Agency (philosophy)

About: Agency (philosophy) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10461 publications have been published within this topic receiving 350831 citations. The topic is also known as: Thought & Human agency.

Proletarianisation, agency and changing rural livelihoods : forced labour and resistance in colonial Mozambique

Abstract: In current analytical approaches to rural poverty in Southern Africa, the more we see the term 'livelihoods', the less we see the concept 'proletarianisation'. This displacement is partly a response to warranted criticism of teleological and functionalist tendencies in some Marxist work on proletarianisation, but it also reflects a troubling retreat from history, politics and class analysis in current livelihoods frameworks. This paper attempts to detach the concepts of livelihoods and agency from the micro-economic language of possessive individualism and strategic gaming and to reclaim them for a Marxist terrain of class struggle. It shows that the multiplicity and variation in rural livelihoods in Mozambique today are the outcome of a historical process of proletarianisation grounded in violent and repressive regimes of forced labour during the colonial period. Forced labour - and resistance to it - shaped the ways in which labour and agricultural commodity markets worked and developed. Qualitative shi...

Stories We Tell About Labor: Turkopticon and the Trouble with "Design"

Abstract: This paper argues that designers committed to advancing justice and other non-market values must attend not only to the design of objects, processes, and situations, but also to the wider economic and cultural imaginaries of design as a social role. The paper illustrates the argument through the case of Turkopticon, originally an activist tool for workers in Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), built by the authors and maintained since 2009. The paper analyzes public depictions of Turkopticon which cast designers as creative innovators and AMT workers as without agency or capacity to change their situation. We argue that designers' elevated status as workers in knowledge economies can have practical consequences for the politics of their design work. We explain the consequences of this status for Turkopticon and how we adapted our approach in response over the long term. We argue for analyses of power in design work that account for and develop counters to hegemonic beliefs and practices about design as high-status labor.

Spiritual Knowing and Transformative Learning

Abstract: This chapter discusses the place of spirituality and spiritual learning in the promotion of transformative education. In highlighting the importance of taking spirituality seriously in the politics and ontology of educational transformation, I locate my discursive framework in the discussion in the challenges of critical teaching to a diverse school audience in North American contexts. I bring an anticolonial reading to what it means to engage spirituality in the political project of transformative learning. My understanding of transformative learning is that education should be able to resist oppression and domination by strengthening the individual self and the collective souls to deal with the continued reproduction of colonial and recolonial relations in the academy. It also must assist the learner to deal with pervasive effects of imperial structures of the academy on the processes of knowledge production and validation; the understanding of indigenity; and the pursuit of agency, resistance, and politics for educational change. Dei, Hall and Goldin-Rosen-berg (2000) have argued for working with “Indigenous knowledge” as a strategic knowledge base from which to rupture our academies (schools, colleges, and universities). In this discursive politics, the notion of Indigenous is understood as the absence of colonial imposition of the knowledge that is unique to a given culture or society. Such knowledge reflects the commonsense ideas and cultural resource knowledges of local peoples concerning everyday realities of living. It is knowledge referring to those whose authority resides in origin, place, history, and ancestry. (See also Dei, 2000.)

Everything Is Dangerous: A Critique of `Normative Power Europe':

Abstract: The article builds on the existing critique of ‘Normative Power Europe’ (NPE), extending it in previously unexplored directions by drawing on the work of Michel Foucault. The author conceptualizes and empirically demonstrates the hidden face of European Union (EU) norm diffusion. The EU promotes human agency abroad through the promotion of fundamental civil, political and economic rights. This is the celebrated face of European foreign policy. Its other face ‐ ignored by students of NPE (proponents and critics alike) ‐ is that the EU’s self-styled mission for humanity inscribes the very agency of those it seeks to empower in relations characterized by epistemic violence, the technologization of politics and administrative arbitrariness. The author delimits a conceptual space for investigating the two faces of NPE, making the case for a micropolitical analysis of EU norm diffusion. In two empirical snapshots, the article brings into focus the deep ambiguity of the EU’s post-sovereign normative power.

Interrogating urban experiments

Abstract: The notion of the “urban experiment” has become increasingly prevalent and popular as a guiding concept and trope used by both scholars and policymakers, as well as by corporate actors with a stake in the future of the city. In this paper, we critically engage with this emerging focus on “urban experiments”, and with its articulation through the associated concepts of “living labs”, “future labs”, “urban labs” and the like. A critical engagement with the notion of urban experimentation is now not only useful, but a necessity: we introduce seven specific areas that need critical attention when considering urban experiments: these are focused on normativity, crisis discourses, the definition of “experimental subjects”, boundaries and boundedness, historical precedents, “dark” experiments and non-human experimental agency.