Exploring Deleuze's Philosophy of Difference

"By questioning both the object and the subject of teaching, this book challenges us to think in new ways about the processes involved in imparting new knowledge and skills to students. If it refuses to call itself a book in the traditional sense of the word, then it is because it carefully and skillfully sidesteps offering answers and instead, following Deleuze’s great advice, it pursues questions and problems, pushing them to their limits. That limit point, interestingly enough, is revealed as the point where, rather unexpectedly, but entirely convincingly, Deleuze and Derrida meet. The book doesn’t make the mistake of conflating the two, but it does open up a very nice picture of the two shaking hands over the corpse of traditional ways of thinking about language teaching."

"This engaging assemblage of differences inspired by Deleuzian thinking enables readers to experience narratives, autoethnography, ethnography, travel writings, philosophy, history, and literature through various shifting relations. Exploring Deleuze's Philosophy of Difference: Applications for Critical Qualitative Research exemplifies poetic, moving, and subtle suturing of the space(s) between thought and action, encounter of self and other, cultural appropriation and insight. This book offers important methodological insights into the ways the subjects, objects, and processes of inquiry might be reconceptualized within the ontologies of difference. David Bright uses the example of foreign teachers and international schooling in Vietnam to demonstrate the limits of structured and linear ways of thinking about learning and teaching. The complexities of becoming English-speaking teachers in Vietnam highlights many unexpected encounters between teachers and students, researchers and participants, researchers and audiences simultaneously generating multiple non-un-re-presentations of identities and conceptual difference."

Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, Professor, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. A Concept of Difference: Rethinking the Real

2. Researching Differently: Towards a Minor Literature

3. A Critique of Representations: Individuating the Self

4. A Search for Conditions: Self and Other

5. The Dice Throw: Writing and Thinking Differently

About the Author

Index

David Bright

David Bright is a lecturer in education at Monash University. His research focuses on the cultural politics of education, both nationally and internationally, with a specific interest in identity and difference informed by postcolonial and poststructural theory. He has published on international education, educational research, and writing as methodology, as well as other subjects.