Showing papers on "Agency (philosophy) published in 2018"

Building adaptive capacity to climate change in tropical coastal communities

Abstract: To minimize the impacts of climate change on human wellbeing, governments, development agencies, and civil society organizations have made substantial investments in improving people's capacity to adapt to change Yet to date, these investments have tended to focus on a very narrow understanding of adaptive capacity Here, we propose an approach to build adaptive capacity across five domains: the assets that people can draw upon in times of need; the flexibility to change strategies; the ability to organize and act collectively; learning to recognize and respond to change; and the agency to determine whether to change or not

Conversation and Responsibility

Abstract: Preface Introduction: Moral Responsibility, Conversation & Meaning Chapter 1: Responsibility: A Conceptual Map 1. Kinds of Responsibility 2. Morally Responsible Agency 3. Moral Responsibility for Conduct 4. Holding Morally Responsible 5. Moral Responsibility, Entailment, and the Concept of Moral Responsibility Chapter 2: Reorienting Strawson's Theory of Moral Responsibility 1. Variations on Strawson's Theory 2. Embracing and Developing Wallace's Principle (N) 3. A Normative Interpretation versus an Extreme Metaphysical Interpretation 4. Two Distinctions 5. Resisting a Strawsonian Theme: The Explanatory Role of Holding Responsible 6. A Modest Metaphysical Interpretation Chapter 3: Moral Responsibility & Quality of Will 1. A Strawsonian Quality of Will Thesis 2. The Morally Reactive Attitudes and their Attendant Practices 3. Pleas: Reasons to Modify the Reactive Attitudes 3.1 Excuses and Justifications 3.2 Exemptions Chapter 4: Conversation & Responsibility 1. The Intimate Link of

Toward a Psychology of Human Agency: Pathways and Reflections:

Abstract: Social cognitive theory is founded on an agentic perspective. This article reviews the core features of human agency and the individual, proxy, and collective forms in which it is exercised. Agency operates through a triadic codetermination process of causation. Knowledge from this line of theorizing is widely applied to effect individual and social change, including worldwide applications that address some of the most urgent global problems.

The Senses of Agency and Ownership: A Review.

Abstract: Usually, we do not question that we possess a body and act upon the world. This pre-reflective awareness of being a bodily and agentive self can, however, be disrupted by different clinical conditions. Whereas sense of ownership (SoO) describes the feeling of mineness towards one’s own body parts, feelings or thoughts, sense of agency (SoA) refers to the experience of initiating and controlling an action. Although SoA and SoO naturally coincide, both experiences can also be made in isolation. By using many different experimental paradigms, both experiences have been extensively studied over the last years. This review introduces both concepts, with a special focus also onto their interplay. First, current experimental paradigms, results and neurocognitive theories about both concepts will be presented and then their clinical and therapeutic relevance is discussed.

Tales of the unexpected: Integrating career shocks in the contemporary careers literature

Abstract: Orientation: This article addresses the interplay between individual agency and contextual factors in contemporary career development processes. In light of the prominence of the former in the contemporary scholarly debate, we present a case for a more comprehensive approach by heeding the latter as well. Research purpose: The main aim of this article was to provide a definition and conceptualisation of career shocks, as well as an agenda for future research on this topic. Motivation for the study: Most of the contemporary careers literature has overemphasised the role of individual agency in career development. While certainly important, we argue that we also need to address the role of context – in this case, career shocks – in order to gain a fuller appreciation of career development processes. Main conclusions and implications: We provide a definition of career shocks based on the existing literature related to chance events and turnover. In addition, we provide an overview of attributes of career shocks, potentially valuable theoretical perspectives and key issues for future research. Contribution: This article brings together several existing streams of literature related to career shocks and provides an integrative definition and conceptualisation. We hope that this will ignite future research on an important but often overlooked topic.

