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Building on postcolonial, feminist and gendered migration theories and the ‘turn to mobility’ this article aims to explore the agency of so-called low-skilled Moroccan female marriage migrants in Flanders (Belgium). More precisely, it aims to study how religious temporality plays a role and how it shapes their experiences in a specific context of migration and precariousness. It questions how these women invoke a religious temporality in confronting the uncertainties and difficulties of which motherhood and a precarious residency status are the most challenging and stigmatising. Firstly, focussing on two ethnographic vignettes this article empirically analyses their nonlinear, risky and often undocumented trajectories laying bare a politico-discursive temporality in marriage migration, motherhood and belonging. Secondly, it analyses how exactly these women tend to challenge this bureaucratic temporality. The analyses show that through their active engagement with sabr (patience) and tawakkul (reliance on God) these women become agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where sporting games may be said to epitomize our species' unique agential capacity for playful movement, sports played in nature differ from their equivalent played indoors in that they envelop the human agent within the living physical environment from which our agency originates. In this paper, we draw attention to how sporting sites differ according to origin by pursuing a biosemiotic line of reasoning. Here, the story of a meaningful human life begins with the eukaryotic cell, even though the human subject itself arises much later. As such, the story of nature in relation to our agency, here, in sports, changes too. We present key concepts from biosemiotics, including its continuum life-as-semiotic-agency view, Umwelt, metasemiosis, and semiotic scaffolding to advance our argument that naturogenic sporting sites provide continuity to the macro processes that have generated our semiotic ability to play. Meanwhile, secluded anthropogenic environments constitute yet another discontinuity for the modern sportsperson where the moving body steps into an anthroposemiotic loop and its restricted signscapes from centralized agency. We conclude on the primacy of naturogenic sporting sites as they preserve the quality and complexity of animal ludens' constitutive relations and therefrom semiotic freedom, on which current and future gameplaying depends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, neoliberal logics have affected the teaching profession and, consequently, had a direct impact on teachers' professionalism. The aim of this paper was to conduct a literature review to determine the most significant arguments and debates about teacher professionalism in the last 10 years and its relation to a transformative teacher attitude. Therefore, relevant review studies from 2011 to 2021 were analysed in order to respond to the following questions: "how can current scholarly publishing within teacher professionalism inform a transformative vision of education? What are the main themes identified and how do they relate in order to inform teachers' professionalism?". The themes of 'professionalism' and 'agency' are central to the current scientific debate, interconnected with the issues of professional development, leadership, and research. This paper hereby provides insight into alternative paths towards the (re)professionalisation of teachers, which response can be a 'transformative professionalism' framed by the interconnection of professionalism and agency. The process of continuous professional development in the context of autonomy appears as the elected form for this process of re-professionalisation and agency. School leadership and teachers' research emerge as opportunities for professional development with these characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success with which minority teachers cope with socio-cultural integration indicates their transformative agency. However, teachers' ideational projects, which are converted into a set of established practices, are tightly connected with their ideologies. In this case what they transform is not a matter of integration for them but is irrevocably intertwined with protecting their own culture. Applying a symbolic interactionist methodological lens and Archer's 'social morphogenesis' explanatory framework, in this qualitative research I aim to examine the unique educational context of Estonia. Schools with Russian as the language of instruction co-exist with schools where instruction is in the national language. The paper explores the mechanisms that stand behind the social agency of minority teachers and why their practices are considered 'morphostatic' for the whole education system. The paper concludes that these teachers' agency is culturally mediated and their strategies are reflexive and morphogenetic in nature, even though they don't lead to integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Middle Eastern contexts, like Jordan, the public participation spaces referred to as “invited spaces” for state-led participation are heavily controlled by the state and its representatives. This paper explores the various ways in which grassroots and civic organizations navigate and sometimes manipulate the state apparatus’ planning rules and grids to create alternative modes of meaningful participation in the production of the city. Following the Arab Spring in 2011, local grassroots organizations started adopting “new languages and taktikat” (تَكتِيكَات,’ tactics in English, words used by the grassroots