International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education

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Writing a thesis differently

Eileen Honan & David Bright

To cite this article: Eileen Honan & David Bright (2016) Writing a thesis differently, International
Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29:5, 731-743, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2016.1145280

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International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2016
VOL. 29, NO. 5, 731–743
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2016.1145280

Writing a thesis differently

Eileen Honana  and David Brightb
a
School of Education, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia; bFaculty of Education, Monash University,
Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In this paper we explore the contributions that Deleuze and Guattari have Received 23 April 2015
made to thinking/writing language and how these ideas can be put to work Accepted 31 October 2015
in producing a doctoral thesis. We contribute to the field of work within KEYWORDS
what Patti Lather and Elizabeth St Pierre have called the “post-qualitative” Doctoral thesis writing;
movement, where researchers attempt to “imagine and accomplish an deleuze and language;
inquiry that might produce different knowledge and produce knowledge post-qualitative research
differently”. We attempt to rethink the thesis text, using a language where methods; rhizomatic
language always falls apart, a way of talking/writing/reading about methods; tetralinguistic
presentation of research within a doctoral thesis that will provide the discourses
writermachine a space to “pass”. The paper will provide some ideas and ways
forward for writers who are attempting to deterritorialize research, who are
attempting to experiment with new representational forms.

A beginning
What now seems problematic is the situation in which young philosophers, but also all young writers who”re
involved in creating something, find themselves. They face the threat of being stifled from the outset. It’s become
very difficult to do any work, because a whole system of “acculturation” and anticreativity specific to the developed
nations is taking shape. It’s far worse than censorship. (Deleuze, 1995, p. 27)
This paper contributes to a growing field of work within what Lather and St. Pierre (2013) have termed
the “post-qualitative” movement, where researchers attempt to “imagine and accomplish an inquiry
that might produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently” (Lather, 2013, p. 653). In
particular we are interested in the re-presentation of research within academic texts, especially within
the text of a doctoral thesis.1
The impetus for writing this text is our suspicion, shared with St. Pierre (2011), that a “conventional,
reductionist, hegemonic, and sometimes oppressive” (p. 613) orthodoxy of qualitative educational
research has infiltrated the writing of the thesis text. We fear that “we are being told how we must see
and what we must do when we investigate” (Law, 2004, p. 4), and worry that in writing we increasingly
find ourselves stifled from the outset, operating within a problematic of acculturation and anticreativity
wherein we are urged to make original and creative contributions through practices of writing that
“are necessary while at the same time necessarily limiting” (Koro-Ljungberg & Mazzei, 2012, p. 728).
This paper is part of our attempt to play with, to extend and to disrupt the practices of language,
text and method that are constructed within normative accounts of doctoral thesis writing, and to
move beyond the strictures of the “scientific method” while at the same time writing about and within

CONTACT  Eileen Honan  e.honan@uq.edu.au

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
732    E. Honan and D. Bright

the post-qualitative turn (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013). Our aim is not to reject academic writing but to
interfere with normativities of practice that have come to sanction what is recognizable as academic
writing and examinable as thesis text.