A perspective on radical transformations to sustainability: resistances, movements and alternatives

Abstract: A transformation to sustainability calls for radical and systemic societal shifts. Yet what this entails in practice and who the agents of this radical transformation are require further elaboration. This article recenters the role of environmental justice movements in transformations, arguing that the systemic, multi-dimensional and intersectional approach inherent in EJ activism is uniquely placed to contribute to the realization of equitable sustainable futures. Based on a perspective of conflict as productive, and a “conflict transformation” approach that can address the root issues of ecological conflicts and promote the emergence of alternatives, we lay out a conceptual framework for understanding transformations through a power analysis that aims to confront and subvert hegemonic power relations; that is, multi-dimensional and intersectional; balancing ecological concerns with social, economic, cultural and democratic spheres; and is multi-scalar, and mindful of impacts across place and space. Such a framework can help analyze and recognize the contribution of grassroots EJ movements to societal transformations to sustainability and support and aid radical transformation processes. While transitions literature tends to focus on artifacts and technologies, we suggest that a resistance-centred perspective focuses on the creation of new subjectivities, power relations, values and institutions. This recenters the agency of those who are engaged in the creation and recuperation of ecological and new ways of being in the world in the needed transformation.

The end of media logics? On algorithms and agency:

Abstract: We argue that algorithms are an outcome rather than a replacement of media logics, and ultimately, we advance this argument by connecting human agency to media logics. This theoretical contribution...

Situating local biologies: Anthropological perspectives on environment/human entanglements

Abstract: In this paper, we posit the notion of ‘situated biologies’ as a conceptual contribution to the often-polarised debate over the material human body as being either local or universal. To argue our case, we briefly recapitulate the medical anthropological concept of ‘local biologies’ before highlighting current molecular biological research on epigenetics and its implications. We discuss how different forms of ‘local’ arise in environment/human entanglements and how material agency becomes situated and contingent through various knowledge practices. We conclude by developing the overarching concept of ‘situated biologies’ to further a collaborative ethnographic agenda that explores the multiple effects of particularising or universalising material agency in research on environment/human entanglements.

A discursive review of the textual use of 'trapped' in environmental migration studies: The conceptual birth and troubled teenage years of trapped populations.

Abstract: First mooted in 2011, the concept of Trapped Populations referring to people unable to move from environmentally high-risk areas broadened the study of human responses to environmental change. While a seemingly straightforward concept, the underlying discourses around the reasons for being ‘trapped’, and the language describing the concept have profound influences on the way in which policy and practice approaches the needs of populations at risk from environmental stresses and shocks. In this article, we apply a Critical Discourse Analysis to the academic literature on the subject to reveal some of the assumptions implicit within discussing ‘trapped’ populations. The analysis reveals a dominant school of thought that assisted migration, relocation, and resettlement in the face of climate change are potentially effective adaptation strategies along a gradient of migrant agency and governance.

Classical humanitarianism and resilience humanitarianism: making sense of two brands of humanitarian action

Abstract: Humanitarian aid has long been dominated by a classical, Dunantist paradigm that was based on the ethics of the humanitarian principles and centred on international humanitarian United Nations agencies and non-governmental organizations. While in previous decades alternative paradigms and humanitarianisms evolved, this classical paradigm remained the central narrative of humanitarianism. In recent years, however, this paradigm has been paralleled by a resilience paradigm that is focused on local people and institutions as the first responders to crises. Whereas classical humanitarianism is rooted in the notion of exceptionalism, resilience humanitarianism starts from the idea of crisis as the new normality. This paper discusses the two paradigms and the incongruent images they evoke about crises, local institutions and the recipients of aid. The article puts forward the case for studying the ways in which these contrasting aid paradigms shape practices, dealing with the importance of discourse, the social life of policy, the multiplicity of interests, the power relations and the crucial importance of understanding the lifeworld and agency of aid workers and crisis-affected communities. The article demonstrates how the stories that humanitarians tell about themselves are based on highly selective views of reality and do not include the role they themselves play in the reordering and representation of realities in humanitarian crises.

Homo neoliberalus: From personality to forms of subjectivity:

Abstract: Based on a Neo-Sprangerian approach to forms of life in Western cultures, and drawing on humanities-based ideas about personality, a critical-hermeneutic description of a neoliberal form of life an...

Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality

Abstract: Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality critically reads the intersubjective theories on educational relations and uses a posthuman approach to ascribe agency relationally to humans and nonhumans alike. The book introduces the concept of ‘educational relationality’ and contains examples of nonhuman elements of technology and animals, putting educational relationality and other concepts into context as part of the philosophical investigation. Drawing on educational and posthuman theorists, it answers questions raised in ongoing debates regarding the roles of students and teachers in education, such as the foundations of educational relations and how these can be challenged. The book explores educational relations within the field of philosophy of education. After critically examining intersubjective approaches to theories of educational relations, anthropocentrism and subject-centrism are localized as two problematic aspects. Post-anthropocentrism and intra-relationality are proposed as a theoretical framework, before the book introduces and develops a posthuman theory of educational relations. The analysis is executed through a diffractive reading of intersubjective theories, resulting in five co-concepts: impermanence, uniqueness-as-relationality, proximity, edu-activity, and intelligibility. The analysis provided through educational examples demonstrates the potential of using the proposed theory in everyday practices. Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, early childhood education, research methodology and curriculum studies.

Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis

Abstract: This book assesses the forces of social struggle shaping the past and present of the global political economy from the perspective of historical materialism. Based on the philosophy of internal relations, the character of capital is understood in such a way that the ties between the relations of production, state-civil society, and conditions of class struggle can be realised. By conceiving the internal relationship of global capitalism, global war, global crisis as a struggle-driven process, the book provides a novel intervention on debates within theories of 'the international'. Through a set of conceptual reflections, on agency, structure and the role of discourses embedded in the economy, class struggle is established as our point of departure. This involves analysing historical and contemporary themes on the expansion of capitalism through uneven and combined development, the role of the state and geopolitics, and conditions of exploitation and resistance. These conceptual reflections and thematic considerations are then extended in a series of empirical interventions, including a focus on the 'rising powers' of the BRICS, conditions of the 'new imperialism', and the ongoing financial crisis. The book delivers a radically open-ended dialectical consideration of ruptures of resistance within the global political economy.

Sustainability cultures and energy research: An actor-centred interpretation of cultural theory

Abstract: The energy cultures framework has had widespread use in studies of the energy-related implications of habitual behaviour and behaviour change, and to other topics including mobility, water and carbon-related outcomes. As a heuristic that has become widely used because it helps researchers to make sense of how cultural formations influence sustainability outcomes, it is timely to explore its relationship to cultural theory. I discuss the origins and applications of the framework and elaborate its underpinning concepts about the relationship between cultural formations and sustainability outcomes. I contrast these concepts with cultural theory and conclude that the sustainability cultures approach has similar roots to practice theory, but diverges at several key points. The actor-centred articulation of cultural attributes and their outcomes, with its main focus on actors’ agency in cultural change, contrasts with practice theory’s view of actors as ‘carriers’ of routine practices. It aligns most closely with Bourdieu’s habitus although more substantial theoretical enquiry is needed to explore linkages to Bourdieu’s interest in praxis. Sustainability cultures offers an approach to investigating the significant cultural changes that will be required for a sustainable future.

Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance

Abstract: In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistance be auditory? Sonic Agency highlights sound’s invisible, disruptive, and affective qualities, and asks whether the unseen nature of sound can support a political transformation. In this timely and important book, author Brandon LaBelle sets out to engage contemporary social and political crises by way of sonic thought and imagination. He divides sound’s functions into four figures of resistance – the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant and the weak – and argues for their role in creating alternative “unlikely publics” in which to foster mutuality and dissent. He highlights existing sonic cultures and social initiatives that utilize or deploy sound and listening to address conflict, and points to their work as models for a wider movement. By examining the experience of listening and being heard, LaBelle illuminates a path from the margins toward hope, citizenship, and vibrancy. When the current climate has left many feeling they have lost their voice, it may be sound itself which restores it to them.