to describe their practices) that allowed them to move beyond direct confrontation with the state in the so-called “invented” spaces of participation led by civil society. Building on de Certeau’s notion of “tactics,” this paper looks at these approaches as tactics used by grassroots to negotiate power and participation within neoliberal top-down authorities. Ultimately, it argues against viewing grassroots initiatives solely in terms of a binary lens of legality/informality or “invited”/“invented” dichotomies, as they neither function as insurgents nor remain passive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From early 2020, as the spread of COVID-19 and related restrictions intersected with everyday lives and, inevitably, social research practices, the ability to act and continue research was a significant concern in the social research community. In a project aimed at supporting methodological responses to the pandemic context the authors ran a series of online knowledge exchange workshops. The invitation to participate suggested researchers convey recent times of their research experiences by drawing and presenting a river sketch. The paper critically engages with the research rivers by creating a new interference pattern of a new materialist approach combined with experiences and project artefacts. The compatibility of new materialism and qualitative inquiry is discussed. Through an analysis focussed on two of the rivers, the ways the research river activity entangled matter and meaning is examined and the paper shows how a new materialist understanding of exclusion transforms the ethical dimensions of researchers' methodological decisions. We conclude that research rivers produce particular forms of retrospective agency that highlighted affect throughout the pandemic and reframes the ethics for choosing and developing methods along an axis of inclusion and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sense of agency, our felt sense of authorship for our actions, is a difficult concept to define, yet its faltering stands at the heart of psychopathology. Historically undertheorized by psychoanalysis and typically positioned opposite relatedness by clinical psychology, Jeremy Safran conceived of agency and relatedness as paradoxically related. This paper pays tribute to Safran's ideas by taking his writings on agency as a starting point to elaborate how agency forms, and goes awry, in the relational crucible of early life. In doing so, the paper draws on the developmental theory of Winnicott, empirical research on embodied agency from adjacent fields of study, and Safran's clinical phenomenology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agency, or the capacity to take intentional actions, is considered one of the primary affordances of virtual reality (VR) for learning. VR is expected to increase learners' agency because it allows for full‐body interactivity from a first‐person perspective, giving them novel ways of interacting with the digital environment. Yet, agency in immersive learning has not been well‐studied relative to other affordances like presence, and more evidence is needed to understand how varied media and designs heighten or diminish agency. This mixed‐method study addressed this need by developing and validating measures of sense of agency with 30 high school students who used VR field trips in their engineering class over four lessons. By comparing immersive videos to video game‐like interactive graphical environments, the study illustrates some of the complexities of agency in VR. The findings indicate agency is not a unidimensional construct nor is it equivalent to full‐body interactivity in VR as learners felt some types of agency when using immersive videos. Furthermore, learners' identities moderated associations between the type of VR media and their sense of agency, and agency did not change over time as the novelty of VR waned. These results suggest VR designers should consider varied ways of interacting in VR that are beneficial for learning. They also support the use of immersive videos when the educator's goal is to increase agency over learning or focus, and provide measures and direction for future research to assess the relationship between varied types of agency, features of VR experiences and learning outcomes. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic Virtual reality (VR) can enhance learning by giving learners a strong sense of presence in the virtual environment and giving them agency over their learning through novel forms of interactivity. Many studies have looked at increasing the learner's presence in VR, but fewer have assessed learners' agency. Prior work found the impact of increased interactivity on learning was mixed: sometimes it increased learning outcomes and motivation, other times it did not. What this paper adds This study develops and validates measures of learners' sense of agency within VR learning environments. This study finds that more interactivity in VR increases how much agency learners feel over their actions but not necessarily their agency over learning and attention. This study also finds variation in students' experiences of agency based on their culturally defined sense of self‐construal. Implications for practice and/or policy Practitioners interested in immersive learning technologies should consider the design of the media used rather than focusing only on the device's capability. Immersive videos may be effective tools for enhancing student agency, depending on the aims of the learning experience. Designers and educators should consider learners' identities such as self‐construal, and understand