Anticreativity and acculturation in academic writing

St. Pierre (2011) asserts that the centre of methodology has failed in the wake of the deconstructive
critique of concepts and categories such as the interview, validity, data, voice and reflexivity. Notions
of “knowledge, truth, reality, reason, science, progress, the subject” (St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000, p. 1) have
been subjected to the play of différance, disrupting many of our most deeply entrenched ontological
and epistemological assumptions, and demanding radical consequences.
And yet, despite this ongoing and inevitable critique, the concepts have tightened and reified, stand-
ing firm in the face of this deconstructive assault, resulting in an orthodoxy of qualitative research that is
“so disciplined, so normalized, so centered … that it has become conventional, reductionist, hegemonic,
and sometimes oppressive and has lost its radical possibilities” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 613). This orthodoxy
produces and is a product of the “thousands of textbooks, handbooks, and journal articles that have
secured qualitative methodology by repeating the structure in book after book with the same chapter
headings so that we now believe it is true and real” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 613).
Just as with method, writing too has become (at least potentially) conventional, reductionist and
hegemonic. The proliferation of textbooks, handbooks and journal articles, as well as blogs and web-
sites offering advice and instruction on “writing your thesis” forms a textual maze through which
doctoral students must navigate. In Australia, this journey is often taken more or less alone, with
guidance provided by an advisor or supervisor (although more collaborative practices are sometimes
encouraged – see, for example Aitchison & Lee, 2006). In the USA the journey is often much more
regulated, governed by the “qualitative research methods” courses and programs doctoral students
must take before writing their “dissertation”. Some of the advice on thesis writing offered by these
artefacts is constructed as common and good sense, and often presented with equivocation. For
example, in the book Writing Your Thesis a discussion on writing conventions offers the following
stylistic advice on perspective:
A position has now probably been reached in writing about research, where although the third person is perhaps
generally favoured in most cases, it is now acknowledged that the first person is appropriate in a number of different
contexts, and is perhaps favoured in some. (Oliver, 2008, p. 55)
However, other advice is repeated to the point of orthodoxy. Perhaps the best example of this occurs in
the area of “thesis structure”. Writing Your Thesis, for example, has chapters titled: The preliminary pages
and the introduction; The literature review; Methodology; The data analysis chapters; and The conclusion
(Oliver, 2008). Another guide, Mapping Your Thesis : The Comprehensive Manual of Theory and Techniques
for Masters and Doctoral Research, includes chapters on The introduction; Literature review part one;
Literature review part two; Methods; Results; and The discussion (White, 2011). As a final example,
The Dissertation Journey: A Practical and Comprehensive Guide to Planning, Writing, and Defending your
Dissertation, in addition to the typical structure of Introduction or Problem Statement; Review of the
Literature; Methodology; Results or Findings; and Conclusions, Recommendations, Implications, also
offer two : “alternative formats” as shown in Table 1:
Paltridge (2002, p. 131) describes this commonly described assemblage of introduction – literature
review – methods – results – discussion – conclusions as the “typical macro-structure” of the traditional
thesis, yet notes that there are many actual published theses that do not use this standard format.
Our concern, then, is not to disparage excellent work that is produced following these structures
and advice but to highlight the danger of such structures being repeated to the point of orthodoxy,
stifling creativity from the outset, determining what can be written and directing doctoral students
away from thinking and writing differently. The chapter “Seeking Structure” in How to Write a Thesis
begins as follows:
 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education   733

Table 1. Alternative formats.

Model-building studies
Chapter 1 Problem and purpose
Chapter 2 Literature review
Chapter 3 Methodology
Chapter 4 Analysis of data
Chapter 5 Conclusion and model
Case studies
Chapter 1 Problem and purpose
Chapter 2 Literature review
Chapter 3 Methodology
Chapters 4–6 Case studies
Chapter 7 Analysis of themes
Chapter 8 Conclusions, implications and recommendations
Source: Roberts (2010, p. 22).

The knack for all research students regardless of discipline is to pinpoint what is required and model your work accord-
ingly. (Burnham, 1994, p. 33)
This quotation could be interpreted as a cynical “give them what they ask for and no more” perspective
on the course or degree. However, it is a useful reminder of how important it is to know what is expected of
you. You not only have to know what is required, you have to adapt your thinking and writing accordingly. (Murray,
2011, p. 117)
Our argument, following Deleuze, is that it is imperative for doctoral students not to adapt their thinking
and writing to what is required precisely because:
the problem is not to direct or methodically apply a thought which pre-exists in principle and in nature, but to
bring into being that which does not yet exist (there is no other work, all the rest is arbitrary, mere decoration).
To think is to create – there is no other creation – but to create is first of all to engender “thinking” in thought.
(Deleuze, 1994, p. 147)
If we take the problem of educational research writing to be one of creation rather than the application
of the pre-existing, then what is required is a style and structure that eschews the already thought; a
writing that is against style and against structure. Writing that is:
something unstable, always heterogeneous, in which style carves differences of potential between which things
can pass, come to pass, a spark can flash and break out of language itself, to make us see and think what was lying
in the shadow around the words, things we were hardly aware existed. (Deleuze, 1995, p. 141)
The sparks of this style of writing are produced through an irreverent “straining toward something
that isn’t syntactic nor even linguistic (something outside language)” (Deleuze, 1995; p. 164). This
would be a writing that produces a language that is not “arid” but that can “vibrate with a new
intensity” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986; p. 19). Not writing according to what is expected, but writing
to create – to bring something to life. This is Deleuze and Guattari’s imperative – to “oppose a purely
intensive usage of language to all symbolic or even significant or simply signifying usages of it.
Arrive at a perfect and unformed expression, a materially intense expression” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1986, p. 19).

