Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p> Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were French intellectuals whose collaboration yielded philosophical concepts that inform transdisciplinary research in many areas, including applied linguistics. While their conceptual creations were not designed expressly for applied linguistics research, they were intended to be mobile, to be taken up wherever they were deemed useful to think through problems arising in social, artistic, and political life. This entry traces their growing influence in literacies‐ and language‐related research following corresponding trends in applied linguistics, specifically, the multilingual turn, the poststructural turn, the transdisciplinary turn, and the materialist and posthuman turn. Deleuze and Guattari posit a relational onto‐epistemology hinging on the potential of difference to disrupt or <jats:italic>deterritorialize</jats:italic> . In doing so, they undermine the representational power of language and reconceptualize it in terms of an intermingling of material content with discursive expression. Taking this different understanding of language as a point of departure, this entry goes on to present concrete examples of how Deleuze‐Guattarian concepts— <jats:italic>assemblage, rhizome, becoming, affect</jats:italic> —have been productively put to work in research in different domains of applied linguistics such as sociolinguistics, translation, language acquisition, English for Academic Purposes, and language teacher education. While acknowledging significant critique from feminist, decolonial, and anti‐racist scholarship regarding Deleuze and Guattari's contribution to social and applied linguistics research, the conclusion is that they will remain useful in order to address the complexity, relationality, and heterogeneity characterizing many current questions in applied linguistics. </jats:p>