This paper  outlines the process of my PhD journey entangled with the participants' journeys of becoming language educators in the context of British HE. Despite the research is set in the United Kingdom, its outcomes and processes can be easily applied to other European and non-European contexts since the discussion focuses on the rhizomatic concept of being and becoming both a language educator and a scholar in Education. The paper is centred around the notion of be-coming, considered as a non-linear and rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) process supported by the use nomadic cartographies (Braidotti, 2011, 2013) as a methodological tool.

The paper explores the relationship between researcher and participants within a Posthuman and New Materialist onto-epistemological framework aiming at deconstructing and questioning traditional research assumptions. It questions what it means to be a "mature" researcher within the field of Teacher Education entangled with participants as co-researchers and as co-creators of the research process. It also questions the notion of reflexivity in intra-action with the posthuman notion of diffraction as a more appropriate tool to question one's own position within the academic discourse and within the relationship between theory and practice in Higher Education.

Drawing from my personal journey of becoming a researcher and from the participants personal and professional narratives of being and becoming language educators, the paper is also questioning the notion of data gearing towards an appreciation of "deep and warm" data and of personal small narratives as valid objects of investigation. The paper will discuss the cartographies produced by ten co-researchers answering the initial research question "What does it mean for you to be a language educator". The cartographies will be presented in intra-action, in discussion one with the other and entangled with the researcher's own personal auto-ethnographic narrative and cartography. The final discussion will centre around the notion of "which story is which?" and "whose narrative is it?" within the research process, undermining the notion of objectivity and of voice within education research (Jackson & Mazzei, 2009).

This paper is based on an onto-epistemological Posthuman framework that questions the dichotomy between theory and methodology, as well as between theory and practice. Therefore, the cartographies (Braidotti, 2011) that are used as the main methodological tool, are at the same time part of the theoretical background that underpins this research, being at the same time process and product. Drawing from Deleuze & Guattari ‘s (1987) and from Braidotti’s (2011) key concepts of assemblage, becoming and nomadic identity, the study questions the linearity of traditional epistemological categories in favour of rhizomatic connections, oppositions and affective entanglements to explore the complexity, fluidity and non-linearity of becoming language professionals. The paper also makes references to auto-ethnography (Adams, Holmes, Ellis, 2015) as a research methodology and to the concept and process of "Writing as a Method of Inquiry" (Richardson & St.Pierre,2005) where traditional academic writing is questioned and is considered as a creative process by which data can be generated.

The findings of this study give evidence that language teachers’ narratives, despite being marginal within the main academic discourse, can be regarded as powerful voices of negotiation and re-negotiation of one own’s professional identity through migration, displacement and de-territorialization into new physical and symbolic territories (Braidotti, 2011). These auto/biographical stories indicate that language teaching is more than a profession; it is an emotional, embodied, social and political act by which personal and professional identities are re-positioned within new physical and symbolic domains. The multidimensionality of the self seems to find expression within the fluidity, the cacophony of voices and the non-linearity of these diasporic stories of migration, that allowed the participants, including the researcher, to be other and same. Language teaching seems also to become a sacred place where beauty can survive and where resistance to mainstream academic discourse can be performed. The study hopes to inspire language teachers, not only those who have been active participants in this research journey, to embark into new professional trajectories and also aims at underpinning a different conceptual and practical attitude to language teacher training and professional development that would position identity at the core of its framework. The paper also aims at questioning traditional research methodologies in favour for more creative ones that would allow the space for marginal and "small stories" to emerge within academic discourse.

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