we sought these concepts not to
become enforcers of a knowledge (Weheliye, 2014, pp.
47-48), but to connect to political immediacies in our com-
munities, and enact radical research practices. By the (un)
end(ing) of the course, I began to think that maybe (I) could
place Gilles and Felix and their concepts and our under-
standings to work in whatever my research practices were
quickly becoming.
Amid all of the questions produced through these close
encounters of the Deleuzian kind was one at the heart of my
reason for coming back to school in the first place: How do
we navigate experimental research practices that, in open-
ing up new ontologies and ways of being, are often unintel-
ligible to the very practitioners and fellow researchers with
whom we hope to engage? Let us all genderfuck the idea of
what works. But this will not help me become legible within
my larger field, and it most certainly will not help practitio-
ners out there who wish to become legible within higher
education and student affairs. Higher education and student
affairs specifically are disciplines that, despite their some-
what radical social commitments, are still entrenched in the
search for what works, or what has impact, and hopefully a
high impact at that (Kuh & Schneider, 2008; Wells, Kolek,
Williams, & Saunders, 2015). This is the point, yes, that
there is a political immediacy to our work. We are all radi-
cally responsible for the immanent creation of this world,
especially in the knowledges we produce and sustain. And
this is also the point: with radical responsibility comes radi-
cal precarity, and if you are not creating the world as it is,
you are likely out of a job. On a glass-half-full day, let us all
genderfuck this current apparatus, dispositif, assemblage,
agencement for change. On a glass-half-empty day, who
can pay a mortgage with an agencement?
Continued Entanglements
(Lisa’s Version)
The Deleuze and Education Theory course was a rich
teaching and learning experience for me. I had an eager
audience that provided critical feedback on my developing
keynote, the students willingly experimented with begin-
ning attempts to put Deleuze and Guattari to work, and off
I went to Stockholm for the International Deleuze Studies
Conference, fittingly named Daughters of Chaos. Beings,
doings, and thoughts beyond the scope of the course were
enmeshed in unanticipated joinings and becomings. As I
write the preceding sentence I question my initial tendency
to differentiate “beyond the scope of the course” in a minor
pedagogy as if there is a beyond that is not always already
implicated. The following Autumn, I embarked on a year-
long directed reading of key texts by Deleuze and Deleuze
with Guattari at the request of three students who had been
in the course, all of whom are or were my doctoral advisees
(Laura included).10
We created our own seminar with guidance provided by
me, but with the understanding that the students would be in
charge of setting the agenda. They selected the readings
based on curiosity and perplexity, what they wanted to
understand, or texts that developed some of the concepts
first encountered in the seminar. As we read and thought
and struggled, new texts were added, previous texts were
Mazzei and Smithers 103
revisited, and writing was shared. The machinic assemblage
was at work.
I was present in an advisory capacity, or so I thought. What
I am not sure that we (at least me) anticipated is how produc-
tive this would prove to be because of the 3+1. Someone (not
me) had the idea of creating a Google folder that was and is a
treasure trove of resources. One person created a “syllabus”
that mapped topics and related readings (both primary and
secondary) on a week-by-week basis. Another person created
a folder within this drive aptly named “Deleuze Dump” in
which we deposited shared readings including dissertations,
journal articles, notes from our discussions, and drafts of
papers and articles that we were working on.
One of the things that produced such a productive assem-
blage is that we all came to this, not just with a general
interest in working with Deleuzian ideas, but we were all
trying to think about his/their thinking about and relation-
ship to/with language. One of our early forays into A
Thousand Plateaus (ATP) was the fourth plateau, November
20, 1923—Postulates of Linguistics (Deleuze & Guattari,
1980/1987). I was writing about a collective voice, and we
all somehow came to collective enunciation. One of the stu-
dents (I think maybe Matt) wanted to read Deleuze and
Guattari on Kafka, and I willingly followed this “line of
flight.” Someone else, perhaps all three, were interested in
a major language and minor language. It was this fortunate
coupling that I plugged into in shifting my thinking from
writing about voice in qualitative inquiry, first as affect,
then as a collective assemblage, to a mapping of a minor
inquiry (Mazzei, 2017) of which collective assemblage of
enunciation is but one element (Deleuze & Guattari,
1975/1986). None of these lines of flight would have been
possible without my first reading the Kafka book, and con-
tinuing to think with the 3+1.