student experiences may vary. What is already known about this topic Virtual reality (VR) can enhance learning by giving learners a strong sense of presence in the virtual environment and giving them agency over their learning through novel forms of interactivity. Many studies have looked at increasing the learner's presence in VR, but fewer have assessed learners' agency. Prior work found the impact of increased interactivity on learning was mixed: sometimes it increased learning outcomes and motivation, other times it did not. What this paper adds This study develops and validates measures of learners' sense of agency within VR learning environments. This study finds that more interactivity in VR increases how much agency learners feel over their actions but not necessarily their agency over learning and attention. This study also finds variation in students' experiences of agency based on their culturally defined sense of self‐construal. Implications for practice and/or policy Practitioners interested in immersive learning technologies should consider the design of the media used rather than focusing only on the device's capability. Immersive videos may be effective tools for enhancing student agency, depending on the aims of the learning experience. Designers and educators should consider learners' identities such as self‐construal, and understand student experiences may vary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global – albeit uneven – nature of the Covid-19 pandemic has heralded changes that shape and reshape ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, ideoscapes, mediascapes (Appadurai 1996) [Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] and linguascapes (Pennycook 2003) [“Global Englishes, Rip Slyme and Performativity.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4): 513–533]. It is unsurprising then that the papers in this Special Issue show how contradictions have become commonsensical in the post-Covid landscape. Agency runs as an overarching theme across the papers in diverse forms: the reassigning of primary responsibility for health to individuals by authorities (Huang); the undertaking of active surveillance of the self and others (Leppänen); increasing agency through digital technology and multimodal repertoires (Ou and Maelström); and activism in the form of positive digital citizenship (Jiang) or online and offline political activism and protest (Silva and Lopes). Intertwined with this theme of agency, a number of areas emerge: the issue of personalisation or individualisation in digital communication; the increasing multi-modality and in particular the creative move from remediation to resemiotisation, benign and malignant; the role of surveillance, in terms of the policing of order, maintenance of behaviour and control of the self and others, and of explicit groups by official authorities; and the hierarchies and inequalities in terms of the uneven experience of the pandemic and its ongoing effects and activist responses to this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attia Hosain's Partition novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), offers possibilities for the physical structure of the home to be analysed through a spatial lens to decode architectural metaphors of the zenana (women's space). This paper explores how the women characters negotiate with the often dichotomised private and public spheres of the home and outside, to show their rising confluence in a mod-ernising nation. This paper grounds gendered space in the materiality of courtyards, walls, stairwells and rooftops to argue that the homosocial, homospatial bond that exists within the zenana court-yard is reinvented by Laila in the wake of the socio-political changes of the 1930s–50s, which allows for Laila's imagined 'world' to become a reality. By studying the architectural sites of seclusion not as static but charged with agential capacity through their enclosed openness, this paper reads the courtyard as a transgressive space of resistive politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the method of tracing-and-mapping, this paper traces the history of how menstruation has been conceptualized in English education policies since 1928, as well as how such conceptualizations have positioned young people. It explains how education policy in England has conceptualized menstruation as a (cis girls') biological process; a controllable problem; and a process that can be instructed on and learned. The paper unfolds how such conceptualizations positioned young people as passive non-agents. It also draws on feminist relational materialism, critical menstruation studies and childhood studies to experiment with different articulations of menstruation and agency. It concludes by reimagining menstruation education and young people's role in addressing menstrual stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a substantial body of leaving care research, the theorization of care leaving has been more limited. Only a few studies have incorporated a life course perspective, mainly in Global North contexts where life course perspectives may differ significantly from those in the Global South, including Africa. Drawing on findings from a feasibility research study, this paper contributes to the emerging international literature on theorizing care leaving by applying a life course perspective to the experiences of youth leaving care in four African countries. The paper highlights how life course can be a useful conceptual framework for understanding the experiences of care leavers with an emphasis on four core concepts: biography, linked lives, waithood, and