Agents Subject Research Articles

Społeczna rola prawników: odpowiedzialność, podmiotowość, zaufanie

This article attempts to answer the question why is it worth to exhibit the category of agency in the legal practice. Answering the question I started my discussion from the presentation ideas related to the issue of the social role of the lawyers. In the completion of this objective, I discussed three ideas: moral responsibility, trust and subjective agency. Putting forward the role of the lawyer, I paid attention to the relationship between the notion of trust in the lawyer’s role and moral responsibility. This relationship is based on an ethical link, which is founded on a kind of obligation. This idea can be demonstrated by looking into confidence in the lawyer’s role as a special form of obligation to consider individual, institutional and social arguments. In the presented approach the state of limbo between the individual dimension, which focuses on the relationship between a specific individual and their rights, and the public dimension, where attention is paid to institutional and social arguments, is a characteristic feature of the professional role of a lawyer. The shaping of a professional role in a subjective and structural authorship is based on the idea of a two-way movement. It consists in highlighting the institutional structure with simultaneous reinforcement of the role of the subject who acts within it.

“The Language of the Eyes”: Speech Acts and the Gaze in a Monologue by Badīʿah Maṣābnī

Abstract The script of a short film from 1932 by the cabaret star Badīʿah Maṣābnī features the voice of a woman holding forth on the subject of women’s eyes and the effects they have on male onlookers. The characteristics of the text, a monologue entitled “Lughat al-ʿuyūn,” or “The Language of the Eyes,” are analysed in the light of speech act theory, with a view toward understanding the dynamics of gender and subjective agency that permeate it. Special attention is paid to the gaze, both the gaze emanating from the depicted women’s eyes and the gaze of the presumably male spectator. Structures of gender and agency as they apply to eyes in the film script are then compared to formulations of the beloved’s eyes in the classical Arabic poetic tradition, as well as to depictions of eyes in a contemporary colloquial poem by Bayram al-Tūnisī. The comparisons reveal the relatively subversive nature of the film. The piece concludes with reflections on the film’s feminist impulse.

Beyond the search for the subject: An anti-essentialist ontology for liberal democracy

Reading Foucault’s work on power and subjectivity alongside “developmentalist” approaches to evolutionary biology, this article endorses poststructuralist critiques of political ideals grounded in the value of subjective agency. Many political theorists embrace such critiques, of course, but those who do are often skeptical of liberal democracy, and even of normative theory itself. By contrast, those who are left to theorize liberal democracy tend to reject or ignore poststructuralist insights, and have continued to employ dubious ontological assumptions regarding human agents. Against both groups, I argue that Foucault’s poststructuralism must be taken seriously, but that it is ultimately consistent with normative theory and liberal democracy. Linking poststructuralist attempts to transcend the dichotomy between agency and structure with recent efforts by evolutionary theorists to dissolve a similarly stubborn opposition between nature and nurture, I develop an anti-essentialist account of human nature and agency that vindicates poststructuralist criticism while enabling a novel defense of liberal democracy.

<em>The Tailored Suit</em>: Re-Membering and Gendering Can Themba's “The Suit”

This paper examines the short film The Tailored Suit (2011), written and directed by Kitso Lelliott, in order to consider 1950s Sophiatown’s sociocultural legacy pertaining to race and gender in South Africa. The film is inspired by the work of Can Themba, a writer and journalist who worked at Drum magazine in the 1950s. Though the establishment of a cosmopolitan black identity was significant in its undermining of Nationalist Party segregationist ideology, the struggle for equality was predicated on a racial struggle that subsumed a gendered agenda. Here the work of Can Themba and Drum magazine, which have become mythologized in contemporary South Africa, are interrogated with particular emphasis on Themba’s iconic short story, “The Suit” (1963). Through engagement with Themba’s text, I foreground the processes through which black women have been subjected to multiple, compounded subjugation. In response to the representations of black femininity in the short story “The Suit,” the film The Tailored Suit privileges black women’s articulations, foregrounding the agency of marginalized subjects. From the periphery, subjugated women can destabilize the hierarchical social structures that subordinate and objectify her. By troubling representations of black woman in “The Suit,” part of an iconic historic moment prefiguring the contemporary sociocultural milieu, the reimagining in the short film offers a fragmented frame of reference, positing an alternate to a homogenizing masculine discourse on history. In The Tailored Suit history and memory are stitched into the fabric of the present, at times indistinguishable as they bleed into one another and the “dismembered and unaccounted for” memories of the marginalized begin to appear.