Data Science as Machinic Neoplatonism

Abstract: Data science is not simply a method but an organising idea. Commitment to the new paradigm overrides concerns caused by collateral damage, and only a counterculture can constitute an effective critique. Understanding data science requires an appreciation of what algorithms actually do; in particular, how machine learning learns. The resulting ‘insight through opacity’ drives the observable problems of algorithmic discrimination and the evasion of due process. But attempts to stem the tide have not grasped the nature of data science as both metaphysical and machinic. Data science strongly echoes the neoplatonism that informed the early science of Copernicus and Galileo. It appears to reveal a hidden mathematical order in the world that is superior to our direct experience. The new symmetry of these orderings is more compelling than the actual results. Data science does not only make possible a new way of knowing but acts directly on it; by converting predictions to pre-emptions, it becomes a machinic metaphysics. The people enrolled in this apparatus risk an abstraction of accountability and the production of ‘thoughtlessness’. Susceptibility to data science can be contested through critiques of science, especially standpoint theory, which opposes the ‘view from nowhere’ without abandoning the empirical methods. But a counterculture of data science must be material as well as discursive. Karen Barad’s idea of agential realism can reconfigure data science to produce both non-dualistic philosophy and participatory agency. An example of relevant praxis points to the real possibility of ‘machine learning for the people’.

What is My Role in Changing the System? A New Model of Responsibility for Structural Injustice

Abstract: What responsibility do individuals bear for structural injustice? Iris Marion Young has offered the most fully developed account to date, the Social Connections Model. She argues that we all bear responsibility because we each causally contribute to structural processes that produce injustice. My aim in this article is to motivate and defend an alternative account that improves on Young’s model by addressing five fundamental challenges faced by any such theory. The core idea of what I call the “Role-Ideal Model” is that we are each responsible for structural injustice through and in virtue of our social roles, i.e. our roles as parents, colleagues, employers, citizens, etc., because roles are the site where structure meets agency. In short, the Role-Ideal Model (1) explains how individual action contributes to structural change, (2) justifies demands for action from each particular agent, (3) specifies what kinds of acts should be undertaken, (4) moderates between demanding too much and too little of individual agents, and (5) provides an account of the critical responses appropriate for holding individuals accountable for structural injustice.

Realising governmentality: Pastoral power, governmental discourse and the (re)constitution of subjectivities:

Abstract: Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality has been hugely influential in sociology and other disciplinary fields. However, its application has been criticised by those who suggest it neglects agency, and gives overwhelming power to governmental discourses in constituting subjectivities, determining behaviour, and reproducing social reality. Drawing on posthumously translated lecture transcripts, we suggest that Foucault’s nascent concept of pastoral power offers a route to a better conceptualisation of the relationship between discourse, subjectivity and agency, and a means of understanding the (contested, non-determinate, social) process through which governmental discourses are shaped, disseminated, and translated into action. We offer empirical examples from our work in healthcare of how this process takes place, present a model of the key mechanisms through which contemporary pastoral power operates, and suggest future research avenues for refining, developing or contesting this model.

Structural change from physical foundations: The role of the environment in enacting school change

Abstract: Educational change is known to be challenging and therefore research exploring the conditions that seem to facilitate change is important. The literature relating to school level change shows some awareness of the part played by the physical school environment, but the role of the school premises in change is rarely the focus of research rooted within this literature. This is a notable omission. The history of innovation in school design parallels the recognised challenges of school reform and change. Educational leadership practice and certain historic policy initiatives suggest awareness of how the physical environment may encourage or constrain, and so is potentially an important part of a change process, but this understanding is not developed. This paper brings together our research concerning school environments and our work with schools attempting pedagogical change to develop such an understanding of the place of the physical setting in initiating, supporting and sustaining school level change. It is a conceptual exploration of the role of the physical environment in enacting change using an empirical base to illustrate our argument. We present a narrative account of two schools’ approaches to change and use the theoretical framework of culture, structure and individual action, where the physical environment is part of the structure within which change is attempted. It becomes clear that although the physical setting is intimately related to other school structures, particularly certain organisational features, there is a qualitative difference in the way the physical setting, as a tangible and visible entity, contributes to change processes. As well as contributing to the development of conceptualisations of educational change, our exploration has implications for the wider understanding of structures within human society, and their relationship to culture and individual agency.

