The paper outlines a theoretical basis and analytic approach for putting schizoanalysis (Deleuze & Guattari, [1972]2009) to work with an ethnographic data set in education research. The purpose is to apply and evaluate schizoanalysis as a tool for empirically based education research. The question asked is: what does schizoanalysis contribute to ethnographic education research, and what analytic potential does schizoanalysis offer?

Schizoanalysis (Deleuze & Guattari [1972]2009) is a mode of critical inquiry in the European continental philosophy tradition with origins in psychoanalysis (notably in its critique toward Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic traditions) as well as in Marxism, analysing relations between power and desire as a core part of critical social theory (Sauvagnargues 2016). Schizoanalysis explores the hyperactivity, contradictions and anxieties ceaselessly created around socialisation and subjectivity formation processes, especially under conditions of capitalist expansion, making it particularly interesting for education research (e.g., Ringrose 2011; Savat & Thompson 2015; Sellar 2015; Thompson & Cook 2015). Through schizoanalysis, education emerges not as a coherent institution, but as a set of machines, devices and technologies forging together humans, nonhumans and materialities in contested spaces of teaching and learning. These machinic dimensions of education organise pedagogical activities while being constantly traversed by shifting and heterogeneous affects and forces of all sorts. An overarching question for a schizoanalysis of education is how the educational institution organizes itself in some particular forms rather than others: “Why this system and this form?” We may also turn this question toward ourselves: “why and how do we assemble and arrange these particular components to construct those particular machines?” (Savat & Thompson 2015: 294, emphases in original). Rather than focusing on meaning-making, pedagogical development, or the “improvement agenda” of education (Moran & Kendall 2009), schizoanalysis deals with machinic processes of education; processes where desiring-production is central. What is of interest is how desire is arranged and assembled in specific social or pedagogical formations (cf. Sharon 2011), and how, for instance, science proliferates from desire (Watson 2008).

Although the interest in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s thought has increased in education research, it is often their later works, particularly A Thousand Plateaus ([1980]2004) which is in focus, rather than the Marxist-influenced schizoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus ([1972]2009). Analytic interest is commonly focused on learning and “becoming” in educational processes, often with attention to the vitalist, life-affirming, and transformative potentials of their philosophy. Schizoanalysis as a tool of critical inquiry in education research is, however, beginning to be developed notably within a European and international community of Deleuze Studies scholars, and this paper aims to contribute to, and strengthen this development.

The paper draws on ethnographic material and semi-structured interviews with students, teachers and school leaders from fieldwork in four Swedish upper secondary schools (two vocational upper secondary programmes, and two theoretically oriented programmes), and one institute of higher education (comprising a total of 102 days in the field). Data collection has been carried out through ethnographic fieldwork within two critical theory-driven research projects exploring the role of education in the animal-industrial complex. The material has subsequently been synthesized and re-analyzed applying the specific tool of schizoanalysis (see Pedersen 2019). The ethnographic fieldnote excerpts are, for the purpose of this paper, selected and used not primarily for their content, but rather for highlighting schizoanalytic points made and exemplifying critical phases of the analytic process when schizoanalysis is put to work through empirical (ethnographic) material. As an arguably “post-qualitative” (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013) approach, schizoanalysis has no general guidelines, but is developed in the intersection between a philosophical work and a specific set of data. The philosophical work engaged in this study is Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus ([1972]2009), and an overarching analytic task is to begin to identify educational desiring-machines in a certain institutional setting, and what they produce. Putting schizoanalytic inquiry to work through materials produced within “conventional” human-centered modes of qualitative research (ethnography and interviews), involves certain ontological and epistemological challenges which will be addressed in the paper.

Schizoanalysis makes it possible to capture the complexities, contradictions, and irrationalities in educational practice through a machinic ontology where production processes are everywhere, and where affective dimensions (desiring-machines) are intimately connected with machineries of political economy. As an impersonal, “machino-centric” (Guattari [1986] 1998) ontology, it destabilizes the common preoccupation with “the subject” in education research (i.e., the teacher, the student, the child, the parent, and relations between these), which opens new modes of understanding social and educational reality through ethnographic data. Although schizoanalysis has no predefined agenda that offers a way out of present societal power arrangements and social injustices, continued schizoanalytic work can identify how emancipatory processes may be catalysed within and beyond formal education (Pedersen 2018).

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