Expression Of Agency Research Articles

The expression of agency by graduate teaching assistants and professors in relation to their professional obligations

Agency has been identified as a personal asset for teachers that may enable them to competently manage their classrooms (Stein, Kintz, & Miness, 2016). We explored how tools from systemic functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 1994) can be used to track the agency instructors express. We interviewed graduate student teaching assistants (GTAs) and professors from mathematics departments to track their articulation of agency regarding responsibilities associated with interpersonal, disciplinary, institutional, and individual obligations of the role of mathematics instructor (Chazan, Herbst, & Clark, 2016). It is informative to compare these two groups because, while they all teach critical introductory mathematics courses, they also have recognizable differences in status. We report that while GTAs present themselves as similarly agentic as professors in relation to their disciplinary obligation (to the integrity of the mathematics they teach), they vary in relation to their other obligations. We draw implications for the professional development of GTAs.

Dimensions of agency in transnational relations of Afghan migrants and return migrants

Abstract This article examines agency unfolding in the relationships that Afghan migrants and return migrants maintain with Afghanistan. Based on qualitative case studies of Afghan diaspora groups in Germany and the UK and Afghan return migrants in Kabul, we focus on how people engage with and position themselves in relation to Afghanistan. Drawing on Emirbayer and Mische’s tri-dimensional concept of agency in combination with Vigh’s idea of social navigation, we approach affective relations and forms of practical (transnational) engagement as expressions of agency. Research on migrants and return migrants is seldom brought together. However, exploring the types of engagement of these two groups with Afghanistan is telling for three reasons. First, it enables us to identify parallels and differences in the way Afghan migrants and return migrants relate to Afghanistan. Secondly, we uncover how ideas of change vary in different settings and under different socio-political conditions. Thirdly, we demonstrate that ties between people and place are not innate but an expression of agency and self-positioning. These in turn are contingent on individual characteristics and the context in which people are embedded. Compared to policy-oriented discussions on the migration-development nexus and on forms and outcomes of migrant engagements, our study yields a more nuanced understanding of entanglements between agency and engagement among Afghan migrants and return migrants.

Platform-Capital’s ‘App-etite’ for Control: A Labour Process Analysis of Food-Delivery Work in Australia

This qualitative case study adopts a labour process analysis to unpack the distinctive features of capital’s control regimes in the food-delivery segment of the Australian platform-economy and assesses labour agency in response to these. Drawing upon worker experiences with the Deliveroo and UberEATS platforms, it is shown how the labour process controls are multi-facetted and more than algorithmic management, with three distinct features standing out: the panoptic disposition of the technological infrastructure, the use of information asymmetries to constrain worker choice, and the obfuscated nature of their performance management systems. Combined with the workers’ precarious labour market positions and the Australian political-economic context, only limited, mainly individual, expressions of agency were found.

The Social Environmental Context of Resilience Among Substance-Using African American/Black Men Who Have Sex With Men

ABSTRACTResilience theory has been suggested as a framework for research on HIV prevention among men who have sex with men. Among this population, literature indicates that African American/Black men who have sex with men experience additional health disparities including elevated HIV incidence rates, victimization, and poor physical health. Conceptualizing resilience as a part of one’s social environment, this qualitative study investigates resilience processes and HIV transmission risk among a sample of 21 substance-using African American/Black men who have sex with men. Data from in-depth interviews describe the social environmental context in which resilience is exhibited and document the influence of homophobia, expressions of agency, and access to social, economic, and cultural capital on resilience processes. Central to this are expressions of hidden resilience, in which African American/Black men who have sex with men mitigate risk and experience their lives as subjectively successful, whether or not outsiders see it as such.

Flexible futures: children’s agency on the adventure playground

ABSTRACTAdventure playgrounds allow for free play – an expression of children’s agency. In England, they have undergone a process of formalisation from the original ‘junk’ playgrounds. Cultural changes such as increased focus on academic performance, childcare, health and safety, and funding pressures have created new challenges. While critiques of change are prevalent in the literature and on the ground, further study is needed to investigate how change on adventure playgrounds affects agency. This research employs environmental analysis, observations, interviews, and creative child-accessible methods on three adventure playgrounds in the south of England, each showing evidence of formalisation. Prevailing theories suggest that flexibility promotes children’s agency. These theories created an interpretive lens for the research findings. Flexibility was found to be a differentiating factor between the playgrounds and corresponded with individual playground’s management approach. The study identified issues of agency associated with a lack of flexibility in management approach, such as parents on the playground, opposition to technology, and questions of playground authenticity. This study argues that flexibility is necessary, not only for children’s expression of agency, but also for the future of adventure playgrounds.

