Reading :: Agency and Transformation

Agency and Transformation: Motives, Mediation, and Motion

Edited by Nick Hopwood and Annalisa Sannino

This 2024 collection from Cambridge focuses on agency from a cultural-historical perspective, and largely with the purpose of political activism. 

As the editors argue in Chapter 1, “The world we live in urgently calls for a better understanding of agency, and for using new understandings to promote positive change” (p.1). They critique “what dominant psychological and sociological conceptualisations of agency typically offer: categorising different types of agency but remaining silent or unclear on the processes of its emergence and development” (p.1). They note that agency is often seen as a slippery concept (p.3), but argue that this slipperiness is more due to how we too often think about agency. Their alternative is a dialectic understanding of agency, grounded in cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) (p.7). In discussing this understanding, they characterize Vygotsky’s project as “rebellious” and “activist” (p.9), and they explore three “motifs”: motivation, mediation, and motion. They then turn to developing a developmental account of agency (p.19), one that does not just respond but that also builds toward a vision of the future. 

In Chapter 2, Sannino offers a conceptualization of transformative agency based on her transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS) framework (p.35). As she explains, “TADS highlights the unfolding of transformative agency as a process (motion). These dynamics are triggered by the ways in which historical contradictions are experienced when we pursue what matters in our activities (motives). They are sustained by the use of cultural means and artifacts (mediation)” (p.36). She puts this perspective into dialogue with “Eric Olin Wright’s sociology of real utopias” (p.36), which “despite the strong dialectical and progressive stance it adopts… is still predominantly one based on the formulation of accounts and critiques on how power is played out” (p.36). Along the way, Sannino overviews her recent studies on eradicating homelessness, examining two studies in which housing unit managers and employees, NGOs, city and national representatives participated. (Residents of the housing units did not.) Examining these “hybrid coalitions,” Sannino concludes: “the agency processes presented earlier make it possible to put forward the following three claims on which a power-sensitive concept of transformative agency could build: (1) power can be put in motion by means of TADS; (2) conflicting motives, besides being paralyzing experiences of disorientation and powerlessness, can also be resources for generating and exerting power; and (3) power is a willful process that can be triggered and sustained by deliberately mobilizing material and symbolic artifacts as mediators” (p.51).

In Chapter 3, Anna Stetsenko argues that we should “understand humans as active co-creators of the world and their own development who agentively contribute to co-realizing the-world-in-the-making and, moreover, who come to be agentive – that is, capable to matter – precisely through such contributions” (p.57). She characterizes this view as decolonialist, invoking Frantz Fanon (p.57), and characterizes it within her transformative activist stance (p.60), which understands Marxism and Vygotsky’s approach as aligning “with the radical scholarship of resistance” (p.60). Along these lines, she challenges views of Vygotsky as eurocentric: indeed, Marx and Vygotsky yielded a “new – I would argue, de facto non-eurocentric – approach” because “their philosophy of ‘world-changing’ went against the very core postulates and the most central pillars of European canons” (pp.61-62). (I think this argument is a tough one to make, and requires us to either ignore or explain away Vygotsky’s consistent focus on achieving the New Soviet Human through teaching Soviet cultural tools and competencies. See my review of Proctor’s Psychologies in Revolution for starters.) Stetsenko concludes that “this chapter reveals how the scholarship of resistance, inclusive of the Marxist/Vygotskian framework and its extension in TAS, offers ways to understand human agency without placing humans either above nature/reality or apart from it. Instead, all of human development is understood as the process of a synergistic co-realizing of, and hence a togetherness with, the world. This highlights that people and the world belong together – and moreover, not as entities but as currents in one and the same stream of a joint/entangled/entwined co-becoming” (p.76). 

Skipping ahead, in Chapter 8, Aydin Bal and Aaron Bird Bear “present a formative intervention study, Indigenous Learning Lab, implemented at Northwood High School through a coalition of an Anishinaabe Nation in the Great Lakes, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the Wisconsin Indian Education Association, and a university-based research team” (p.183). At the high school, “Indigenous students who made up 21 percent of the student population received over 60 percent of the suspensions and 100 percent of the expulsions in the 2014–15 academic year” (p.184). In response, “Indigenous Learning Lab aimed at facilitating transformative agency among American Indian students, families, educators, and community members and non-Indigenous educators at Northwood High School to design the future of their school’s behavioral support system” (p.184). Applying Sannino’s TADS and following a decolonialist approach, the authors conclude that 

Disproportionate representation of American Indian students in school discipline is an adaptive historically accumulated systemic crisis. The individualization of systemic problems – seemingly color-neutral discourses, policies, and practices – cannot solely address complex, adaptive systemic injustices such as disproportionality. People cannot survive and thrive in an oppressive institutional culture that persists and reinforces racism, White supremacy, and racialized experiences. Addressing racial disproportionality requires developing systemic, adaptive, and persistent solutions with historically marginalized communities and practitioners and building justice-oriented, strategic coalitions among multiple communities and activity systems that envision systemic transformation. To this end, there is a need for creating an inclusive problem-solving space in which local stakeholders collaboratively engage in future-making with critical dialogue on racism and settler colonialism to dismantle the existing punishing, disabling, and marginalizing education systems and simultaneously reimagine schools as sites of collaboration, inclusive future-making, and joy. (p.205)

The collection also includes chapters describing research into a post-Apartheid land restitution case in South Africa (Chapter 10), birth plans in Brazil (Chapter 11), an ecological agroforestry association also in Brazil (Chapter 12), frontline homelessness work in Finland (Chapter 13 — reporting on the Housing First project led by Sannino), and children’s agency during the COVID-19 epidemic in China (Chapter 14), along with several classroom studies that I skimmed (I’m just not that interested in classroom studies). 

The collection concludes with Nick Hopwood’s chapter on agency in CHAT. Hopwood argues that “Linking actions with activities is key to [overcoming the tendency to locate agency in an individual/structure binary]. Concern for the direction and reach of actions implies consideration of the activities in which they are embedded” (p.357). He concludes: 

Agency cannot be directionless. It is a matter of intended movement towards a desired future, however unviable it may seem and however unknowable the means to realise it may be. As such, agency is inherently and intimately connected with motives, with responsibility to oneself and others. (p.376)

In sum, the collection uses contemporary CHAT to discuss the difficult question of agency. Although I’m not especially interested in agency per se — like other broad terms such as “concept” and “solidarity,” this term has been used so many ways that it’s sometimes hard to tell what is being invoked — in this collection, authors have worked hard to develop a developmental, cultural-historical understanding of agency. For me, it is not entirely convincing — I’d really like to see more critical pushback against Vygotsky, Leontiev, and others in the CHAT lineage, who (I would argue) clearly understand agency differently than some of the contributors here. I’ve already mentioned Vygotsky’s focus on empowerment through culturally assimilating someone else’s tools, and I second Blunden’s critique of Leontiev as providing a managerial view of activity, i.e., a view from the top of the hierarchy. 

Still, reading these chapters has given me a better sense of an approach to agency, one that attempts to retain a developmental understanding while making the concept useful through a decolonialist lens. That’s an important contribution. If you’re interested in agency and CHAT, definitely pick up this book.