The event of bringing forth novel and fitting differences within a situated assemblage, where “novel” marks an emergent variation that did not previously exist in that configuration and “fitting” names its consequential uptake, or how it reconfigures capacities, relations, and possibilities for action.
In a postqualitative, posthumanist, and new materialist register, creativity is not a property lodged inside an individual mind but a process that unfolds across relations among bodies, materials, discourses, and technologies. Following Deleuze & Guattari, creativity can be understood as immanent invention—new “lines of flight” that reroute habits and reorganize what a situation can do—while transduction (after Simondon) names how novelties propagate through a milieu, converting constraints into affordances and stabilizing invention into practice. For Barad, creativity is an effect of intra-action: phenomena do not pre-exist their relations; rather, relations enact the very agencies and boundaries from which differences-that-matter emerge.
Bennett’s “vibrant matter” complements this by foregrounding nonhuman participation in composition, while Massumi and Ahmed draw attention to affect—the felt intensities and orientations that prime what becomes possible—so that creativity can be sensed as a shift in collective capacities, not merely as a new idea. With Haraway, creativity is always situated and accountable: it is a practice of composing with “companions” (human and nonhuman), telling stories that reworld without universalizing, and crafting tools that matter for justice in specific places.
Creativity reframes inquiry as composing-with rather than extracting-from. Method becomes an apparatus for enabling generative differences—for example, setting up encounters among texts, tools, and bodies that can yield unforeseen patterns—while analysis attends to how novelties take hold, sediment, and transform accountability. Instead of coding for themes inside participants, a postqualitative approach traces how creative events arise through intra-actions among prompts, interfaces, policies, histories, and affects; how these events alter the field of possible actions; and how they are ethically evaluated in their situated effects. Creativity thus functions as a methodological sensitivity to emergence, attunement, and the performativity of research practices themselves.
In AI‑entangled writing instruction, creativity becomes visible when humans and models co-compose problem framings, rework genres, or invent feedback practices that expand what writing can do in a particular classroom. This includes moments where prompts, datasets, interface affordances, and institutional discourses catalyze recombinations, reframings, or translations across modalities that feel consequential to participants and shift what counts as viable composing. Creativity here is distinguished from originality understood as ownership; what matters is situated emergence and fit—the way a novel move reconfigures relations among students, instructors, tools, and artifacts to increase the assemblage’s capacity to think, feel, and act differently. This orientation clarifies evaluative practices: attention turns to the conditions that enable generative differences, the ways those differences travel into rubrics, assignments, and revision routines, and how they redistribute authorship, accountability, and care across the pedagogical assemblage.