Agency and Transformation

Motives, Mediation, and Motion

Nick Hopwood, Annalisa Sannino

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2023
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009191272
• Subtopic: Ethnopsychology
• Index: Psychology

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Motives, Mediation and Motion: Towards an Inherently Learning- and Development-Orientated Perspective on Agency
• Chapter 2 Toward a Power-Sensitive Conceptualization of Transformative Agency
• Chapter 3 The Tasks of Reality and Reality As the Task: Connecting Cultural-Historical Activity Theory with the Radical Scholarship of Resistance
• Chapter 4 A Relational View of a Future-Orientated Pedagogy: Sustaining the Agency of Learners and Teachers
• Chapter 5 From Future Orientation to Future-Making: Towards Adolescents’ Transformative Agency
• Chapter 6 Excluded Lives: Questions of Agency and Transformation in Practices of Exclusion from School
• Chapter 7 Children’s and Youth’s Civic Projects and Responsible Agency
• Chapter 8 Decolonizing Agency: Future-Making with Indigenous Communities
• Chapter 9 Unpacking Social Articulation of Agency: Vexed Questions for Responsive Professional Action
• Chapter 10 The Emancipatory Nature of Transformative Agency: Mediating Agency from Below in a Post„-Apartheid„ Land Restitution Case
• Chapter 11 Choice in Childbirth, Agency and Collective Action: Cesarean Sections and Birth Plans in Brazil
• Chapter 12 Transformative Agency by Double Stimulation in an Ecological Agroforestry Association from Brazil: Reflections from a Change Laboratory Intervention
• Chapter 13 Transformative Agency and the Cultivation of Innovations in Frontline Homelessness Work
• Chapter 14 Children’s Agency during the COVID-19 Pandemic in China
• Chapter 15 Agency As the Direction and Reach of Actions: A Theoretical Outline
• Index