Patterns, capacities, and forms of order that arise from relational processes without being predetermined by any single element, where novelty becomes thinkable as a property of the whole-in-motion rather than a sum of parts.
Emergence names the coming-to-presence of patterns and capacities through relational configurations whose properties cannot be located in any single component. In posthumanist and new materialist vocabularies, it signals an ontology of immanence in which causality is enacted across space–time configurations, and novelty is an achievement of an assemblage as it composes and recomposes capacities at thresholds of qualitative change. This sits alongside Barad’s account of intra-action, where relata do not pre-exist their relating but are iteratively articulated through apparatuses that enact agential cuts; in this register, what emerges is not merely a new pattern among pre-given parts but a phenomenon in which the very boundaries of “parts,” “properties,” and “causes” are produced. The emphasis on incipience and intensity foregrounded by Massumi situates emergence in the interval before capture, while Bennett’s vital materialism underscores the distributed liveliness through which matter affects and is affected. Taken together, emergence is less an outcome than an ongoing dynamic of becoming that redraws what there is to count and how it comes to matter.
Within agential realism, Barad recasts emergence as the iterative reconfiguring of phenomena through specific apparatuses; what appears as emergent is inseparable from the agential cuts that make it intelligible. Phenomena do not pre-exist measurement and then exhibit emergent behavior; rather, apparatuses and practices co-constitute what becomes. This sits in productive tension with Haraway’s sympoiesis—worldingwith & apart—where entities and knowledge practices co-generate environments, relations, and capacities. In both, emergence is inseparable from ethics: configurations that make some patterns possible also exclude others, and these exclusions matter. In educational research, this reframes explanation from linear cause-effect toward tracing how pedagogy, media, bodies, spaces, and technologies collectively precipitate differences that matter over time. The emphasis shifts from predicting outcomes to cultivating conditions, noticing thresholds, and attending to the performativity of research practices themselves.
Emergence aligns tightly with postqualitative inquiry’s move from representation to composition. It offers a way to design studies that treat “data” as lively events rather than inert evidence, and “analysis” as attunement to how concepts, materials, and practices co-assemble. Methodologically, it legitimates iterative, experimental designs in which the research apparatus evolves with the phenomenon, and where novelty is traced through moments of intensification, breakdown, or alignment. Ethically, it foregrounds accountability to the cuts and conditions that allow certain emergences to stabilize while foreclosing others, thus tying inquiry to questions of who and what gets to become within a pedagogical ecology. Conceptually, emergence helps hold together affect, materiality, discourse, and temporality without resorting to a single master cause, while remaining precise about situated configurations that amplify or dampen capacities.
Emergence clarifies how AI-entangled writing classrooms generate new capacities and practices that cannot be traced to any single actor—neither instructor intent, nor model affordances, nor student habit, nor policy dictates. It supports analyses that follow how assignment prompts, interface affordances, model responses, feedback genres, peer exchanges, and institutional narratives collectively precipitate genres of composing that stabilize for a time and then shift. Emergence gives language to instructors’ lived sense that classroom atmospheres change as platform updates roll out, as collective habits form around prompt engineering, or as assessment ecologies respecify what counts as learning. It becomes possible to track thresholds: when collaborative prompting starts to feel like co-authorship; when version histories and comment threads accumulate into a distributed memory that reorients revision; when anxieties about originality morph into curiosity-driven tinkering. With an emergent lens, authorship appears as a pattern enacted across apparatuses; creativity appears as the activation of new capacities in the assemblage; pedagogy appears as cultivation of conditions where desirable forms of novelty can take hold and become accountable.