A minor literature?
A minor literature, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1986, 1987), is the deterritorialization of a major
language, immediately connected to the political, and collective in value. It is “less a product than a
process of becoming minor, through which language is deterritorialized immediately social and political
issues are engaged, and a collective assemblage of enunciation makes possible the invention of a people
to come” (Bogue, 2010, p. 171). A minor literature is political, asubjective, collective and revolutionary,
existing “only in relation to a major language and [as] investments of that language for the purpose of
making it minor” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 105). Lecercle (2002, p. 195) writes that as the enunciation
734    E. Honan and D. Bright

of a collective assemblage the aim of a minor literature ‘is not to foster or extract meaning, but to give
rise to intense, and intensive, expression … the point of minor literature is not to make recognisable
sense, but to express intensities, to capture forces, to act”.
The idea of a minor literature has been taken up in various fields, including postcolonial literature
studies, feminist studies and bilingual and multicultural education (Bogue, 1997). However, the focus
of a minor literature is not a dialect or minor linguistic system, but rather in the relations between the
major and the minor, the connections between the political contexts of the production of the minor
and the assemblage machine that is involved in this creation. Importantly, minority and majority are
defined in relation to normativities rather than number:
The notion of minority is very complex, with musical, literary, linguistic, as well as juridical and political, references.
The opposition between minority and majority is not simply quantitative. Majority implies a constant, of expression
or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 105)
Major and minor are measures of variation from the standard or ideal, and need not be more or less
numerous: “Majorities and minorities are mutually determined through their positions in power rela-
tions, and thus through their function rather than their possession of some defining trait, whether sta-
tistical, religious, ethnic, racial or biological” (Bogue, 2005, p. 113). Thus, for example, within the greater
collectivity of researchers, minor may be doctoral students who outnumber faculty, or “international”
students who outnumber “local” students, or the innumerable women being crushed:
especially in places like universities, by the highly repressive operations of metalanguage, the operations, that is,
of the commentary on the commentary, the code, the operation that sees to it that the moment women open
their mouths-women more often than men-they are immediately asked in whose name and from what theoretical
standpoint they are speaking, who is their master and where they are coming from: they have, in short, to salute
… and show their identity papers. (Cixous & Kuhn, 1981, p. 51)
Importantly, a minor literature is not that which is written in a minority language. As Deleuze and
Guattari insist, “minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority
constructs within a major language” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p. 16). Thus, a minor literature is a process
of minorization, a becoming-minor in which writers proceed to:
invent a minor use of the major language within which they express themselves entirely; they minorize this language
… they make the language take flight, they send it racing along a witch’s line, ceaselessly placing it in a state of
disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each of its terms. (Deleuze, 1998, p. 109)
Thus, a minor literature in educational research would not be consenting to adapt your thinking and
writing according to what is expected by the majority, but to use the major language of the thesis to
express yourself in full, and in the process to interrupt the expectations of the major, destabilizing terms
such as literature review, methods, results and so on.
Bogue (1997)suggests that Deleuze’s ideas could perhaps be referred to as “minor writing” rather
than minor literature, and this is helpful for an understanding of the minor within a Foucauldian under-
standing of discursive systems and networks. Literature appears to signify a body of canonical work
that can be ranked and ordered and divided (high/low, classic/modern, quality/popular). Language, at
least in many readings of Deleuze and Guattari’s commentaries on this concept (Lecercle, 2002), seems
to signify the field of structural linguistics, especially because of Deleuze and Guattari’s continued
critique of Chomsky’s work in that area (Deleuze, 1995; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). But if the references
to literature and/or language are replaced with “discourse”, especially if discourse is understood to be
a collective system of representation that is constituted not only by the utterances of the speaker, but
in the manner in which they are spoken, the relations between the speaker and the listener, and the
social, economic and cultural contexts in which those utterances occur, then there is a connection that
can be usefully made here. Deleuze and Guattari’s following explanation of expression brings to mind
Foucault (1972) on discourse:
Expression should be understood not simply as the face and language, or individual languages, but as a semiotic
collective machine that preexists them and constitutes regimes of signs. A formation of power is much more than
a tool; a regime of signs is much more than a language. Rather, they act as determining and selective agents, as
 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education   735