Balancing risk, interpersonal intimacy and agency: perspectives from marginalised women in Zambia

Women are most exposed to sexual health risks within their marital relationships, primarily due to the sexually risky behaviours of their spouses. Studies show that expanding agency is critical for women to mitigate both physical and sexual health risks and is linked to increased psycho-social well-being and economic independence. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative primary data collected from a peri-urban community in Zambia, this paper explores how women exert agency in a community where few educational and economic opportunities and substantial food insecurity exacerbate women’s risk for HIV within their marital relationships. It also examines how expressions of agency within marital unions can reduce HIV risk exposure and lead to socio-economic benefits. However, expressions of agency can also create physical, psycho-social and sexual health risks, particularly when spouses do not support independent decision-making and actions that women consider necessary to support the household and maintain intimacy. Findings highlight the importance of community involvement and addressing harmful socio-cultural norms to foster the realisation of women’s agency.

Landscape Transformation under Slavery, Indenture, and Imperial Projects in Bras d’Eau National Park, Mauritius

ABSTRACTThe archaeology of Bras d’Eau National Park, Mauritius provides a case study of transformations in physical and social landscapes under the coercive labor regimes of slavery and indenture, and twentieth-century colonial and post-colonial environmental projects. This article considers the regional and domestic spatial practices in the Bras d’Eau site that, over the course of three centuries, transitioned from farm, to sugar plantation, to forestry crown lands, to national park. Archaeological analysis and archival documentation show that the material traces of each phase of occupation are layered in Bras d’Eau’s landscape like a palimpsest. The built infrastructure of the estate facilitated movement and access to broader island resources essential to later sugar production, but the organization of the estate was also embedded within emerging everyday Mauritian expressions of agency, health, and environment. Today, ancient roads, village ruins, and the forest together form a heritage of environmental and cultural preservation and loss.

Exploring children’s agency in a designed atelier: A socio-material perspective

This paper aimed to explore the interplay between the socio-material configuration of a designed atelier and children?s agency. Ateliers were designed for and utilized by children aged 8?11 years. The material properties of the atelier and the expressions of agency are analyzed as interdependent rather than dualistic elements. In this study, agency was distributed and emerged in relation to the socio-material environment. The paper concluded with reflections about pedagogical and research implications to adopt a socio-material approach.

Texting Amor: Emerging Intimacies in Textually Mediated Romance Among Tzotzil Mayan Youth

AbstractCell phones are vehicles for creating and transforming sociality in peer networks (Coleman 2010; Wallis 2010). In the last decade, increased access to cell phones has radically changed courtship practices among Mayan youth of Zinacantán, Chiapas, and México as young couples now text clandestine romantic relationships, unmediated by elders. Since there is essentially no vocabulary for romantic love in Mayan Tzotzil, couples now rely on Spanish expressions gleaned from the media and other sources and have created a genre of romantic texting. The current study analyzes the textual microprocesses of dialogical construction of romance from a database of ten thousand WhatsApp text messages. Both microlevel practices and macrolevel forces are considered in shaping new landscapes of love, showing how texting affords new technological, linguistic, and literacy skills that are significantly changing repertoires of identity (Kroskrity 1993, 2000) and new expressions of agency and affect among Mayan youth. [Youth, cell phones, romance, love, digital communication, literacy, Mayan]

Nietzsche and the Art of Cruelty

Abstract This article explains Nietzsche's high regard for cruelty. After offering a conceptual analysis of cruel acts, it argues that they are an apt means of expressing one's power, drawing from work on Nietzsche's psychological views and doctrine of the will to power to do so. In addition to the benefit that perpetrators of cruelty can enjoy in virtue of expressing their power, victims, by enduring cruelty, can cultivate qualities essential to overcoming the terrible truths of existence. Finally, central to most of Nietzsche's remarks on the matter, self-directed cruelty has deep connections with the process of sublimation, which makes possible greater and more varied modes of life. In light of this picture, the liberal equation of suffering with harm becomes questionable, as does the insistence that cruelty deprives an individual of her agency. Self-cruelty, in particular, comes to look like one of the best expressions of agency.

Digging for Dementia: Exploring the experience of community gardening from the perspectives of people with dementia

ABSTRACTObjectives: The study sought to explore the lived experiences of people with dementia who participate in community-based gardening programmes.Methods: A collaborative gardening project was conducted over six weeks at a day centre for people with dementia. Six participants were recruited from the centre's attendees. Each session was co-designed by participants. Semi-structured group interviews were conducted each week, and researcher observations were documented. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with the centre's staff to explore their views and to contextualise gardening participants’ experiences. Data were analysed inductively using thematic analysis. This paper focuses upon three of the study's emergent themes: identity, agency, and community.Results: The findings revealed that for people with dementia, gardening is not merely a matter of enjoying time outdoors; it is a forum for the articulation of identity and selfhood and expression of agency, and can facilitate the development of new social bonds based upon shared interests, rather than a shared diagnosis.Conclusion: Gardening-based interventions can offer more than simply facilitating outdoor engagement and promoting social interaction. When conditions are right, gardening can be an effective vehicle for the promotion of social citizenship and expression of selfhood and agency in dementia.

