Reimagining applied linguistics through Deleuzo–Guattarian concepts: a conceptual review

Applied linguistics has increasingly engaged with posthuman perspectives that challenge human-centered and representational understandings of language and learning. Among the diverse strands informing this turn, Deleuze and Guattari have been particularly influential, offering concepts such as assemblage, rhizome, becoming, affect, stuttering, minor literature, and smooth/striated space thought through an ontology of immanence. As these engagements continue to unfold, this conceptual review maps how Deleuzo–Guattarian concepts function across applied linguistics scholarship and how they open spaces for reconceptualizing language and learning. Across their diverse mobilizations, these concepts unsettle bounded and representational understandings, reimagining language and learning as relational events continually varying on a plane of immanence. Building on this cartography, I conceptualize the haecceitic encounter as an approach to inquiry on which language, learning, and teaching cease to be subjects or objects and instead become events, through which other problems and new concepts may emerge.