much in the constitution of languages and tools as in their usages and mutual or respective diffusions and com-
munications. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 63)
The “semiotic collective machine” could be understood as the discursive practices that “systematically
form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault, 1972, p. 54) As Foucault tells us:
discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this
more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech. It is this “more” that we must reveal
and describe. (Foucault, 1972, p. 54)
It is this opposition to the purely signifying use of the major language, an insistence that there is more
at work – more than mere designation – that characterizes the minor use of the language to minorize
the language itself.
And the writer? The writer of a thesis is usually, comfortably, positioned as becoming-researcher,
as learner and apprentice. The thesis writer is guided, advised and supervised through their doctoral
experiences, pushed and pulled by their advisors, other academics, fellow students and by the book
after book describing exactly what a thesis is. They learn to read, they learn the major language of
qualitative research methods, they learn what they must see and do and they learn to construct a text
that fits within academic discursive contexts as “a thesis”. In short: they learn what is expected of them.
But minor writing is a process of becoming-minor. In his detailed exposition of Deleuze and Guattari’s
work in and on language philosophies and theories, Lecercle argues that the concept of becoming-mi-
nor “is an asubjective process, it does not claim or comfort identity, but on the contrary blurs fixed
identities in its collective process of variation” (Lecercle, 2002, p. 199). In this sense, writing a thesis in a
minor literature in academia is at odds with the function of the doctoral thesis text, which is one claiming
the subjectivity of scholar, researcher and writer: sanctioning the incorporeal transformation of novice
to expert, producing the “identity papers” (Cixous & Kuhn, 1981, p. 51) required for acceptance into the
majority. And it is precisely this which connects a process of becoming-minor in thesis writing with its
politics: a writing that will interfere with the expectations of academic writing while also providing the
becoming-researcher a space in which to “pass” (Smith, 1994).
It is only through the ongoing deterritorializing of the boundaries of the acceptable that the thesis
text is renewed. “The role of minor language, or dialect, or mode”, writes Lecercle (2002, p. 197), “is
therefore clear: it keeps the major language alive, it turns its potential freezing into a stream, an ongoing
process”. And it is in the process of doing this deterretorializing work that one becomes “writermachine”:
Rather than a means of freedom, therefore, the act of writing must be understood as a means of escape and this
entails entering into a state of becoming. … a writer is a machine made up of these components, these passages,
these materials that enter into this machine. In writing, individuated attributes and identity are dissolved in favour
of new contents and expressions; individual and private experience is changed by new blocs of experience that are
drawn from elsewhere and no longer belong to individuated experience as such. Here, in this description of the
writermachine, we see the possibility of collective enunciation, according to the proposition of a “minor literature”.
(Lambert, 2006, p. 37)
This work requires its own set of tools, including the semiotic tools that move the writing beyond just
using words. It requires a stretching of the boundaries for “unless we push research and/or data (or
theory for that matter) to its exhaustion, then we merely reproduce the original form – the colonized
form if you will” (Mazzei, 2010, p. 515). And it requires interference with the expected practices of
researching – the ways of knowing and writing that comprise qualitative educational research – because
“it is at the level of interference of many practices that many things happen, beings, images, concepts,
every kind of event” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 280).

A tetralinguistic model of discourse

In their account of a “minor literature” Deleuze and Guattari make use of a “tetralinguistic” model of
language, developed by the French linguist Gobard2 who used the sociolinguistic and ethnographic
work of Ferguson and Gumperz (1960). While some could argue that the reference to Gobard’s work is
another illustration of the “obscure” and idiosyncratic “quirkiness” of Deleuze’s approach to language
736    E. Honan and D. Bright

