Myers Education Press Exploring Deleuze's Philosophy of Difference: Applications for Critical Qualitative Research (Explorations in Qualitative Inquiry)

The concept of difference occupies a central place in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. In this work, David Bright explores how Deleuze’s difference can be put to work in critical qualitative research. The book explores research and writing as a creative process of dynamically pursuing problems. Following Deleuze’s advice not to think of problems in terms of solutions, the book offers important methodological insights into the ways the subjects, objects, and processes of research might be conceived and represented in writing, exploring the problem of thinking and writing about difference in complex ways without reducing thought to static representations of identity. Bright uses the example of foreign teachers and international schooling in Vietnam to show us how Deleuze’s difference can be used in critical qualitative research, demonstrating the limits of traditional ways of thinking about difference in learning and teaching. Exploring Deleuze's Philosophy of Difference is a book that will interest all those with an interest in the application of Deleuze’s philosophy to critical qualitative research. Review By questioning both the object and the subject of teaching, this book challengesus 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.--Professor Ian Buchanan, Cultural Studies, Indigenous Studies, Science & Technology Studies and Environmental Humanities (Discipline leader), University of Wollongong, AustraliaThis 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 ofinquiry 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 About the Author 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.