agency. Implications for policy and practice are outlined with a focus on interdependence, participatory practice, biography, and cultural transition planning alongside efforts to redress systemic, oppressive barriers facing care leavers in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bell's theorem is based on the assumptions of local causality and measurement independence. The last assumption is identified by many authors as linked to the freedom of choice hypothesis. In this sense the human free will ultimately can ensure the measurement independence assumption. The incomplete experimental conditions for supporting this assumption are known in the literature as "freedom-of-choice loophole" (FOCL). Although there is no consensus among the scientists that the measurement independence is linked to human choices, in a recent paper, published in a prestigious journal, signed by more than a hundred authors, this assumption was seriously taken for the first time in an experiment known as Big Bell Test (Abellán et al. 2018). Using photons, single atoms, atomic ensembles and superconducting devices, this experiment was performed in five continents, and involved twelve laboratories, adopting human choices to close the FOCL. Nevertheless, the possibility of human freedom of choice has been a matter of philosophical debate for more than 2000 years, and there is no consensus among philosophers on this topic. If human choice is not free, this solution would not be sufficient to close FOCL. Therefore, in order to support the basic assumption of this experiment, it is necessary to argue that human choice is indeed free. In this paper, we present a Kantian position on this topic and defend the view that this philosophical position is the best way to ensure that Big Bell Test can in fact close the loophole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, I explore a pragmatist and processualist perspective on the interpretation of historical sources. By analyzing Horace M. Kallen's 1918 book, 'The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy', regarded as an instance of pragmatist historical inquiry, this paper engages with recent processual and evental approaches to history. It elucidates a conceptualization of historical sources as 'actor-events'. Through Kallen's example, the paper demonstrates how cultural historians can effectively perceive sources as both actors that evoke meaning and as events that unfold. From this perspective, Kallen's work illustrates how diverse temporalities hold simultaneous significance and how cultural and social struggles related to what is emerging, in the future, give rise to the emergence of truth in historical sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few issues have attracted as much policy interest in the tertiary sector as graduate employability. Graduate employability positions universities and their students as key players in the national economy. At the same time, the standard conception of graduate employability, as it has evolved from human capital theory and modified by neoliberal ideology, has met with significant criticism. This paper reports on our analysis of the strategic plans of Australia's 42 operating universities current in 2018 to better understand (1) the extent to which employability was embedded in each university's strategic priorities and (2) the ways in which employability was characterised in those plans. Our paper provides empirical evidence of the way in which Australian universities universally and uniformly adopted a particular model of employability, simultaneously claiming its distinctiveness. Our analysis suggests the need for Australian universities to take a more thoughtful and nuanced approach to graduate employability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Second language acquisition theory has traditionally focused on the cognitive and psycholinguistic processes involved in additional language (L2) learning. In addition, research on learner psychology has primarily centered on learners’ cognitive abilities (e.g., aptitude and working memory) and internal traits or states (e.g., dispositions, motivations, and affect). Language learning behavior, however, has remained largely neglected and under‐theorized. To address this gap, this paper proposes the proactive language learning theory, which delineates the agentic and strategic behaviors that learners employ to learn an additional language. These behaviors include input‐seeking behavior, interaction‐seeking behavior, information‐seeking behavior, and feedback‐seeking behavior. This paper presents theoretical arguments supporting the proposal, describes the four behavioral dimensions of the theory, and outlines general hypotheses concerning the contextual and learner‐related antecedents of these behaviors and their effects on L2 outcomes. Finally, the potential implications of this theory for advancing our understanding of L2 learning and instruction are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With dramatic global expansion of secondary schooling there has been significant research interest in how education is related to future aspirations, with important calls to acknowledge connections within processes of aspiring to young people's social, economic and cultural circumstances. This paper presents findings from thematic analysis of interview, participant observation and classroom observation data from an ethnographic study in two secondary schools in Tanzania. It argues that an important, and often overlooked, aspect of this complex process is the way in which aspirations for the future are connected not only to present realities, but