Full Description
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.
Contents
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.