We were “thinking without method” (Jackson, 2017),
using “concept as method” (Lenz Taguchi & St. Pierre,
2017), and “thinking with theory” (Jackson & Mazzei,
2012). We were doing inquiry produced by concepts rather
than patterned by method in ways that functioned “to main-
tain the repetition of difference, as the production of the
new, while resisting the gravity of the circle of recognition
and its representations” (O’Sullivan & Zepke, 2008, p. 1).
In other words, the pedagogy of thinking with concepts pro-
voked what pedagogy and inquiry might be in the process
of becoming; in other words, a minor pedagogy.
This is risky business and requires both an immersion in
philosophical texts and an experimentation at the limit of
what is known. In describing this process, Elizabeth St.
Pierre (2017) writes,
The experimentation required in post qualitative inquiry cannot
be accomplished within the methodological enclosure. This
experimental work is risky, creative, surprising, and remarkable.
It cannot be measured, predicted, controlled, systematized,
formalized, described in a textbook, or called forth by
preexisting, approved methodological processes, methods, and
practices. (p. 2)
This risky business continues as our assemblage has now
taken me to a new book project and Laura to the completion
of her dissertation and to a new faculty position. We still
meet occasionally (now virtually), and with Matt have co-
authored a journal manuscript. We share the data archive of
texts and questions and thoughts produced from our peda-
gogical experiment, and, and, and . . .
Continued Entanglements
(Laura’s Version)
This dissertation project fits perfectly with your ideas of
what the field needed, and yet it is located in a present that
you could not have predicted.11 It is fitting that the path
from a “what works” focus in first term qualitative methods
to an assemblage theory dissertation makes a mockery of a
linear spacetime. So many readings, so many conversa-
tions, such generative feminist research communities. And
here you are, at your dissertation field site, a site that
decided to hold itself and their students accountable to suc-
cess. Success! What’s not to love about success? Student
success, an order-word in action, ordering content and
expression on the grid of intelligibility that it calls home. In
this instantiation of a student success initiative, one that
resonates with several nationwide campaigns, success is a
very specific measurement of student academic achieve-
ment. Student success is known through the rate of first
time, full-time students, whose first full-time term is in fall,
who graduate in four years (plus the trailing summer if
needed) or fewer. The success of this student success initia-
tive will be known through a ten percent increase in the
four-year graduation rate of the incoming class of 2020 over
the comparable rate of the class of 2015.
The mantra of this field site: to be student-centered and
evidence-based. To what grid does that map, and where are
the locations of escape? The assemblage of/at/in/constituting
this field site speaks in right-aligned chunks in this section, in
italics. Stumblings toward a cartography of this field site
speak in left-aligned chunks, in the middle of analysis:
One of the things we do is start from the data.
That was quick; what happened to student-centered? This
field site didn’t waste any time shining a light on its con-
tents (or expressions?):
It’s like I say, what Banner says is the way it is.12
This field site is recognizable in so many ways. This seems
to be the problem, or question, that intercollegiate athletics
104 Qualitative Inquiry 26(1)
has wrestled with for decades. How do you hold students
and their institutions accountable? This also seems to be the
same question that distorts intercollegiate athletics.
Accountability to progress toward degree, academic prog-
ress rates, and graduation rates are metrics that student ath-
letes can attain without gaining the college experience that
folks gesture to as the important result. What Banner says
are supposed to be proximal measures of this expansive col-
lege experience. Are they? If they are, are they worth it? If
they are, is it worth remaking university systems in the
image of “what works” for their production?
Let me be real clear here: I need to get to the metrics, the key
metrics.
It is disturbingly easy to slip into habitual, all-too-human
ways of thinking about student affairs. Of course you could
know that metric if someone around here just had Data
Warehouse access:13
By the way, the accreditors really loved that approach.
