Reflexive Agency Research Articles

Embracing Failure through Performative Pedagogy: A report from the margins

Working at a satellite campus of an Australian regional university, where many students are the first in their family to attend university, fear of failure can present a strong disincentive to creative experimentation. Consequently, the authors have developed a number of tacit strategies with which to gently engender students with critical and creative skills at the expense of short-term vocational expectations. This de-emphasis of vocational specificity is particularly radical in a social context in which unemployment is high, cultural diversity is low (despite a higher than average Indigenous population) and education levels remain low. This paper seeks to explore the challenge of fostering a climate of critically engaged creative experimentation in a relatively conservative and socially disadvantaged regional context. The authors consider whether there is pedagogical value in facilitating the creation of liminal spaces between community and classroom in a social environment more attuned to vocational aspiration and economic sustenance than critical self -reflexive agency. The paper also addresses the role of student centred learning and the idea of the undergraduate student as researcher as critical to facilitating a holistic educational experience. This case study proposes a pedagogical climate that might performatively emphasise the importance of students re-imagining their own ethical, philosophical, spiritual and political futures. The authors find that the potential for failure is incontrovertibly linked to each of these aims. In a world in which previously unimagined contexts are routinely traversed the author's assert that the transformative potential of failure can unlock a transposable ability for students to critically navigate the complexity of contemporary cultural landscapes.

Poetic Imag(ination): Finding Praxis Through Haiku

I draw on poetic inquiry to explore my experience using and interpreting haiku within the context of a literacy methods course. From this project I learned that poetry, as a pedagogical tool as well as one of inquiry, opens up spaces for (un)imaginable possibilities to be exposed, moving both teacher and students toward a place of praxis and reflexive agency

Formal education and intercultural capital: towards attachment beyond narrow ethno‐national boundaries?

Schooling and school management can play an important part in promoting inclusive forms of national attachment, intercultural dialogue and reflexive engagements with the “Unfamiliar”. The (inter) personal benefits of intercultural experiences and skills are widely acknowledged. But can we really learn to be intercultural? And what are the prospects of attachment beyond narrow ethno‐national boundaries for less privileged members of society? These questions lie at the heart of the present article. Conceptually, the article draws on Bourdieu's notions of habitus and cultural capital. Within this framework, I regard people's attachments to country (and beyond) as learned and habituated, yet open to modification and reconstruction through reflexive agency, educational practices and the acquisition of intercultural capital.

Wise Leadership and the Capacity for Ontological Acuity

Everything can be reduced to discourse, including leadership, or so it seems. The same can be said of psychology, although its epistemological tributaries are more diverse than those of discourse theory. The challenge for discourse theorists is to rigorously define their discipline and develop methodologies that link theory to practice. Fairhurst (2007) has considerably contributed to this endeavor and has as well set up a conversation between psychology and discourse analysis. This article adds to this conversation by examining agency in wise leadership through discussing the concept of ontological acuity. In doing so, we extend Fairhurst’s discussion of reflexive agency because we agree that leadership theories generally fail to adequately theorize agency and the ontological complexity of organizational life. By showing the role of discourse analysis in understanding agency in leadership research, this article indicates how discourse analysis and psychology research at the level of social cognition can contribute significantly to leadership research. Leaders constantly have to deal with the complexity of organizational knowledge inscribed in organizational discourse. Underlying this discourse is an episteme, comprising “the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems” (Foucault, 1972, p. 191). Because this episteme is an “a priori organising principle” (Bannet, 1989, p. 164) regulating what people think and say in discursive sites, leaders need to be able to reflexively understand and critique the inherent ontologies that regulate these sites. We call this capacity ontological acuity. Possessing this capacity, wise leaders become critical discourse analysts, even if unwittingly

Agency in Adaptation

Agency in Adaptation

The return of the subject?

The deconstruction of the subject associated with postmodernism cannot be said to have simply carried the day. Opponents and critics of postmodernism have held that we must return to the subject and to autonomy as a necessary condition of thinking about ethics, politics, agency and responsibility. Indeed, Peter Dews has recently argued that efforts to displace the subject repeat rather than dissolve the problems generated by subject-centered theories, a charge he takes to be devastating. The implications of this return to the subject, and the power of the critique which motivates it, will be my focus here. I consider especially Judith Butler's performative account of agency and her recent discussion of reflexivity, and argue that they afford us a means of obviating the critique while providing for the reflexive agency that proponents of the return to the subject think necessary.

On the ''Physiological Dope'' Problematic in Housing and Illness Research: Towards a critical realism of home and health

The housing and illness literature is fascinating because it represents a key battleground on which social science has waged an empirical war upon its traditional enemies in the natural sciences. However, while this literature is of immense sociological importance, it has yet to attract any theoretical interest from sociologists - despite the recent surge of interest in the sociology of the body. In this article I attempt to fill this lacuna by developing a sociological critique of the housing and illness literature. Specifically, I argue that housing researchers' commitments to making social factors conceptually prior to, and thus an external trigger of, physiological events might enable them to identify ''bad housing'' as a cause of illness. It cannot, however, enable them to explicate the variability and complexity of the relationship between housing, health and illness, namely why bad housing does not always cause illness, because it posits a conception of the human body as a ''physiological dope'', without agency. I suggest that this necessitates the embodiment of the epistemology of social science, so that pychosociological factors become internal and integral (rather than external and prior) to physiological events. I develop this theme by ''theory-building'' a three-dimensional (socio-psycho-physiological) conception of the body that possesses reflexive agency. This enables me to explicate how things can and do ''happen otherwise'' in the housing/health/illness relationship, i.e. how and why some reflexive occupants of bad housing can remain in good health.