also aspirations in the present. Focusing on students' aspirations relating to 'being a "good" student' and being able to 'soma kwa bidii' or 'study hard', this paper uses the conceptual language of the capability approach to assert the importance of considering aspirations for 'being' in education in conjunction with future aspirations for 'becoming'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music therapy research has traditionally been somewhat fragmented into different research traditions. This paper argues that the burgeoning field of enactivism could provide important theoretical integration to music therapy research and practice. Stressing the interdependence of mind, brain, body, and environment, enactivism has provided theoretical integration in several fields, not least music cognition and psychiatry. This paper is the first focused theoretical contribution that applies relevant enactivist theory to music therapy. After a reflection on theoretical developments in music therapy, we provide a general introduction to enactivism and its multiple origins in human and biological sciences and present its existing contributions to understanding mental illness and musicking. We also make a specific contribution, through discussion of an example of free music improvisation. Providing an enactive analysis of the sense of agency in this practice, we argue that music improvisation, especially in therapy, might work particularly well for people with severe mental illness because improvisation strengthens and flexes the disturbed sense of agency that often characterizes such mental health challenges. Finally, we discuss strengths and weaknesses of the proposed framework and suggest future potential studies to better evaluate the potential contribution of enactivism to the research and practice of music therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings of a qualitative study that explored international students' identity negotiation during their cross-border studies against the backdrop of the internationalisation of higher education in Asia. Through a comparative narrative-based case study of two Burmese international students' experiences during their studies in a Hong Kong university, the paper reveals both similarities and differences in their negotiation of (i) identities as 'non-local'/'international' students in the university context and (ii) national identities in relation to the local community and the imagined global/international community. In particular, the findings illustrate the divergent ways in which the two international students negotiate the meanings they attach to the 'non-local' student label, respond to local students' (mis)recognition of their national identities, and perceive the (in)compatibility between their national and global identities. Overall, the findings point to the diversity and heterogeneity in international students' experiences which appear to be variably shaped by differential dispositions and capacities in exercising strategic agency for identity (re)construction. The case study also calls for the need to problematise the reification and over-simplification of the so-called 'international student experience' and argues for the importance of paying attention to the complexity of international students' identity negotiation in the context of international education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates students' post-secondary education transition processes in Cameroon through the lens of agency. Situated in a country where the higher education participation rate is fairly low, our article explores how students agentically negotiate access to higher education within structural constraints of socio-economic status and gender. Semi-structured interviews with 25 students from two secondary schools in Yaoundé, Cameroon were conducted. The findings reveal that students enacted the four modes of reflexives (Archer, 2003) dynamically and discursively, with specific manifestations of agency relevant to gendered and classed structures in Cameroonian society. In this paper, we propose a person-centred, empowering approach to supporting students in higher education participation. We further confirm the importance of non-universal, contextually-situated employment of Archer's (2003) typology of four reflexive modes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Sugden (2018. The Community of Advantage: A Behavioural Economist’s Defence of the Market. Oxford University Press) offers an alternative account for normative economics grounded in the view that it is in each individual’s interest to have more opportunity rather than less, irrespective of whether their decisions reveal well-ordered preferences. Our paper characterizes Sugden’s proposal as a step in the right direction, but as insufficient. His opportunity criterion does not go far enough in taking insights from psychology seriously. Sugden defends an idea of agency understood as a person’s subjective sense of being in control of her actions. To realize this sense of being in control, we argue that a focus on opportunity-only is problematic; people also need agentic capabilities. We use self-determination theory (SDT) to develop a subjective account of agency that is grounded in psychological science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion paper is presented to be read in three simultaneous and different modalities. At one level, it is a historiography of British Bengali women's labour power and hence an exploration of the historical constraints that vis-a-vis appear as a natural logical consequence but on closer examination performed as part of a broader structure