Ongoing, relational transformation that composes new capacities and relations in a field of forces, where entities do not pre-exist their relations but take shape through them.
In postqualitative, posthumanist, and new materialist thought, becoming names the continuous production of difference through immanent relations, rather than a transition between fixed states. Drawing across Deleuze and Guattari, becoming is more than imitation or evolution toward a model: it is an intensive, minoritarian process that alters what bodies and collectives can do, often along “molecular” lines of change. It unfolds across multiplicities and affects, as capacities are composed in encounter, generating becomings-animal, -woman, -molecular, -imperceptible, and more—each a concrete reconfiguration of relations and potentials in a given assemblage. In this register, time is not a sequence of already-formed identities but an event of difference that actualizes the virtual through novel compositions of force and matter.
New materialist and feminist posthumanist work further extends becoming as a worldly, more-than-human process. Haraway’s “becoming-with” foregrounds co-composition across species and technologies; Braidotti’s posthuman subject is a nomadic assemblage in process; Barad’s agential realism treats becoming as the intra-activity of spacetime-mattering, where phenomena, bodies, and apparatuses co-emerge through agential cuts. Becoming thus marks an onto-epistemological commitment: reality is processual; knowing participates in the world’s ongoing differentiation; ethics attends to what relations are being made possible or foreclosed in every methodological and pedagogical choice.
Treating inquiry as becoming reorients method from representation to composition. Research designs are understood as apparatuses that participate in worldly becomings, so decisions about concepts, materials, and analyses are agential cuts that condition which relations and capacities can emerge. Analysis attunes to intensities, transitions, and new capacities—how affects circulate, how assemblages shift, and how matter-discourse co-constitutes phenomena. Rather than coding toward stable essences, postqualitative inquiry traces trajectories, maps emergent relations, experiments with concepts as methods, and stays accountable to the differential becomings it sponsors.
Becoming reframes writing pedagogy as an evolving assemblage in which instructors, students, interfaces, prompts, datasets, institutional policies, and assessment practices co-compose new capacities for reading, writing, and judging. It clarifies how affective climates in AI-entangled classrooms are not internal states but relational becomings shaped by media discourse, platform frictions, and histories of writing instruction. It offers conceptual traction for analyzing shifts in authorship and creativity as emergent capacities distributed across humans and tools, where composing is a relay of affects, gestures, and material constraints that alter who or what can write, revise, or respond. It also helps examine how tangible artifacts—revision histories, prompt chains, feedback traces—participate in the classroom’s becoming, rendering certain practices legible while making others imperceptible, and thereby orienting what learning can become in situ.