Engendering cosmopolitanism: Gendered narratives of instability and agency

Borrowing from Becker's (1999) conceptualization of personal disruption, this article examines prolonged moments of instability in the lives of two Colombian migrant women. Such moments, it is argued, appear critical to the extent that they bring into focus assumptions about continuity in life, and encourage individuals to confront, reconcile or rearticulate narrative categories that guide them (Becker, 1999: 206).It is on these terms that the paper engages the concept of cosmopolitism: as a narrative trope meaningfully deployed within critical engagements and evaluations of self, society, and strategic resistance, and ultimately as an expression of agency, however liminal. The view taken here recognizes that such expressions are always shaped by the social, cultural, political and material predicaments through which individuals live their lives. This includes most especially gendered norms, expectations and practices. In doing so it recognizes that critical uses of cosmopolitanism are significantly gendered.

Analysing teachers' operations when teaching students: what constitutes scientific theories?

ABSTRACTThe aim of the study is to analyse teachers’ efforts to develop secondary school students’ knowledge and argumentation skills of what constitutes scientific theories. The analysis is based on Leontiev’s three-level structure of activity (activity, action, and operation), as these levels correspond to the questions why, what, and how content is taught. The unit of analysis was a school development project in science education, where design-based interventions were conducted. Data comprised notes and minutes from eight meetings, plans, and video recordings of the lessons, and a written teacher evaluation. The teachers’ (n = 7) learning actions were analysed to identify (a) concept formation in science education, (b) expressions of agency, (c) discursive manifestations of contradictions, and (d) patterns of interaction during the science interventions. Three lessons on what constitutes scientific theories were implemented in three different student groups (n = 24, 23, 24), framed by planning and evaluation meetings for each lesson. The results describe (1) the ways in which teachers became more skilled at ensuring instruction met their students’ needs and (2) the ways in which teachers’ operations during instruction changed as a result of their developed knowledge of how to express the content based on theoretical assumptions.

The education of children in care: Agency and resilience

This paper considers the educational experiences and progress of children in care in England. As part of a mixed methods study 26 young people, together with their carers, social workers and teachers, were asked about their educational experiences and the contributory factors to educational progress during secondary schooling. Responses from young people revealed that they were exercising control over their educational experiences – an expression of agency. They chose to engage with learning once they felt the problems in their lives were being managed and, therefore, that certain preconditions were being met. Analysis of this qualitative data was set within a theoretical framework linking the Sociology of Childhood with the Social Ecology of Resilience. Four groups of young people were identified who demonstrated different responses: ‘Stressed/unresolved’; ‘Committee/trusted support’; ‘Private/self-reliant’; and ‘Disengaged’. The implications are discussed for social workers and schools in working with young people to improve their educational progress and attainment.

Blackness and the Image of Motility: A Suspenseful Critique

This essay mobilizes the idea of “motility” to interrogate the integrative function blackness is expected to perform in both still and moving photographic images, i.e. the way in which it functions to foster a sense of coincidence between the profilmic space and the photographic image, thus bestowing a sense of wholeness to the image. Leveraging the fact that the notion of motility poses, but cannot conclusively resolve, the onto-political dimension of movement, and particularly the question of whether movement is an expression of agency, compulsion, or injunction, this essay examines the critical act of stillness and suspension Steve McQueen performs in his 1997 work Deadpan where he reproduces, but with an important variation, a famous Buster Keaton’s stunt from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). By departing from the original on the basis of his chosen upright stillness, McQueen pursues a productive wedge between the visible and the visual, against the integration carried out by the image of black motility and the compulsive association of black bodies with surplus affectability and movement.