of inequality. At another level, it intervenes, utilising the theoretical lens of Pierre Bourdieu's 'thinking tools' to inform an awareness that does not pathologize, but instead reads against the constructed layers of assumptions to foreground the social conditions that appear as social structures in diminishing Bengali women's labour power. Finally, the discussion expands the site of analysis, arguing under Sunni orthodoxy based upon the recitation, women have significant labour rights, moreover those rights have diminished in Bangladesh. At the same time, in Britain, social conditions have superseded religious limitations that have benefitted British Bengali women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite an increasing number of studies that explore language learning beyond the classroom (LBC), research examining LBC activities in relation to in-class learning is very limited. This paper investigates what kinds of LBC activities university students of Chinese and Japanese in Australia engage in and how they connect these activities to classroom learning. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews, two-week diary entries about their exposure to the target language and stimulated-recall interviews based on their diary entries. The analysis reveals several ways that the students bridge in-class and out-of-class learning, including integration between in-class learning and LBC which are mutually supportive. It also shows some differences in types of LBC activities between learners of Chinese and those of Japanese, in part due to the limited availability of online resources and media in China. Based on these findings, we need to continue to discuss how to encourage LBC based on students' digital literacies and practices and how to integrate LBC with classroom learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enhancing women's decision-making autonomy in developing countries constitutes one of the recognised approaches to improving maternal healthcare service utilisation. The inability of women to make decisions about their health, the lack of universal health insurance, and inadequate health facilities are contributing factors to high maternal mortality rates in many countries in the developing world. This study explored women's decision-making autonomy over maternal healthcare in Ghana. The authors used a mixed method design, collecting quantitative data through a survey of 163 pregnant and lactating mothers from private and public health centres in Madina, a suburb of Accra in the Greater Accra Region. They also gathered qualitative data from four nurses/midwives and 40 women and their partners. The study identified a clear dominance of men over women in making maternal health decisions, explained mainly by cultural, financial and religious factors. It also identified two other decision-making processes influenced by economic factors: a balanced or democratic decision-making process and a women-dominated decision-making process. The paper concludes that there is a need for a change in cultural norms and stereotypes, particularly concerning the supply side of health services and the factors driving individuals to seek quality and appropriate maternal health care. Presently, these decisions are heavily influenced by cultural and economic patriarchal relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stemming from the combined philosophies of social work and professional artistic practice, this paper recounts five years of working with populations of fifth graders to craft their own original plays. Application of group development theory in our evolving theatrical process emphasizes several lessons, including utilizing a population's observed need(s) to derive socioemotional purpose; the ownership a group discovers when creating its own material; and the importance of centering what two communities have to offer each other in mutual aid. The 509 classroom at PS3 is a case study for the immense socioemotional impact artistic practice can have when student need is not neglected in favor of academic skill acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guest worker programs entail an intrinsic tension between control over workers' mobility and workers' agency. By drawing on the qualitative data from Chinese construction workers in Japan's Technical Intern Training Program (TITP), I illuminate the dialectical nature of the tension between control and agency. My findings suggest that labor recruiters and employers implement labor control, but their practices have the opposite effect of pressing workers to abscond or to do irregular jobs. Staying in the program is not an outcome of effective control, but a response to circumstances wherein revisions to Japan's immigration policy bring rewards while China's surveillance policies incur potential punishments. The control-agency dialectic suggests that the regulative focus should be shifted from workers to employers and recruiters. Incorporating approaches of spatiotemporality and relationality, I analyze how workers sustain relations with various actors through three interconnected temporal stages, and how the relational dynamics shape workers' varied mobility choices. Two features of the construction industry shape workers' circumstances and occasionally facilitate their mobility: the stratification of the labor force according to legal status and the subcontract system. The paper thus highlights the need to contextualise labor agency in changing state policies, relations with co-ethnics, and industry-specific features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ObjectiveMethodResultsConclusionThis study reviews