What is the threshold at which banal phrases directly speak
the collective assemblage of this field site, no breaking
open of words needed?
I find this conversation to be both exactly fitting of the way
race has circulated, and absolutely stunning. Both.
Oh, wait, that was your note to self, not a quote. If the world
is an immanent creation for which all actants are radically
responsible, is it super fucked up to just let that last off-the-
record conversation slide without saying something?
We need to schedule a meeting [of the data advisory
group]—now that we have all this data flowing in, what do
we do with it?
Does the university have any ideas on how to know students
outside of data? How can data be sufficient when we are
enmeshed?
Think of true tags . . . like identifiers. A tag could be work, so
they [students] work 20 hours a week, 40 hours a week. . . Not
academic, true student attributes, not majors, we can draw
the majors. Are they participating in things . . . those kind of
identifications that aren’t already in Banner.
Is it post qualitative research to just watch people and take
notes all day (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Springgay &
Truman, 2017)? What about experimentation? Is it good
enough to just sit in meetings and look for an assemblage,
as if it were a thing able to be captured through simple
empirical observation? Even so, the point is not to recog-
nize an assemblage, it is to travel along its mappings toward
escape, a becoming-minor. What does escape look like? Is
it observable? How would it even be representable if wit-
nessed—wouldn’t escape die in representation?
Regardless of where a student interacts, the interaction is
student-centered, evidence-based, there’s care for the student
. . . the goal is a student-centered approach.
If the student is the creation of the university assemblage,
does it make sense to say that the institution is student-cen-
tered? Universities do not act upon students who are sepa-
rate from them, and thus centerable; universities produce
students. If the university produces students through data
and evidence-based practices, doesn’t that make the univer-
sity data-centered?
I know a lot of [particular major] students who say ‘I’m just
going to hang around until fall.’ No! Get out of here!
The digestible pop-behavioral economics of Nudge used to
be so useful (Thaler & Sunstein, 2009).14 Peer educators
understood when the book called for us to construct choice
architectures for our students. The university is a confusing
place and there are too many options in front of us at any
given time. It is incumbent upon those designing systems to
build in ideal default options for users, lest they get over-
whelmed. Just build grids of intelligibility, just build strata,
and then place students in their ideal location. Know stu-
dents as data, funnel students according to data. So many
knowledges gained in the last few years have ruined Nudge,
yet its lessons pervade this field site. Deleuze’s (1992) cryp-
tic caution about motivation—we request our own territori-
alization in a major language—elicits the lessons of Nudge
and gives such great pause. What world have we shaped?
How will we ever escape a form of power that enrolls us so
deeply in reproducing its work?
I don’t understand why you’re confused, we need to
incentivize behaviors, guardrails for our students . . .
What is possibly problematic about a system that nudges
students into pathways chosen for them that shape every
meaningful option regarding their undergraduate education
so that they achieve a goal that the university deems
meaningful?
We can provide support, but we can’t perform for them, we
can’t take the tests for them.
So many readings in mind, none of which fit into the work-
ing definition of research at this site.15 Does the research
show impact of environmental alterations on pre-deter-
mined outcomes? That sounds like approximately nothing
we have read in our methods series. Let me think back . . .
let me google . . .
Mazzei and Smithers 105
We need to build better guardrails, that’s about academic
polices, we need to build better academic policies that
encourage better progress toward degree.
This is neoliberalism—and—something else. We read about
this last term, or the term before, or the year or two before
that; in so many groups, we read this. Where? This seems to
be somewhere in the middle of Anti-Oedipus and A
Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2009;
1980/1987). But how? Does it matter exactly where it falls
in a strict application of Deleuze and Guattari’s theories to
the world? If thought, as philosophy and knowledge-cre-
ation, is the production of concepts, then perhaps a new
concept is needed here (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994)?
This assemblage is remaking the university in its major
image. Now, to find a concept that fits this assemblage of
data-driven control (Deleuze, 1992). Or to create one. Or
find. Or create? Is it arrogant to create? Do men ask them-
selves these questions?
