A reflective-writing practice composed as a diffractive apparatus: writing with and through heterogeneous materials to trace differences-that-matter, attune to interference patterns, and make accountable the agential cuts that shape what becomes sensible in inquiry.
Diffractive journaling adapts diffractive methodology to the ongoing practice of research journaling. Rather than treating a journal as a private record of impressions, it composes the journal as an apparatus that brings texts, events, sensations, artifacts, and concepts into contact, reading them through one another to notice interference patterns. Following Haraway’s invitation to think with diffraction as an “optics of difference” and Barad’s agential realism, the journal is not a neutral container but an active site where matter and meaning are configured. The writing folds together classroom episodes, institutional policies, interface screenshots, fragments of student work, theoretical passages, and embodied sensations, so that their encounter can generate differences that matter and render exclusions, resonances, and new possibilities perceptible.
Practically, a diffractive journal privileges slowness and specificity—staying with concrete details, sequencing encounters, and tracing how a shift in one strand (a revised rubric, a platform update, a media narrative) alters the pattern elsewhere. It welcomes multimodal traces (images, snippets of code-like prompts to an LLM, marginalia) and treats them as co-actors. This is not a diary of feelings in isolation, nor a log of discrete facts; it is a situated, material-discursive practice that world-makes through the cuts it performs and the relations it amplifies. In this sense, diffractive journaling is both method and ethic: it enacts accountability to how inquiry participates in the becoming of its objects.
In a postqualitative register, diffractive journaling affirms that inquiry is more-than-representational. It recasts the research journal from a human-centered, retrospective reflection tool into a live site of material-discursive composition, where the researcher’s body, tools, documents, and environments intra-act. By foregrounding apparatus design (what gets included, how entries are arranged, which traces are invited), it aligns with posthumanist commitments to distributed agency and with new materialist attention to how materials co-produce thought. It also offers a concrete technique for “thinking-with” data and theory as they co-generate problems and possibilities, rather than coding and sorting toward pre-figured categories.
Diffractive journaling is well-suited to AI-entangled writing instruction because it can stage encounters among classroom practice, platform affordances, and institutional discourse. A journal entry might juxtapose an instructor’s embodied response to a student’s LLM-assisted draft with the interface’s suggestion history and a current policy memo, tracing how authorship becomes legible in that moment. It can hold side-by-side a prompt’s phrasing, the model’s temperature settings, a student’s revision trail, and feedback annotations, to surface how creativity and accountability are enacted. By collecting screenshots, prompt snippets, and time-stamped reflections, the practice makes palpable the lived and affective textures of teaching with AI, while revealing how the pedagogical assemblage—rubrics, prompts, platforms, histories—reconfigures what counts as learning and originality in specific contexts.