Theorizing Reactive Reflexivity: Lifestyle Displacement and Discordant Performances of Taste

Abstract: Culturally oriented consumer research has predominantly been framed by two ideal types of reflexivity, which we characterize as existential and critical reflexivity. Drawing from our research on divorced women who have been displaced from their domestically oriented, middle-class lifestyles, we develop an alternative conceptualization—reactive reflexivity—that highlights a different relationship among consumer agency, social structures, and identity goals and practices. Rather than embracing their post-divorce lifestyles as a revitalizing challenge (per existential reflexivity) or liberation from a constraining gender role (per critical reflexivity), our participants felt estranged from their current lifestyle and reflexively viewed their pre-divorce lifestyle as a structure of relative empowerment that had afforded emotional, aesthetic, and status-oriented benefits. In reflexive response to these perceived lifestyle discontinuities, they engaged in discordant practices of taste that sought to insulate their aesthetic predispositions from structurally imposed socioeconomic constraints and, ultimately, to accomplish a reactive identity goal of regaining their displaced status as middle-class homemakers. We discuss the implications of our analysis for theorizations of consumer taste and the relationships between gender ideologies and reflexive consumption practices.

Where and How Do Aging Processes Take Place in Everyday Life? Answers From a New Materialist Perspective

Abstract: In the last decade, the focus of studies on age and aging has fundamentally changed from biological to symbolic, discursive, and cultural phenomena. Currently, the most studied topic in material gerontology is the materiality of age and aging in the context of everyday life. Scholars in this area have thus been making an important contribution to a material understanding of aging processes. As we understand them, however, both social constructivist and material gerontological concepts reach their limit when it comes to the questions of where and how aging processes actually take place in everyday life. In order to answer these two questions, we review social constructivist ideas with a particular focus on the ‘doing age’ concept and material gerontological assumptions regarding human subjects, their material environments, and their relations. We then suggest rethinking bodily limitations and agencies addressed by scholars in the field of new materialism. The aim is to develop a new materialist-inspired understanding of aging processes that helps to reconstruct the material-discursive co-production of aging processes. These processes are deployed as mutual entanglements of materiality and meaning as well as of humans and non-human agency. This approach emphasizes the decentralization of the human actor and thus helps to map the material-discursive complexity of aging processes as relational co-products of humans and non-humans in everyday life.

Citizen Outsiders: How the Struggles of Romanian Roma in London Challenge the Conception of Citizenship

Abstract: Conventionally citizenship has been understood as membership in nation states requiring certain rights and providing certain entitlements. Over the last twenty years, critical perspectives asserted that citizenship is not merely membership, let alone membership of a state. It is now argued that historically and theoretically citizenship involves a distinction between an outside and inside and often its boundaries become the sites of social struggle. Critical perspectives on citizenship invite us to think of citizenship as processes by which political subjectivity, understood as the right to make claims to rights, can be recognised and enacted. As these perspectives allow us to think critically about citizenship beyond membership and the nation state, in this thesis I focus first on the mechanism related to the logic of citizenship that dismisses political agency of those who do not count as political subjects and makes them into what I refer to as ‘citizen outsiders’. Second, I draw on critical perspectives on citizenship and ethnographic methods to examine how Romanian Roma in an East London borough, who are discursively constituted as lacking capacities to act as citizens, contest the ways they are problematised. By focusing on their everyday life struggles as acts of citizenship, I argue that Roma in London do make claims to rights and, in doing so, enact themselves as citizens. Finally I draw conclusions about the ways Roma are problematised and how Roma disrupt these positioning with various acts of citizenship.

Mediating agency and structure in sociology: What role for conversion factors?

Abstract: The article argues that the Capability Approach can enrich sociology’s capacity to link human agency and structure in dynamic analyses of social inequality and marginality. While many read the Capability Approach as excessively individualistic, the validity of this view is less obvious if we take into account the key role of conversion processes in this approach. People’s possibilities to convert given resources into valued functionings do not only depend on individual characteristics (e.g. having a physical or mental impairment) but also on the multi-layered structures (e.g. of a physical, attitudinal, social, economic or political nature) they face. Conversion processes can help us to capture the factors hampering or enabling human agency (individual and collective) – and of the transformation of such factors. As an empirical case, the article discusses the efforts of persons with disabilities to combat exclusion and achieve full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others.