Abstract
This chapter will explore some of the negotiated reworkings of conditions sole parents in this study undertake to account for themselves as postgraduate students. Drawing from Butler, I explore the possibility of change and renewal within enabling and constraining conditions that become the site for responsive action and agency, ‘producing a scene of agency from ambivalence’ (Butler, 1997a, p. 163). I suggest that agency is similar to Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of happiness, therefore in this chapter I am interested in how sole parents prepare for, maintain and defend their capacity to engage with postgraduate education. ‘That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility’ (Butler, 2004c, p. 3). A question I pose in this chapter, following from Butler, is how do sole parent postgraduates open up the possibilities of agency within paradoxical conditions?
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