the status of materials in curriculum and reform, as reflected in a network case study of curriculum in one kindergarten classroom in the United States. This paper focuses on the events leading up to and building upon one inquiry unit that became a focal point in promoting progressive curriculum reform at the school.Methods from Actor Network Theory are employed to attend to a wide cast of human and nonhuman actors, trace their mobilities, and map them into curricular networks. Data, collected over 9 months of one school year, included field notes, audio recordings of conversations, and images of classroom objects and arrangements.Three material assemblages—a closet, a bulletin board, and a curriculum timeline—are viewed as agents assisting in stabilizing the inquiry unit and sustaining further student-centred inquiries amidst competing curricular reforms and policies. Findings demonstrate how teachers may mobilize such assemblages to accomplish multiple objectives, as is necessary when navigating tensions from multiple parties or reform mandates.This study contributes to scholarship conceptualizing the status of curriculum materials, with particular attention to their functionality at the nexus of both the micro-interactions of curriculum enactment and the macro-politics of educational reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ball-Jointed Doll (BJD) is a category of dolls that are exclusively collected by adult doll collectors. These fully articulated and customizable dolls possess a distinctively significant place in the collector's life. The collectors form an affective relationship with their dolls often animating them. This paper looks at this instance of contemporary animism from a neo-animistic paradigm attempting to dissect the subject–object binary and hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-resident fathers are rarely researched from a critical perspective. Becoming a non-resident father often results in major dislocation, presenting challenges and hindrances to a meaningful relationship with children. Dislocation is increased by the involvement of the family court, legal issues, false abuse allegations, and ex-partners. Changing family configurations may marginalize non-resident fathers, with their own perspectives, voices, and lack of power remaining largely unmapped. This paper identifies what hinders non-resident fathers' relationships with their children from a critical and Australian perspective. In-depth interviews using open-ended questions with 19 non-resident fathers were used to collect data, followed by a five-step critical thematic analysis to focus on the locus of power. Non-resident fathers' perceptions included a lack of agency and decision-making power; the mother, legal obstacles, and agencies hindered their desired relationships with children. Hindrances were magnified by descriptions of false allegations and IPV from the ex-partner and/or her agents, resulting in a sense of marginalization, silencing, and disempowerment. Australian non-resident fathers in this study identified that desired relationships with their children were hindered by the roles of legal and welfare services, policing, and their ex-partners. The highlighting of these issues points to ways that non-resident fathers with similar experiences of a lack of agency and decision-making power might be better supported by more streamlined and balanced legal processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses insider research within a Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) framework to examine the lived induction-to-teaching experiences of twelve new academics at a case-study Northern UK university. A CHAT lens foregrounds contradictions as a source for change in the induction-to-teaching process. Data generated through semi-structured interviews with these academics were analysed and, informed by CHAT, allowed us to discern contradictions in sociocultural and structural aspects of the induction activity systems which significantly impact new academics' experiences. Examining these contradictions enabled us to identify interventions for enhancing academic induction policy and practice within the case-study University, but also more widely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores experiences of surrender to an aspect of mind that is unconfined, empty of dualistic concepts, and lucidly aware. Ghent's concept of surrender, Farber's unconscious will, and Buddhist philosophers' essence of mind all link to creative processes described by Poincaré and Mozart. This impressionistic collage points to the spaciousness to know beyond our usual stories. From this essential mind more wholesome actions proceed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article showcases a speculative methodology for recreating interactions between a human and Google Search's Auto-Predict interface as conversations, to explore how AI-based systems are both persuasive and deeply personal. Using ethnomethodology tools and a symbolic interactionist lens, the paper presents three versions of a single Google search, each variation building a slightly different angle on the plausible utterances and interpersonal dynamics of the human and nonhuman partners. This thought experiment emerges from a decade of classroom-based digital literacy exercises with young adults, training them to analyze their lived experiences with digital media, algorithms, and devices. Transforming information exchanges into personal conversations provides a creative method for analyzing how relations are co-constructed in the granular processes of interaction, through which mutual intelligibility is