Modal articulation: The psychological and semiotic functions of modalities in the sensemaking process

Within a semiotic and psychodynamic frame, we present and discuss the psychological construct of modal articulation. By modality, we mean the way a subject organizes the meaning of his/her own experience according to categories of necessity, possibility, opportunity, will, knowledge, permission, and duty. Modality is a relevant topic in some branches of philosophy, logics, linguistics, and semiotics, but there is no systematic discourse about it in psychology. The proposal of this work is to deal with some interesting and promising features of modal categories in the sensemaking process of subjective experience. Modalization is presented as a relevant semiotic organization in each contextual and dynamic sensemaking process in order to perform three functions: (a) connection between affective matrix and subjective experience, (b) mediation between subjective positioning in intersubjective context, and (c) vectorialization of action, namely orienting subjective agency in becoming temporal. Theoretical, methodological, and clinical implications are discussed.

Construção de gênero, laços afetivos e luto em Paris Is Burning

Resumo: O filme Paris Is Burning, de Jennie Livingston, tem suscitado críticas e elogios desde seu lançamento, em 1990. Seu retrato da cultura dos bailes no Harlem nos anos 80, a abordagem da sua singular economia de construção de gênero e as negociações que faz do cruzamento entre etnicidade e sexualidade inspiraram leituras desde o ativismo negro, o pós-estruturalismo e, mais recentemente, os estudos trans. Mas, além da questão da problematização da apropriação e da autoria, existem camadas do documentário que nos levam a refletir a respeito da construção de laços afetivos, de comunidade e da autonomia da agência de sujeitos marginalizados e sua resiliência em face da violência de gênero. Apesar da espetacularização oriunda dos bailes, o filme comunica dignidade de seus sujeitos e opera no espectador a experiência do luto, que propõe uma comunidade compartilhada que finalmente nos una a partir da diferença.

Adman: Warhol before Pop

Adman: Warhol before Pop

Lectura crítica de la historia de los cimarrones de Esmeraldas (Ecuador) durante los siglos XVI-XVIII

En este artículo se intenta hacer una lectura crítica de la historia del cimarronaje en Esmeraldas, desde una perspectiva de la modernidad-colonialidad, visibilizando y poniendo en clave existencial historias subalternas o locales. Dentro de esta mirada crítica del cimarronaje, se trata de resaltar el agenciamiento para la construcción de una hegemonía territorial y política, las formas de resistencia como parte de un proyecto de vida. Uno de los elementos que se trabaja en esta relectura es romper con esa linealidad del tiempo tradicional, donde los hechos del pasado solo son una referencia para recordar. Es por eso que busca que esta narrativa sea un aprendizaje del pasado y, con ello, actualizar el agenciamiento político del cimarronaje, brindando elementos como la actitud cimarrona para ser, pensando desde las dinámicas sociales afroecuatorianas y afrodescendientes. Pensarse críticamente, en estos momentos, el cimarronaje como lucha y reparación, como forma de restituir y reafirmar su existencia, es una narrativa política que pretende aportar desde la historia del cimarronaje elementos para construir proyectos políticos decoloniales. Mostrar que aún la lucha por la libertad y la autonomía es válida en nuestros tiempos y, sobre todo, necesaria.

Vanishing women. Łódź women textile workers in Polish documentary cinema

ABSTRACTThe article examines post-war Polish documentary films representing women textile workers from Łódź in order to determine how these films conceptualize their actual socio-economic and political agency in communist Poland. In a brief historical section female workers’ situation is outlined to provide a broader historical, political and social contexts for film analyses. The main aim of close reading of selected documentaries featuring female textile workers from Łódź is to discuss how these films negotiate official gender equity doctrine in communist Poland. The author claims that regardless of their pro- or anti-communist stance, documentary films about female workers do not articulate their subjective agency and, predominantly, serve to support and solidify patriarchal structures of power.

"the absolute / of water": The Submarine Poetic of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

Despite its status as ahistorical in metanarratives of modernity that serve the colonial project, the sea nonetheless features as a prominent and dynamic space in the global (and especially Western) historical imaginary. In M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 long poem Zong! , the seascape features as a kinet ic contact zone of modernity by creating a responsive archive that documents and preserves the cultural and historical agency of colonized subjects. This paper examines Philip’s text from the perspective of two related spatial schemas that stand in opposition to land-locked narratives of Western modernity: Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectics, and Katherine McKittrick’s (via Sylvia Wynter) demonic grounds. Bringing these two lenses together in conversation with Philip’s text highlights the oppositional archive of space and being engendered by Zong! ’s resistant maritime poetic.