The first question [to students] should be: “Are you planning
on coming back next year?” And if not, let me change your
mind.
What?
We have to build a culture of expectation of four-year
graduation . . . There are strategies, and there are tactics. We
have to be able to say these are the student success tactics
that will lead to four-year graduation.
Field work, a fancy name for staring at people for hours on
end and taking notes at awkward times. Especially awk-
ward when this is the topic of conversation. Especially with
the kind of dissertation that everyone knows is in progress
over here in this corner. Campus needs to build a culture of
expectation; campus needs to be motivated . . .
They’re having their data people talk with campus to get data
on pre-[major] students who don’t make it, so we can know
more about them.
Is it myopic to think that institutions can know students out-
side of data? Assemblage theory, assemblage activism,
assemblage experimentation—political immediacy—will
any of this break through and produce positive change?
Isn’t that the only validity that matters (Lather, 1993)?
Incitements of the Fold
What do pedagogies produce? Does research and teaching
become something other in the context of the more-than-
human? These and other questions were offered by the edi-
tors to open up a conversation about that which is yet to
come, or might become as students and instructors engage
with more-than-human bodies in their thinking and doing of
inquiry.
Laura wrote about her encounters with Deleuze and
Guattari that preceded the Deleuze course that we have used
as the anchor for this article, and the dizziness produced
when that which has been forbidden or left out becomes
centered. Lisa has written about when a minor language (or
minor pedagogy) is produced within the major field of tra-
ditional humanist inquiry.
Although we have centered our own experiences in pro-
ducing a narrative in response to the above questions, we
struggle with an ending that avoids reproducing those expe-
riences. And yet, what they produce are methodologies and
questions and enactments not possible without the entan-
gled processes we have described.
Lisa described a 3+1, but it’s really much more than
that. Her plusses include in addition to the students that she
has mentored, and is mentoring, and will mentor, the other
bodies (human and more-than-human) that produce the
problems that brush up against the authors that she has read,
and is reading, and will read. It includes the spaces and
places and futures not yet imagined. Laura includes contin-
ued relations of persons-thinkings-beings from qualitative
methods-carpools-writing groups-Google hangs-past stu-
dents, current students, future students-all students-persons-
campus inhabitants.
We offer then, our own series of questions from the folds
of these entangled teaching and learning and writing
practices:
•• What are the disorientations (as inspired by Ahmed,
2006) and uncomfortablenesses that we should
expect and encourage?
•• Who and what are both included in and excluded
from some of these possible futures (Brooks et al.,
2017; Mazzei, 2016)?
•• What or where are the queer assemblages and
what type of pedagogy and/or inquiry might they
produce?
•• How do we not become trapped in the circle of rep-
etition by merely deconstructing the traditional
methods that have grounded us, toward difference in
thinking/being/doing (Deleuze, 1986/1988).
These entanglements and incitements, St. Pierre (2017)
writes, “cannot be taught or learned . . . Its focus is not on
things already made, but things in the making” (p. 2). What
we offer is how we have attended to these provocations in
our ongoing efforts toward a minor pedagogy.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
106 Qualitative Inquiry 26(1)
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iDs
Lisa A. Mazzei https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4312-3938
Laura E. Smithers https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5706-3649
Notes
 1. This three course sequence emphasizes philosophical tra-
ditions and the implications for inquiry and the subject.
Course titles are: Qualitative Methodology I: Interpretivist
Inquiry; Qualitative Methodology II: (Post)critical Inquiry;
Qualitative Methodology III: Posthumanist Inquiry. This
sequence is preceded by the course, Philosophy of Research
that examines the philosophical assumptions that underlie
various research methodologies in the social sciences.
 2. Although the course was named Deleuze and Education
Theory due to space limitations imposed by the registrar, it
engaged the work of both Deleuze singularly and Deleuze
with Guattari, so we will reference both Deleuze and Guattari
for the remainder of the article.
  3. Although we will explain what we think happens in a minor
pedagogy, we refer the reader to the texts by Deleuze and
Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus, 1987, and Kafka, 1986) in
which they present the concept of a minor literature, and a
“translation” of the concept into the form of a minor inquiry
as presented by Mazzei (2017).
