Understanding and promoting agency are crucial to addressing urgent social problems of our time. Through agency, we can take transformative steps toward the future that ought to be. This book shows how contemporary conceptualizations from cultural-historical activity theory can inform research and practice that fosters positive change. At the core of this book's novel approach to agency and transformation are three motifs: motives, mediation, and motion. These take inspiration from the original work of Vygotsky and subsequent generations of scholarship, enabling us to understand agency in ways that recognize the social and cultural aspects of agency without losing sight of individuals' contributions to changing their own lives and the lives of others. Referring to connections between learning, pedagogy, and agency, the chapters address power, freedom, and the future in contexts including adolescence, school exclusion, children's activism, Indigenous communities, environmental activism, homelessness, childbirth, and young people during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Researchers need the concept of agency to address diverse and urgent social problems of our time. Cultural-historical activity theory, originally started with Vygotsky, is widely used in education, psychology, sociology, and transdisciplinary contexts. Scholars and students in diverse disciplines will benefit from this volume.
Recenzijos
'This edited volume introduces three interrelated motifs of motives, mediation, and motion to open a dialogue into the struggle between individual and social conceptions of agency and transformation. Highly respected contributors discuss fascinating studies and theorisations, which collectively showcase a diversity of interpretations and give new directions for research.' Marilyn Fleer, Monash University, Australia 'This remarkable insurgent book dares to propose the viable unheard of a Freirean utopic and revolutionary form of constituting agency. Presenting agency both as a concept and as a form of acting, this work interweaves chapters that address a variety of contexts committed to social and ecological justice.' Fernanda Liberali, Pontific Catholic University of Sćo Paulo, Brazil 'A rich book and a valuable contribution to CHAT, worthy of critical appraisal.' Bert Van Oers, Vrije Universiteit, the Netherlands
Daugiau informacijos
Research that seeks to understand and promote change can benefit from new ways of thinking about agency.
1. Motives, mediation and motion: toward an inherently learning- and
development-oriented perspective on agency Nick Hopwood and Annalisa Sannino;
2. Toward a power-sensitive conceptualization of transformative agency
Annalisa Sannino;
3. The tasks of reality and reality as the task: connecting
cultural-historical activity theory with the radical scholarship of
resistance Anna Stetsenko;
4. A relational view of a future-oriented
pedagogy: sustaining the agency of learners and teachers Anne Edwards;
5.
From future orientation to future-making: toward adolescents' transformative
agency Yrjö Engeström, Pauliina Rantavuori, Piia Ruutu and Maria
Tapola-Haapala;
6. Excluded lives: questions of agency and transformation in
practices of exclusion from school Harry Daniels, Ian Thompson and Alice
Tawell;
7. Children's and youth's civic projects and responsible agency
Jaakko Hilppö and Antti Rajala;
8. Decolonizing agency: future-making with
indigenous communities Aydin Bal and Aaron Bird Bear;
9. Unpacking social
articulation of agency: vexed questions for responsive professional action
Prabhat Rai;
10. The emancipatory nature of transformative agency: mediating
agency from below in a post-apartheid South African land restitution case
Heila Lotz-Sisitka, Reuben Thifhulufhelwi, Charles Chikunda and Maletje
Mponwana;
11. Choice in childbirth, agency and collective action: caesarean
sections and birth plans in Brazil Denise Yoshie Niy and Carmen Simone Grilo
Diniz;
12. Transformative agency by double stimulation in an ecological
agroforestry association from Brazil: reflections from a change laboratory
intervention Osni Arturo Francisco Junior, Manoel Flores Lesama and Marco
Antonio Pereira Querol;
13. Transformative agency and the cultivation of
innovations in frontline homelessness work Hannele Kerosuo and Esa Jokinen;
14. Children's agency during the COVID-19 pandemic in China Ge Wei;
15.
Agency as the direction and reach of actions: a theoretical outline Nick
Hopwood.
Nick Hopwood is Professor of Professional Learning at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia and Extraordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He studies how learning contributes to positive change, using and developing cultural-historical theory in the process. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Medicine for his work on professional learning in health care and has received numerous grants for studies working with families with vulnerable young children. Annalisa Sannino is Professor at the Faculty of Education and Culture at Tampere University, Finland. She also serves as Distinguished Research Fellow at Monash University, Australia and Visiting Professor at Rhodes University, South Africa and University West, Sweden. She studies agency and learning for equitable and sustainable transformations by means of cultural-historical activity theory and formative interventions.