and linguistics (Lecercle, 2002, p. 91), the account of the vernacular, vehicular, referential and mythic
uses of language resounds with sociocultural and sociolinguistic theories. Gumperz’s groundbreaking
work (see, e.g. Gumperz, 1993) on the relationship between language use and social contexts has influ-
enced not only the field of sociolinguistics but also the development of the New Literacy Studies (Street,
2005) and sociocultural approaches to literacy education (Barton, 1994). In particular, if one considers
the relationship between language, social context and discourse, then a tetralinguistic account of the
uses of language can shed light on the politics and power relations embedded within language choice.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, a tetralinguistic model of language looks like this:
vernacular, maternal, or territorial language, used in rural communities or rural in its origins; a vehicular, urban,
governmental, even worldwide language, a language of businesses, commercial exchange, bureaucratic transmis-
sion, and so on, a language of the first sort of deterritorialization; referential language, language of sense and of
culture, entailing a cultural reterritorialization; mythic language, on the horizon of cultures, caught up a spiritual or
religious reterritorialization. The spatiotemporal categories of these languages differ sharply: vernacular language
is here; vehicular language is everywhere; referential language is over there; mythic language is beyond. (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1986, p. 22)
This is not, however, a hierarchical model. The tetralinguistic model lends itself to an understanding
of how different discourses are used in different contexts and social situations (Gumperz, 1993). As
Deleuze and Guattari (1986, p. 23) point out, “what can be said in one language cannot be said in
another, and the totality of what can and can’t be said varies necessarily with each language and with
the connections between these languages”. For example, the way in which language is used to direct,
command, instruct and persuade in bureaucratic and commercial documents is quite different from the
way language is used to perform those same linguistic functions by mothers talking to young children.
Thus, it is the social formation of the boundaries of acceptabilities that ascribes hierarchy to the model.
Our argument is that the vehicular language – the language of bureaucratic transmission – is the
hegemonic language of the doctoral thesis within qualitative educational research studies, even when
the thesis employs post-structural theory or post-qualitative research approaches that destabilize and
deterritorialize understandings of the relations between researcher and researched, methods and
methodology and writer and researcher. The universalizing imperative of scientistic method insists
on the use of the vehicular language – the worldwide language of “everywhere” – for the transmission
and commercial exchange of a scientistic apoliticism. Consider, for example, this introduction to “the
Academic Style” in The Dissertation Journey:
Anyone who wishes to become a good writer should endeavor, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more
showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid. (Fowler and Fowler, The King’s English)
The qualities espoused by Fowler and Fowler in the opening quote represent the heart and soul of good expository
writing. However, two additional qualities define the scholarly, academic writing required for dissertation writing:
precision and logic. Knowing how to express your ideas in logical sequence and in a clear and concise manner is crit-
ical to your success as a scholarly practitioner. The qualities of logic, precision, clarity, directness, and brevity are also
qualities of effective thinking. Zinsser (1994) stated, : “Writing is thinking on paper. … If you can think clearly about
the things you know and care about, you can write – with confidence and enjoyment” (p. vii). (Roberts, 2010, p. 111)
This vehicular language – logical, precise, clear, direct and concise – is replete with “order words” that
implicitly carrying a whole history of “qualitative” educational research within them, each with its own
“little death sentence” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 76). Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 76) assert that
“the elementary unit of language – the statement – is the order-word”, but as the translator notes remind
us, the French mot d’ordre also has a military meaning as “password” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 523).
These passwords are used to create the identity papers to pass through into academia (Spivak, 1996);
they are the shibboleths – words like semi-structured interviews, participant, interviewer, interview
schedule, informed consent, observations, anonymity, confidentiality, transcription, coding catego-
ries – “overcoded” signifiers that produce a “uniformity of enunciation, unification of the substance of
expression, and control over statements in a regime of circularity” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 135)
that are used in the text to permit recognition and entry into this new world.
The writermachine, becoming-researcher, doctoral student working with post-structural theory in
educational research creates a text where new understandings about language, power, identity and
 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education   737

subjectivities are purportedly explored. Yet, at the same time, these explorations and the mappings of
new understandings that contribute to thinking knowledge differently may be limited by their con-
tainment within a major vehicular language that denies its own politics, claiming value in discourses
of lucidity, directness, clarity and precision incommensurable with post-structural and post-qualitative
understandings of what language is and what language can do. What is needed instead is a writing of
the middle, a construction of the multiple, an assemblage of discourses–languages–writing–methods
that provides the spaces for “texts of bliss” to be created:
the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles
the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his [sic] tastes, values, memories,
brings to a crisis his [sic] relation with language. (Barthes, 1975, p. 14)
This thesis assemblage would perhaps engage with all modes of language, including the vehicular, the
vernacular, the referential and the mythic. Consider, for example, the difference in style and language
usage in these two text extracts:
This study will adopt a qualitative multiple case study approach to investigate and map the discourses which pro-
duce NEST subjectivities. Four individual teachers will be chosen as cases and will be observed and interviewed
in the school. Additional interviews will be conducted with students, the school principal and non-native English-
speaking teachers, and documentary artefacts will be collected to provide contextual information about the site
in which these NEST identities are enacted.
I have worried a lot (can you tell?) about what I could legitimately name this methodology. Naming seems such a
final act. An attempt (however futile) to halt the endless play of signifiers. An act of violence, determination, fixity,
and closure. An act that privileges presence and being, instead of absence and becoming. Naming seems to sug-
gest that I do know, then, what should be done, how one might be, and what one should do. It seems to suppress
or forget the doubt and uncertainty which above all else has characterised my thinking about methodology, and
that undermines my attempts at knowing. It seems almost unethical to me.
These texts were written by David Bright, the second author of this paper at different stages in his
doctoral candidature. The first, written for confirmation of the candidature has a formal tone, high
modality, and “gives them what they ask for”, transmitting order words in a direct and precise signifying
account of research methodology. The second text, written midway through the candidature makes
use of the rhetorical devices of questioning, ellipses and repetition to construct more tentative, fluid
“prose”, perhaps making moves into the referential and mythical languages, sensing that language itself
cannot contain the world (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). In these two extracts, returning to concepts
of major and minor literature, we might see the ways:
A major usage of a language limits, organises, controls and regulates linguistic materials in support of a dominant
social order, whereas a minor usage of a language induces disequilibrium in its components, taking advantage
of the potential for diverse and divergent discursive practices already present within the language. (Bogue, 2010,
pp. 170–171)
But rather than the relations between the different forms of language in this tetralinguistic model
being read as separating, with an inbuilt hierarchical and systematic view of the boundaries and layers
between each form, if the ontological framework is one of rhizome, the relations are laid out so that
these languages (or discourses) form a network, an assemblage of discursive practices, the edge of
one language always in encounter with the edge of another in a double becoming that changes both
(Sutton & Martin-Jones, 2008). This moves us away from a logic of replacement (how can we replace the
vehicular with the referential or mythic?) to instead trying to “establish a logic of the AND, overthrow
ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 25).
This might result in a thesis text that acknowledges the limitations of representation, that is neither
vehicular nor non-vehicular, but is always already vehicular and … and … and … .
But it is not only paying attention to the use of particular language forms and stylistic devices that
is required in rethinking the writing of a thesis text but also re-considering what “writing” means.
Semiotic systems that are not focused on the primacy of the word could also be incorporated, or even
"fragmentary writings that practice juxtaposition, collage or montage rather than the propositional
logic and well-formed syntactic structure of conventional prose" (Pearce & MacLure, 2009, p. 256). The
heterogeneity of these semiotic systems, the confusion of a montage, the juxtaposition of words, images
738    E. Honan and D. Bright