  4. See, for example, St. Pierre (2011; 2014; 2017) and Lather and
St. Pierre (2013) for a discussion of post qualitative research.
  5. A particularly memorable session of Qual III was the day we
studied the works of Deleuze and Guattari. Lisa opened class
by sitting in a chair pulled to the front of the room, opening
her copy of Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2009),
and reading its first paragraph aloud to a room of doctoral
students silenced by the vivid imagery (shitting and fucking
machines included) that followed.
  6. The use of genderfuck, a radical cousin of gender fluidity, is
used here not in relation to any specific text, but rather class
conversation. Cishet, or someone identified as both cisgender
and heterosexual, is used to highlight the incongruence Laura
felt between Jerry’s comfort with queer terminologies and his
cishet identity.
  7. Persons moved by concepts are themselves a production of
concepts and their assemblages. The stylization (I) represents
this constitutive contingency of the individual (cf. Deleuze &
Guattari, 1991/1994; Foucault, 1975/1995).
  8. “What constitutes through division the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’
worlds of the subject is a border and boundary tenuously
maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control.
The boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by
those excremental passages in which the inner effectively
becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it
were, the model by which other forms of identity-differenti-
ation are accomplished. In effect this is the mode by which
Others become shit . . .” (Butler, 1990, pp. 133-134).
 9. An entanglement of fellow doctoral students (Emily Mathis,
Asilia Franklin-Phipps, and Allyson Dean), colleagues from
other universities (Paul Eaton), faculty (Colin Koopman), and
authors (Rosi Braidotti, 2013; Michel Foucault, 1975/1995;
Stacey Alaimo, 2010; Annemarie Mol, 2003; Anna Deavere
Smith, 1993; Stephanie Springgay, 2008; Jane Bennett,
2010; Kathleen Stewart, 1996). By no means is this naming
exhaustive.
10. These three students are/were Matt Graham, Emily Mathis,
and Laura Smithers.
11. This section explores Laura’s immersion in the contingency
of the (I). Second person is used in the left-aligned text to
denote the attendant negotiations of identity throughout this
section. Many times, this second person refers to Laura. Often
times, it refers to others at the field site. Still more times, it
refers to others haunting these experiences. The second per-
son here is not reducible to any single individually identifi-
able speaker, human or more-than-human; the boundaries of
individual identity are blurred. Read with this instability in
mind(body) to open up the analytical level of concepts (the
transcendental empirical, Deleuze, 2001) from the story of
the persons and things of dissertation research (the simple
empirical, Deleuze, 2001). In doing so, you enter the struggle
of our narrator to get to the transcendental, and the boundar-
ies around your (I) blur into the narration. This blurring, or
becoming, is a minor pedagogy.
12. Banner is a student information system used at many
universities.
13. Data Warehouse is a computer interface through which
administrators can pull bulk data from the student informa-
tion system.
14. In Nudge, Thaler and Sunstein (2009) argue that there is no
way for people to avoid influencing the choices of others. As
such, individuals and society accrue the best outcomes when
individuals consider themselves to be choice architects who
nudge others toward what they see to be the best choice for the
other. Nudge tells a story of investment in major interactions—
measurable interactions among discrete persons, institutions,
and objects—rather than a story of minor entanglements.
15. An incomplete listing includes Foucault (1980), Harding
(1992), Holbrook and Pourchier (2014), Law (2008),
MacLure (2013), Mazzei and Jackson (2012), St. Pierre
(2011); and; and; and . . .
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Author Biographies
Lisa A. Mazzei is professor in the Department of Education Studies
and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Philosophy at the University
of Oregon. In collaboration with Alecia Jackson, she focuses on think-
ing with theory as a new analytic for qualitative inquiry.
Laura E. Smithers is assistant professor in the Department of
Educational Foundations and Leadership at Old Dominion
University. Her research focuses on the possible futures created
and foreclosed by assessment regimes in undergraduate education.