Everyday Spaces of Human Trafficking: (In)visibility and Agency Among Trafficked Women in U.S. Military-Oriented Clubs in South Korea

Spaces of human trafficking can be perceived as “total,” akin to those of the prison and the detention center, because of the intense surveillance, bodily compliance through discipline, removal of freedom, and restricted mobility they create. Although Foucault's panopticon and Goffman's related concept of the total institution have some merit in conceptualizing these situations, geographical scholarship on institutions and regimes of incarceration has advanced important critiques of prisons as total institutions, arguing among other things for the potential of incarcerated subjects to resist and express agency. Drawing on de Certeau, these arguments focus on agency that is expressed through manipulating and subverting the disciplining gaze of power in highly embodied ways. This article examines these everyday expressions of agency in the context of bars and clubs located around U.S. military bases in South Korea, where many of the female migrant laborers are trafficked entertainers. Despite the growing scholarly engagement with human trafficking, comparatively little research attends to everyday resistance and agency in such situations or what spaces of human trafficking might tell us about the nature and geography of incarceration. In response, this article advances a perspective that centers on shadow play in everyday spaces of incarceration to illuminate the operations of resistance and agency in situations of human trafficking. It also draws attention to some of the limits in understanding resistance in such situations through the models and practices of labor activism derived through a consideration of ostensibly free laborers.

Blackness and the Image of Motility: A Suspenseful Critique

This essay mobilizes the idea of “motility” to interrogate the integrative function blackness is expected to perform in both still and moving photographic images, i.e. the way in which it functions to foster a sense of coincidence between the profilmic space and the photographic image, thus bestowing a sense of wholeness to the image. Leveraging the fact that the notion of motility poses, but cannot conclusively resolve, the onto-political dimension of movement, and particularly the question of whether movement is an expression of agency, compulsion, or injunction, this essay examines the critical act of stillness and suspension Steve McQueen performs in his 1997 work Deadpan where he reproduces, but with an important variation, a famous Buster Keaton’s stunt from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). By departing from the original on the basis of his chosen upright stillness, McQueen pursues a productive wedge between the visible and the visual, against the integration carried out by the image of black motility and the compulsive association of black bodies with surplus affectability and movement.

“Sacrifice” Among Ahmadi Women

In the world of religion, sacrifice is believed as a form of devotion toward the deities. Some theories suggest that every religion has its own system as well as function of sacrifice. Therefore, sacrifice cannot be perceived to have a singular meaning. This research focuses on the sacrifice practiced by the Ahmadiyah community, which is a controversial sect within Islam. By looking at the Ahmadi women in Indonesia, this study attempts to find out how women use sacrifice as an expression of agency. Instead of being victims or objects of sacrifice, women can, in fact, play a significant role in resisting discrimination against them by their male-dominated organization through sacrifice.

Exploring industrialized housebuilders’ interpretations of local requirements using institutional logics

Industrialized housebuilding contractors use standardized processes and building systems to improve time and cost efficiency. Recent governmental investigations argue that Swedish local planning authorities’ requirement setting practices stifle the potential for increased industrialization. Yet, no previous research has accounted for the industrialized housebuilders’ perspective. We aim to explore industrialized housebuilders’ interpretations of local requirement setting, using institutional logics to increase the understanding of how structure and human agency influence the emergence of local requirements. Interviews were conducted with representatives of five industrialized housebuilders who together span the Swedish multi-family housing market. Findings indicate that industrialized housebuilders do not perceive intentional local requirement setting as problematic, yet struggle to cope with interpretive local requirement setting. Findings also necessitate distinguishing local requirement setting in the exercise of public authority from local requirement setting in public procurement. The agency structure dualism contributes an understanding of interpretive local requirement setting in the exercise of public authority as an expression of agency and of local requirement setting in public procurement as one of structure. Furthermore, using an institutional logics approach is found to provide an accentuation of human agency and the individual level of analysis that is often absent from construction management research.

Health and Masculinities Shaped by Agency within Structures among Young Unemployed Men in a Northern Swedish Context.

AimThe aim of our paper was to explore expressions of life choices and life chances (aspects of agency within structures) related to power and experiences of health among early unemployed adolescent young men during the transition period to adulthood. These expressions of agency within structure were interpreted in the light of Cockerham’s Health Lifestyles Theory. Furthermore, social constructions of masculinities were addressed in our analysis.MethodsRepeated interviews with ten young men in a cohort of school leavers were analyzed with qualitative content analysis.Results and DiscussionCockerham’s model was useful for interpreting our findings and we found disposition to act to be a crucial theoretical tool to capture the will and intentions of participants in relation to health. We developed the model in the following ways: structure and socialization were visualized as surrounding the whole model. Analyses of what enhances or restricts power are important. In addition to practices of health lifestyles, we added experiences of health as outcome as well as emotional aspects in disposition to act. We interpret our findings as constructions of masculinities within certain structures, in relation to choices, habitus and practices.ConclusionsQualitative research could contribute to develop the understanding of the agency within structure relationships. Future studies need to pay attention to experiences of health among young people at the margin of the labor market in various milieus – and to analyze these in relation to gender constructions and within the frame-work of agency within structure.