A practice of world-making in which bodies, texts, tools, and concepts come together to produce effects; composition is the ongoing arranging of relations that materialize meaning, authorship, and pedagogy.
In a postqualitative, posthumanist, and new materialist register, composition goes beyond the usual definition as a human-centered act of arranging words to denote a situated orchestration of relations across humans, technologies, materials, and concepts. Following Haraway, composition is a mode of “staying with the trouble,” where writing and worlding are entwined as situated, partial, accountable practices that assemble worlds and responsibilities together. Composition names this assembling: prompts and platforms, gestures and histories, keyboards and classrooms, policies and affects combine to make meaning perceptible and actionable. With Barad, composition is material-discursive: it involves apparatuses that make agential cuts, which are the specific ways boundaries are enacted so that something becomes “this” and not “that.” Those cuts are not merely analytic; they do ethical work because they shape what can be seen, said, graded, or credited.
From a Deleuzian perspective (with Deleuze & Guattari), composition is the art of composing an assemblage: connecting heterogeneous elements so that new capacities to act emerge. In affect theory (Massumi, Ahmed), composition is felt as intensities and orientations that tune attention and possibility; it is the way an assignment, an interface, a glance, and a deadline combine to produce momentum, hesitation, or curiosity. In vital materialism (Bennett), composition recognizes the lively participation of things in rhetorical action: prompts nudge, datasets lure, interfaces resist, rubrics channel, and model outputs perturb the flow of sense-making. In postqualitative inquiry, composition is how a study is made: not designed and then executed, but iteratively composed through encounters with materials, concepts, and participants in ways that change the inquiry as it proceeds.
Treating composition as world-making reframes research practice itself as compositional. Designs, methods, and analyses are apparatuses beyond neutral pipelines that bring phenomena into view. A postqualitative study composes phenomena by curating encounters among fieldnotes, transcripts, policy documents, platform logs, and theory, noticing how each relation alters the others. Authorship and data are understood as emergent properties of these relations, not as pre-existing entities. Composition thus foregrounds ethical accountability: which relations are being composed, which are excluded, and how those choices redistribute agency and value. It emphasizes method as iterative making, where composing the inquiry is inseparable from composing the concepts that make the inquiry intelligible.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, composition names the concrete ways instructors, students, and large language models intra-act to produce texts, feedback, and learning. Composition helps analyze how prompts, model settings, and interface affordances co-author drafts; how revision histories, annotation tools, and rubrics compose assessment; and how feelings of strain, relief, confusion, or confidence arise from these material-discursive arrangements. It clarifies authorship as an effect of how tools, prompts, and pedagogical values are composed in situ. It also supports practical redesign: by re-composing the apparatus—altering prompts, sequencing tasks, foregrounding process traces, inviting reflective diffractive readings—instructors can shift how creativity, originality, and accountability become legible. Composition thus becomes both an analytic for studying classrooms and a lever for reconfiguring them.