Mix En Meng It Op: Emile YX?'s Alternative Race and Language Politics in South African Hip-Hop

Mix En Meng It Op: Emile YX?'s Alternative Race and Language Politics in South African Hip-Hop

Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris. By Richard S. Hopkins.Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+218. $42.50.

<i>Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris</i>. By Richard S. Hopkins.Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+218. $42.50.

Affordance, agency and apprenticeship learning: a comparative study of small and large engineering firms

Amidst concerns over skills shortages, both the current British government and its coalition predecessors have, against the grain of wider austerity measures, invested heavily in the apprenticeship system. The majority of apprentices are, and have historically been, employed within small businesses. However, research suggests that, in the main, small firms tend to approach management issues – including workplace employee development – in a less formal way than their larger counterparts. What implications this has for apprentices and their workplace learning remains unclear. The article aims to address this gap, and it does so through a qualitative study of apprentices in three English engineering firms of different sizes. The findings broadly support the established picture of informal working and learning processes in the small firm. However, it is argued that this does not inevitably restrict apprentices’ on-the-job learning. Rather, the ways in which apprentices learn, and what they learn, are conditioned by the interaction – or ‘co-participation’ – between the opportunities afforded by the workplace, and the apprentice’s subjective agency.

The Education of Philosophy

So far, there is no philosophy that one could learn. For where is it? Who has got it in his possession, and by what characteristics can it be recognized? One can only learn to philosophize.-Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Architectonic,A838/B866; quoted in UNESCO 1953:17Nel Noddings, the well-known philosopher of education and proponent of care ethics, worries that Foucault's approach to education is potentially damaging to educational practices and philosophizing because it calls into question the agency of subjects at precisely the moment that historically marginalized groups are beginning to experience their own subjective agency (Noddings 2007: 80-81). Though her argument is not addressed to Foucault alone, his work is implicitly included when she suggests that the so-called of the subject in postmodern philosophy means that subjectivity is no longer the constitutive basis of meaning, that subjects are now understood as constituted by multiple, fragmentary identities.1 If subjectivity is always constituted and fragmentary, and thus produced by forces beyond its control, she suggests, then autonomy and agency will ultimately be experienced as illusions. Marginalized groups, as a result, she thinks, will lose interest in pursuing autonomy and agency. An education in power technologies would be, therefore, an unwitting extension of hegemonic, marginalizing, and exclusionary endeavors.2 But I see no reason for her to limit the argument to marginalized groups. For its center is the thought that if one is educated to believe in the impossibility of individual autonomy, then one will forego the attempt to act autonomously. This paper questions the assumption here that education and educators can and should shape or mold students in such a direct manner, if at all. It will do so by sketching an important part of the intellectual history informing Foucault's own genealogical investigation into the emergence of such an assumption in a disciplinary society. This history leads directly to Georges Canguilhem, Foucault's elective master, his bon maitre. And in the relation between the writings of master and student, we find a different exemplification of education, namely, as a thoroughly dialogical and philosophical activity undertaken for the sake of freedom.3The book in which Noddings worries about the death of the subject, entitled Philosophy of Education, is intended primarily as a textbook for students of education. Though the chapters of the book treat diverse philosophical approaches to education, Noddings's title seems to suggest that there is such a thing as philosophy of education. This paper's title, by contrast, is meant to suggest that education would be better grasped as an activity pursued philosophically, rather than the object of a disciplinary subdivision within academic philosophy. Etymologically, philosophy is the love or friendship for wisdom, that is, the search for wisdom. While many other human activities and practices require education or training, not all make education central to the very practice itself as philosophy does. The best way to philosophize about education, I contend, would be to consider attempts at the education of philosophy. Rather than evaluate solely what philosophers have said or written about how to philosophize or think, I will consider how one philosopher endeavored to develop and transform methods and ideas found in another. I respond to Noddings's concerns, therefore, by focusing on Foucault's accounts of education and philosophy, framing these as critical continuations of Georges Canguilhem's own work as a philosopher concerned with education.Such an endeavor is authorized by Foucault's own late essays asserting the importance of Canguilhem's work for his own (Foucault 1991). Treating Canguilhem and Foucault together on education is important in its own right for a number of reasons: first, because it helps to correct widespread and mistaken perceptions about Canguilhem, that, for instance, he was a historian more than a philosopher or that his sole area of interest was medicine and the life sciences. …

O que o doente faz quando fala? A narrativa do doente sob uma perspectiva pragmático-discursiva

RESUMO O que os doentes, em interação com profissionais de saúde, fazem ao falar? Como se dá a comunicação humana em práticas complexas, como as práticas em saúde? Este artigo pretende refletir sobre essas questões, cooperando para o entendimento da comunicação humana focado na agência dos sujeitos em discurso. Pretende também cooperar para as reflexões sobre a importância da narrativa, não apenas como espaço de agenciamento na prática em pauta, mas também como nova forma de construção de saberes, inclusive científicos. A perspectiva que permeia toda a reflexão é a pragmática, que entende a linguagem como performativa (Austin, 1975) e lugar por excelência da construção identitária (Rajagopalan, 2006, 2006a, 2003, 2003a).

