The paper describes an inquiry into and a tentative re-working of familiar notions of creativity that are traditionally expressed in terms of it being the possession or characteristic of a product, a process and/or a person. The inquiry is further designed, therefore, to enable a problematisation of these as specific constructions of ‘creativity’ that situate it temporally and spatially as a category of difference. The context for this is an ongoing inquiry into professional practices within a contemporary HE institutional setting in the UK.

In using post-human strategies of theorising the paper is designed to offer a spatially informed and speculative cartography of creativity/creative practice as ‘becoming’, (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988) that, in turn, can be used to suggest the need for inquiry into and the promotion of always diffracting and differentiating possibilities for professional subjectivities, pedagogical practices and developmental strategies.

In taking a lead from Deleuze and Guattari this paper argues that ‘concepts are not necessarily forms, discoveries or products’ (1994: 5) rather that they are the result of a philosophical practice which involves creating concepts that are always new. By articulating the creation of concepts as events, this paper will argue for a form of research informed pedagogic practice that is alert to and engages with the complexity of what Barad (2007) refers to as the ‘entanglements’ and ‘intra-actions’ that exist and operate within the constant play between the material and discursive dimensions of inevitably post human exchange. Further, by attempting to displace the employment of the traditional and unitary logic of critical reason with what Deleuze refers to as a ‘logic of sense’ (Deleuze, 2004) the paper is also designed to offer a processual and a plural sensualism that is attendant to and creative with the distributing and differentiating tendencies of space as multiplicity. In this respect the paper will argue for a sensing of (pedagogic) space in terms of its distributed, unbounded, fluid and heterotopic nature and base its rhetorical stance upon the view that creativity is relational to and with this space and therefore of a similarly fluid and transmutational form.

The research is designed, through the use of narrative based inquiry methods, to encourage participants to engage in an examination of the creative practices which they might attempt to promote within their own approach to pedagogy. In objective terms this general research question will be activated through the participant’s consideration of and views on the nature of what they perceive to be their own creative approaches to practice, the theoretical models that they might use to inform these and the possible policy based initiatives and approaches that might influence them. Such an approach is also designed to inquire into the view that a reliance upon rigid specifications and classifications of ‘creativity’ and of ‘creative practice’, resists reflexivity and in so doing is potentially responsible for the perpetuation of, what Schon (1983, 1987) and others have referred to as, a crisis of confidence in professional practice in education today.

Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, London: Duke University Press. Gale, K. (2013, forthcoming) Action research and the assemblage: engaging Deleuzian pedagogy and inquiry beyond the constraints of the individual and the group in education settings. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Deleuze, G. (2004) The logic of sense, Translated by Mark Lester, London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988) A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, Translated by Brian Massumi, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994) What is philosophy? Translated by Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, London: Verso. St. Pierre, E. (1997) Methodology in the Fold and the Irruption of Transgressive Data International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol.10. No.2. 175 – 189. Schon, D. (1983) The reflective practitioner, San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Schon, D. (1983) Educating the reflective practitioner, San Francisco: Jossey Bass.