and sounds might draw on the referential discourses of art, music, drama and poetry. There are already
examples of this work within post-qualitative research books (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013; Four Arrows
aka D.T. Jacobs, 2008; Sellers, 2013), in journal articles and special issues (Hofsess & Sonenberg, 2013;
Koro-Ljungberg & Mazzei, 2012) and especially in digital spaces such as blogs and websites (http://www.
museumofqualitativedata.info/). Yet it appears that many writermachine, becoming-researcher, doc-
toral students still find it difficult to imagine themselves as a collective assemblage of enunciation and
challenging to engage with the politics of writing, and cautious of what can be seen in these accounts
of alternative uses of languages, instead preferring to “give them what they ask for”.

Stretching the boundaries of the thesis text

Typographical, lexical, or syntactic creations are necessary only when they no longer belong to the form of expres-
sion of a hidden unity, becoming themselves dimensions of the multiplicity under consideration; we only know of
rare successes in this. We ourselves were unable to do it. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 24)
Working within a Deleuzean field includes unsettling and disrupting assumptions about method and
writing, and straining against the boundaries of “acceptable” practices and approaches. For those early
career researchers who are completing doctoral studies this can be exceptionally challenging, as they
struggle to conform to the official expectations of a thesis while at the same time paying attention to
Deleuze’s ideas about the non-linear and unbounded nature of text. The question becomes not “how
does it work?”, but rather “how does it work in a way that will satisfy university requirements?” This
requires an understanding that “evolving genres of representation do not reject academic writing but
strain at the very limits of what writing can mean” (Somerville, 2012, p. 540). In this part of the paper,
we examine three different aspects of writing illustrated by doctoral thesis texts that have strained
against conventional boundaries and practices, engaging in processes of becoming-minor. The first
two examples come from theses constructed with the supervision of Eileen Honan, the first author,
and the third example comes from her own thesis.
First, an example of disrupting the conventional structure of a thesis text is examined. This is fol-
lowed by an illustration of engagement with multiple tetralinguistic languages when re-presenting
data in a thesis text. Finally, we demonstrate the possibilities of working with Deleuzean ideas about
the unbounded nature of words and writing and language when creating a thesis text.
The first example of becoming-minor within a thesis text is one of disrupting the orthodoxy of the
typical scientistic structure. The linear processes reflected in this structure are far removed from an
understanding of research that is rhizomatic, that is becoming-research, that is process not product,
movement not stoppage. Koro-Ljungberg describes this research process thus:
Research processes can be felt in their effects and can be actualized through movement from one sample to another,
through in- and out-foldings of texts and interpretations, methodological parts folding on each other, redoubling
and reductions, and examples of methodological pasts projecting ahead to the future. (Koro-Ljungberg, 2012, p. 813)
If we move beyond the structure of method, if we destabilize and deterritorialize the boundaries
between and across participant, researcher, sound and silence, voice and movement, then we must
also move beyond the boundaries of a textual structure that will not work. One illustration of this
boundary crossing work can be found in Marg Sellers (2009) thesis3 which focused on young children’s
creation of curriculum through play in an early childhood setting. Marg wrote her text as plateaus, and
provided different “reading maps” for the reader/examiner, as shown in Figure 1.
In the “abstract” to her thesis text, Marg wrote:
Rhizome and becoming are two imaginaries that feature frequently in the discussion and in the methodology,
with plateaus comprising the condition and expression of the “thesis” cum assemblage. However, as plateaus work
non-linearly, the conventional notion of a chaptered thesis is rendered sous rature. Hence the thesis-assemblage
becomes a milieu of plateaus that can be read in any order, rather than a conventional linear sequence of chapters
containing specific sections of the research process. Continuing with generating a milieu (while simultaneously
disrupting linearity) both the literature review and rhizoanalysis occur in various plateaus, and the rhizomethod-
ology is played out throughout. (Sellers, 2009, p. vi)
 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education   739

