This special issue of Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodologies: Writing Organizations: Management, Leadership and Appraisal presents to readers seven articles with particular focus on ‘writing’ as a methodological tool. As guest editors, what encounters were we opening to/up when we invited contributions on writing as a methodological tool and writing about being/becoming in assemblages of leadership, management and appraisal? We hoped for a shift, an unsettling of what was thought of as ‘writing’. Semetsky and Stables draw on the concept of edusemiotics to challenge the traditional notion of writing; "While more often than not signs are taken as solely linguistic and in compliance with analytic philosophy of language, edusemiotics includes images, pictures and, indeed, anything that potentially signifies ..." (2014, p. 1)1. We called contributors to consider ‘writing’ as various edusemiotic, nomadic, embodied and embedded, artistic and scholarly gestures, experimentations, playful interventions, exchanges, encounters, ruminations, rhizomatic entanglements and practical philosophical discussions.