Introduction to Special Section: “Mobilizing Race: Borders, Translations, Movements”

Introduction to Special Section: “Mobilizing Race: Borders, Translations, Movements”

The Nation in the Balkan Village: National Politicization in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Thrace

The paper tackles the issue of national politicization in late Ottoman Thrace through the case study of Stenimahos (İstanimaka, Stanimaka), a large mountainous village in Northern Thrace, whose Greek-speaking inhabitants initiated during the 1860s a long tradition of anti-Ottoman nationalist militancy and a close relation to independent Greece. The rapid national politicization and radicalization of the Stenimahiote Greeks was triggered by a severe reproduction crisis of the local economy in the context of mounting incorporation of the Ottoman empire into the world economy. Ensuing conflicts in local society were successively articulated into the unstable ‘post-Crimean war’ regional, imperial and international contexts. Last but not least, the analysis of the ‘amphibious’ emigration movement of the Stenimahiotes to Greece which followed the crisis reveals the agency of the non-elite subjects and challenges idealist and ‘top-bottom’ approaches to the process to nation formation in the late Ottoman Balkans.

The central role of self-agency in clinical recovery from first episode psychosis

Purpose: While there is accumulating evidence for clinical recovery in a significant proportion of people experiencing a first episode psychosis, the mechanisms facilitating this form of recovery are less well known. Thus, the aim of this study is to investigate mechanisms of recovery after a first-episode psychosis as perceived by clinically recovered service users.Methods: Thematic analytic approach within an interpretative–phenomenological framework. Twenty clinically recovered service users were interviewed. Analysis followed an established meaning condensation procedure.Results: Main theme: Establishment of subjective self-agency. Subordinate themes: (1) Environmental support and gentle pressure, (2) Individually tailored assistance, (3) Antipsychotic medication: relinquishing personal responsibility, and considerable side effects.Conclusions: We suggest that an increase in sense of personal agency is a core mechanism driving recovery for participants in the study sample. Findings indicate that interventions aiming to boost subjective and behavioral agency in service users might be of great benefit, particularly in combating negative symptoms of psychosis.

Racism, Migration, and Mental Health. Theoretical Reflections from Belgium

Migrant and diasporic communities who identify as Muslim are underrepresented in mental health care across Western Europe. At the same time, they are particularly at risk of suffering from mental health problems. We seek to explore this underrepresentation in theoretical terms and do so through a critical analysis of sociological literature focused on Muslims and mental health care in a context of migration to Europe. Pursuing the Foucaultian insight that mental health institutions shape subjects that pass through them, we reframe this underrepresentation in terms of subjectivity and the failure to be “good” subjects of Western biomedical regimes. This article aims to sharpen the critical lenses required for such an investigation, in order to use those lenses to discern mechanisms of “othering” within the relevant sociological scholarship. These mechanisms consist of both universalising and essentialising particular experiences, and need to be understood in relation to colonial frameworks. As both mechanisms are premised on disregarding agency, we conclude by arguing in favour of taking the agency of subjects with mental health issues into account.

Mediatizzazione e network society: un programma di ricerca

The contribution analyses the social change from the point of view of the mediatization approach. The concept of mediatization has to be distinguished from that of mediation, because it identifies a meta-process of cultural and social transformation such as urbanization, globalization and individualization. This meta-process is influenced -but not determined - by and it refers to the ability of to spread their format or to impose specific frame in the lifeworld. On this basis, the article identifies three strands of the debate about mediatization - institutionalist, social constructivist, material - and then identifies the systemic approach as an important corrective to the limits of the three approaches. The systemic approach, using the themes of synchronization and irritation among the social systems and the media logics shows how the mediatization is a complex process that must also include non-media factors and agency of subjects. In summary, the mediatization is a meta-process that can not be reduced to specific techno-communicative devices and therefore has a more abstract generalized valence. But at the same time the mediatization does not incorporate an (average) unitary logic and therefore can only be observed through the specificity of the practices. Ultimately the mediatization is not proposed as a new paradigm or as a middle-range theory. Rather it is a guiding concept for the empirical exploration of the social transformations that takes into account how it is today intensified media’s saturation of social interaction.