Figure 1. Mapping milieu(s). Sellers (2009, p. vii).

This non-linear mapping of plateaus could not occur using the typical thesis structure promulgated in
the thesis writing books, journal articles, blogs and websites. As Marg writes, rather than adapting her
thinking and writing to the structure, thinking and writing generated a “milieu of plateaus” in which
“literature review”, “methodology” and “analysis” occur throughout while simultaneously disrupting
the vehicular notions of logic and linearity and pushing beyond the boundary of the traditional thesis
structure.
Moving beyond the focus on language and “textual” could also mean using different semiotic sys-
tems, such as voice, image, sound, as well as thinking about language itself differently, “thinking specif-
ically of the language(s) of research: a materially engaged language would … be non-representational,
non-interpretive, a-signifying, a-subjective, paradoxical and embroiled with matter” (MacLure, 2013,
p. 663). Stewart Riddle (2012) used the linguistic mode to write his thesis in which he studied the
relationship between young people’s literacy practices in school and their “musicking” (Small, 1998)
practices outside of school, but stretched the boundaries of the discursive in re-presenting his “data”
as song lyrics, making use of the referential and mythic languages of poetry and lyricism as well as his
vernacular mother tongue of songwriting afforded to him as musician. The song lyrics created formed
narratives of the movements and processes of musicking that the young people he spoke to engaged
with during and before and after the moment of interaction between “researcher and researched”:
I have to have music in everything
My life has a soundtrack
The power of music is astounding
Music helps me keep my sanity
I’ve had people say to me
“Oh, that is silly if you think that band
Can help you through a rough time
Blah, blah”
I sit there and stare at them
Wait for them to finish
And explain the benefits of music
740    E. Honan and D. Bright

God, I hate people

Music is just my passion
I believe that some people are born
To have an enormous amount of passion for a certain thing
And I think my certain thing is the arts and music
It’s, like, music controls me
I get lost in the rhythm
The beat and the lyrics just take over my mind
And I become a part of it
I like those completely
Insane, docile, mindless states of
Pure music-gasming, ecstasy inducing
Euphoric moments of freedom within the realms of music (Riddle, 2012, p. 132)
Stewart abandons the reliance on the major vehicular language of qualitative educational research,
becoming-minor in the collective enunciation of a politics of music and musicking, researcher and
research, music and writing.
But sometimes the linguistic mode, no matter which language is used, is insufficient. Marg also played
with other semiotic resources available to her in order to re-present the “data” that she had “collected”:
To continue generating this data multiplicity, I approached the rhizoanalysis in several ways – through conventional
transcripts, visual notations and by juxtaposing interactive pieces using the literature, transcriptions from the data
and my commentaries. For example: data were juxtaposed with philosophical imaginaries; data from both cameras
were read alongside one another; data of the children playing were used to inform the methodology as well as the
methodology being used to inform the rhizoanalysis; transcriptions were turned into storyboards and some play
episodes were mapped pictorially. (Sellers, 2009, p. vi)
In this way, Marg was able to capture the moveable, to set down on paper, the processing of playing and
performing curriculum that her video camera had recorded, in ways which might be read as eschewing
logic, precision, clarity, directness and concision of academic writing.
Using the linguistic semiotic resources available within the thesis text does not only mean playing
with structure and language, but making new choices, thinking the unsayable:
Merely to say, would be to reify, to simplify, to reduce, to unproblematically name and be done with it. In “neither
knowing what is coming nor being able to see its origins” (Derrida, 1995, p. 57) we have to think across the unknown,
the unsayable, and the unrepresentable; and this is responsibility. (Pearce & MacLure, 2009, p. 259)
In Eileen Honan’s doctoral thesis about the relationships between teachers and syllabus texts, she
attempts to not only blur tetralinguistic boundaries but to pay attention to the linguistic devices and
stylistic tools used. The description of this “rhizomatic writing” is:
Writing a rhizomatic text therefore is to pay particular attention to the linguistic devices and structures used, to
follow lines of flight that allow transgressive blurring of generic boundaries, to write one’s multiple contradictory
selves into the text, and to make visible the embodied experiences and their effects on the writer and the text.
(Honan, 2001)
For example, this account of a “rhizomatic methodology” (Honan, 2007, 2015) provides an illustration
of the attention to metaphor that this stylistic work demands through a disruption of the vehicular
universality of the urban signification for the word “path”:
For most urban dwellers, a path is a concrete structure that takes one from one fixed point to another, with an
identifiable beginning and end. But in Papua New Guinea, for example, paths are created through bush, up and
down mountains, across streams and rivers. The paths may exist for some period of time but are never permanent.
There are connections between different tracks and sometimes the trails diverge because of landslides or flood-
ing, or disappear completely for reasons not visible through Western eyes. The word, path, could also be used to
describe the journey one takes walking on a sandy beach. This “path”, though, is never fixed as the tide and shifting
sands erase footprints almost as they are made. The rhizomatic journey is not the urban trudging along a concrete
pavement but, rather, a trail that may connect to other trails, diverge around blockages or disappear completely.
 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education   741

