Co-composition of relations, capacities, and worlds through ongoing, situated companionship among humans, nonhumans, and technologies, where beings and practices take shape together rather than in isolation.
“Becoming-with” names a relational, world-building practice developed in multispecies, feminist, and posthumanist work associated with Haraway. It foregrounds companionship as a material-semiotic practice: beings meet, learn to attend, and become response-able in the process of living and making-with others. In this register, life is sympoietic—collectively produced rather than self-made—so the unit of analysis is the web of relations that composes a phenomenon, not an individual entity. This is a deeply ethical orientation: making kin, staying with trouble, and cultivating attentiveness and care are practices that shape what becomes possible in shared worlds. Rather than treating animals, ecologies, or technologies as background or as tools, becoming-with insists that knowledge, value, and agency are distributed and continually composed in companionship. “We become—with each other or not at all,” as Haraway memorably puts it in Staying with the Trouble, where sympoiesis is the name for these co-laboring processes of worlding across species, ecologies, and devices.
As an onto-epistemological commitment, becoming-with orients postqualitative inquiry toward composing relations rather than extracting attributes. Inquiry becomes a practice of attunement and response-ability: designing apparatuses that allow entities to meet in ways that make new sensibilities and capacities possible, and remaining accountable for those meetings’ consequences. This aligns with new materialist attention to material-discursive performativity and with posthumanist critiques of human exceptionalism, expanding “participants” to include animals, artifacts, infrastructures, and media. Multispecies and more-than-human glossaries emphasize becoming-with as an ethics of shared worlding: paying attention, modifying one another, crafting situated possibilities for flourishing across difference and dependency (see entries and discussions of multispecies ethics and kin-making in the attached glossaries). In practice, this means tracing how phenomena co-emerge through companionship, and designing research encounters that allow those co-emergences to be sensed, recorded, and reflected upon without defaulting to human-centered representational habits.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, becoming-with clarifies how instructors, students, language models, prompts, datasets, interfaces, institutional policies, and historical narratives learn to live and work together. This reframes authorship and creativity as emergent capacities of companionship rather than attributes of isolated individuals: composing proceeds as a relay of attention, prompting, revision, and feedback through human–machine–material encounters that co-compose style, judgment, and accountability. Attending to lived, affective experience, becoming-with makes legible how classroom climates take shape through shared practices and frictions—policy updates, media anxieties, new interface affordances—and how those companionships can be cultivated toward more generative learning relations. It also illuminates the pedagogical assemblage: prompts, rubrics, version histories, comment tools, and platform constraints act as companions that train habits of noticing, at times narrowing and at times expanding what writing can become. A becoming-with orientation asks: what kinds of kinship and care are being enacted among instructors, students, and models, and how do those relations reconfigure responsibility, evaluation, and the very feel of composing in the classroom?