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.

Posthuman Agency in the Digitally Mediated City: Exteriorization, Individuation, Reinvention

Abstract: Accounts by geographers of the ways in which urban spaces are digitally mediated have proliferated in the last few years. This significant body of work pays particular attention to the production of urban space by software and digital hardware, and geographers have drawn on various kinds of posthumanist philosophies to theorize the agency of the technological nonhuman. The agency of the human, however, has been left undertheorized in this work, often appearing in the form of excessive resistance to the agency granted to the digital. This article contributes to understanding the digital mediation of cities by theorizing a specifically posthuman agency; that is, a human agency both mediated through technics and diverse. Drawing on the philosophy of Stiegler as well as a range of feminist digital scholarship, the article conceptualizes posthuman agency as always already coconstituted with technologies. Posthumans are simultaneously individuated and exteriorized in that coconstitution, and this permits agency...

Rethinking Social Development: Theory, Research and Practice

Abstract: List of tables. List of figures. Preface. Introduction. 1. Rethinking social development: an overview. Part I Rebuilding the framework - models of explanation and strategies of enquiry: 2. Reconsidering the explanadum and scope of development studies - toward a comparative sociology of state-economy relations. 3. Heterogeneity, actor and structure - towards a reconstitution of the concept of structure. 4. Post-Marxism, post-colonialism - the needs and rights of distant strangers. Part II Reconnecting theory and research - new perspectives on the struggle for development: 5. The state in late development - historical and comparative perspectives. 6. The social construction of rural development - discourses, practices and power. 7. Between econonism and post-modernism - reflections on research on "agrarian change" in India. Part III Linking theory, research and practice - the issue of relevance: 8. Theory and relevance in indigenous agriculture - knowledge agency and organisation. 9. On ignoring the wider picture - AIDS research and the jobbing social scientist. 10. Social development research and the third sector - NGO's as uses and subjects of social inquiry. Afterword. 11. Rethinking social development - the search for relevance. 12. How far beyond the impasse? A provisional summing-up. Notes on contributors. Index.

Mediating Zones of Uncertainty: Interpreter Agency, the Interpreting Habitus and Political Asylum Adjudication

Abstract: This paper builds on previous work by the author (Inghilleri 2003) which explored the status of norms in relation to the notion of an 'interpreting habitus' and the contexts and cultures of interpreter training and practice. It attempts to further elaborate one aspect of the conceptual framework used in this previous work, namely the notion of an interpreting habitus, considering it in relation to translation and interpreting theory more generally. The paper argues for a view of interpreted events within the asylum system as crucial sites for the convergence of competing fields and their accompanying habitus. It suggests that, given the present constitution of the public service interpreting profession as a 'zone of uncertainty', a term Bourdieu uses to refer to weak positions located in the gaps between fields within social space, the status of interpreters' knowledge within interpreted events remains vulnerable to exercises of power outside of their control. Under these conditions, the 'interpreting habitus' – the 'product' of the convergence of fields, habitus and capital – remains oriented toward the maintenance of control of the social/interactive space by the dominant legal and political institutions involved in the political asylum process. The paper is based on a current ethnographic investigation of interpreting activity in the political asylum application process in the United Kingdom.

Précis of Shared agency: a planning theory of acting together

Abstract: We have an important capacity to act together, a capacity for shared intentional activity. Such shared activities are important in our lives. They are important instrumentally: think about the usefulness of shared conversation. And they are important to us non-instrumentally: think about the joys of shared conversation. A theory of human thought and action needs to be, in part, a theory of human thinking and acting together. Shared intentional activity of the sort of interest here is not merely strategic interaction. Walking together (in Margaret Gilbert’s wonderful example) is not merely walking alongside each other. But shared intentional activity also need not be embedded in a framework of promises or the like: think of Hume’s rowers who row together ‘‘tho’ they have never given promises to each other.’’ My focus in this book is on small-scale cases of shared intentional activity that need not be embedded in a larger institution and that do not involve asymmetric authority relations. I focus on duets rather than orchestras with conductors. I call such small-scale cases of shared intentional activity cases of modest sociality. Some have supposed that an adequate theory of modest sociality will need to draw on conceptual, metaphysical, and/or normative resources that go significantly beyond those that are central to our understanding of individual intentional agency. For example, John Searle believes that we will need to appeal to a fundamentally new state of the minds of participants: we-intention. And Margaret Gilbert believes that we will need to appeal to a fundamentally new inter-relation of joint

Agency, Modernity and Social Policy

Abstract: The focus of this article is upon the recent revival of interest in human agency within both sociological and social policy debates. There is a striking resonance between the increasing attention paid to individual behaviour within normative debates about welfare and the concern of some sociologists with the moral and ethical dilemmas that confront the individual in contemporary society. These two sets of arguments are not compatible. Indeed the analyses they present are contradictory. Moralists such as Etzioni, Field and Mead share a belief in the need to restructure welfare in ways that encourage and reward responsible behaviour. In contrast, sociologists such as Bauman, Beck and Giddens suggest that such endeavours could prove to be both futile and dangerous.Attempts to address issues of agency face formidable obstacles and arouse genuine fears that they will serve to endorse a punitive and atavistic individualism. It is these fears, however, which have constrained and confined the debate about welfare in the post-war years. The revival of agency creates opportunities for a social science which is more sensitive to the activities of poor people whilst reflecting more fully the difference and diversity which characterises contemporary British society.