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Abstract
This dissertation aims to put applied linguists and literacy educators in conversation with one another by drawing on the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as well as five years of participatory action research with content area teachers and youth at a rural middle school in the southeastern United States. It is experimental in that it disrupts notions of fieldwork and research as usual. It is fabulative in that it does not seek to interpret a particular environment or the practices in it. Rather, it aims to open up possible worlds for a field that does not yet exist because it is divided. The first major chapter, as such, uses Deleuze and Guattaris (1980/1987) concept of the refrain to show how the division between language and literacy education has manifested itself in the sub-field of disciplinary literacy. It then offers a new empiricist reading of M. A. K. Hallidays (1985) systemic functional linguistics, which has been a subject of contention and promise in both fields. By folding Hallidays thought into and out of Deleuze and Guattaris, its purpose is to illustrate the rhizosemiotic function of language. Last, drawing on the notion of minoritarian politics (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975/1986), this dissertation illustrates how an arts-based after-school program enabled a minor inquiry (Mazzei, 2017) to emerge within the major inquiry of youth participatory action research. More specifically, it shows how an entanglement of discursive and material forces allowed youth to destabilize language, connect to a political immediacy, and speak on behalf of a collective. Overall implications include the need to attend to both matter and meaning in research and teaching, and to open oneself up to encounters that shift what counts as language and literacy.