The trail is never completely re-traceable, as, just like the footprints in the sand, it is erased almost at the same time
it is created. The trail delves underground as gardening metaphors like tubers and root systems are used, or animal
metaphors like networks of interconnecting burrows that are invisible at the surface, apart from the occasional
disruption of earth. (Honan, 2001)
This disruption of the metaphor “path” contributes to an “intensive asignifying use of language” as “the
point of minor literature is not to make recognisable sense, but to express intensities, to capture forces,
to act” (Lecercle, 2002, p. 195). It is only a small illustration of pulling apart language until it vibrates with
new intensity, of interfering with the practices of writing, of becoming-minor. But as Deleuze reminds
us, we write “to bring things to life, to free life from where it’s trapped” (1995, p. 141).

Drawing something new

Lecercle (2002, p. 89) reminds us that ‘far from being laws of nature, linguistic “rules” are merely partial
and temporary maxims, that is, attempts at imposing some sort of order on a language that does not care
for such imposition and whose stuttering constantly subverts them’. The “rules” of writing promulgated
in the proliferation of books, journal articles, websites and blogs around how to write a thesis are also
partial and temporary, and yet very real. The becoming-researcher doctoral student must negotiate
the demands of producing new knowledge within the constraints of expectations about methods and
writing that potentially limits what they can see, and do, and write when they investigate questions of
questions of language, power and subjectivity in educational research.
In this paper we have argued that creation demands opposition to the partial and temporary “rules”
of doctoral thesis writing. We suggest that such opposition might be found in the form of a minor lit-
erature (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, 1987), a writing which minorizes the major language of the doctoral
thesis, interfering with its practices and giving rise to new forms of expression which in turn form the
new practices of which they speak, “an inquiry that might produce different knowledge and produce
knowledge differently” (Lather, 2013, p. 635). We acknowledge that the paper writes into the space of
doctoral writing, without considering the location of this space within an academic writing journey,
and that this long sticky period gives way, makes room for another space, another opportunity to fool
around with writing rules, to give rise to new forms of expression.4

Notes
1. 
We are writing this paper from Australia, where students undertaking a Doctor of Philosophy embark on a 3 ½
to 4-year study that culminates in a thesis document between 80,000 and 90,000 words, sent out for external
examination to 2 or 3 readers, international or domestic, who are judged to be expert in the field.
Gobard’s work cited by Deleuze and Guattari is Gobard, H. (1976). L'aliénation linguistique. Paris, Flammarion.
2. 
Gobard’s work is only available in French and therefore cannot be directly cited in this paper.
3. 
Here we reference the thesis text itself. Sellers has since published a revised version of the Figure 1, and the
quotation in Sellers (2013). Young children becoming curriculum : Deleuze, Te Whāriki and curricular understandings.
New York, NY: Routledge.
4. 
The authors thank reviewers for reminding us of the stickiness of the doctoral writing periods.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Eileen Honan is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at The University of Queensland. Her research interests include
postqualitative research methodologies and working with teachers as critical co-researchers.
David Bright is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. His research interests include teacher identity
and writing differently.
742    E. Honan and D. Bright

ORCID
Eileen Honan   http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2807-5835

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