built, meaning about the world is made, and identities are formed. This critical analysis extends methods for human–machine communication studies and elaborates notions of algorithmic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To establish the claim that racism is an ideology that consists of having morally impermissible attitudes towards people in virtue of their racialised identities, Appiah claims that a (false) belief in race is not automatically morally wrong. This paper examines what is involved in believing in races and shows that believing in races is in itself morally problematic as it involves stereotyping that undermines agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers an account of luck, fate, and fortune. It begins by showing that extant accounts of luck are deficient because they do not identify the genus of which luck is a species. That genus of properties, the tychic, alert an agent to occasions on which the external world cooperates with or frustrates their goal-achievement. An agent's sphere of competence is the set of goals that it is possible for them to reliably achieve. Luck concerns occasions on which there is a mismatch between attempt and result; in bad luck the external world thwarts goal-achievement within the agent's sphere of competence, in good luck the external world assists goal-achievement beyond the agent's sphere of competence. Fateful events are those where, more passively, the agent finds the external world achieving or frustrating their goals. Fortune concerns the contraction and expansion of the agent's sphere of competence. Eight reasons are given for accepting the account; its theoretical virtues and various things it explains. Lastly, three objections are answered; that the tychic properties relate to well-being rather than agency, that there are alternative theories of fortune available in the contemporary literature, that the account draws arbitrary distinctions between synonyms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pressure towards digital education is felt everywhere including in places with extreme digital divides. Resource-constrained educational environments are particularly threatened by datification manifest in the dominant business models of surveillance capitalism as there is less room in such contexts to refuse the 'free' offerings from big tech companies; it is these very contexts which are most vulnerable. Yet educators within such environments are not mere pawns of circumstance. While the realities of their structural constraints may be invisible or obfuscated, educators are driven by their own 'concerns', which in this case pertain to the needs of diverse students in very challenging circumstances as well as to their personal aversion to being monitored. This paper reports on findings from focus groups in a mixture of institutionsin South African education. Archer's theoretical framework provides a lens to show how, despite very little choice, educators critically reflect on their circumstances expressing discomfort and unease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to explore how professionals with personal experiences of family‐related childhood adversity describe and make sense of the relationship between their experience and their supportive practice. It builds on interviews with 10 professionals working within two Swedish non‐governmental organizations offering support to children experiencing family‐related adversity. The findings show that the participants draw upon their own experiences when identifying children's need for individual support, recognition, belonging, knowledge and hope. Together, these five aspects can be said to form an experience‐informed narrative about children's support needs. The paper concludes by suggesting that the concept of a 'professional peer' may be a useful term for encompassing the dual role of professionals who have personal experiences of family‐related childhood adversity and who provide support to children in similar situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational researchers are increasingly striving on the edge of possibility to re-imagine and realise the future. Activist scholarship requires appropriate philosophical and theoretical bases, what Stetsenko refers to as 'dangerous' – useful in the struggle for a better world. How might praxis, agency and learning be charged with transgressive spirit? This paper considers the Theory of Practice Architectures and Transformative Activist Stance, established frameworks that dangerously address praxis, agency and learning. Adopting a postabyssal approach, contributions from the Global South and East are drawn on to develop an epistemologically plural basis for thinking differently about praxis, agency and learning. Recent Latin American scholarship reinvigorates Freirean ideas through connections with Fals Borda and contemporary feminist pedagogues, centred on a notion of feeling-thinking. Luitel's interpretations of Vedic philosophy provide radically different ideas of negative dialectics, chaos, responsibility and liberation. An open-minded, open-hearted, open-ended approach is crucial to making these ideas more useful in the struggle over alternative, more equitable and just futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a tension at the heart of Aristotle's understanding of organic activities, created by his appeals to the productive activities of craftsmen and his use of normative language to characterize the goals of such activities. In this paper I discuss two ways of interpreting Aristotle's teleology aimed at resolving this tension, and discuss a closely analogous tension at the heart of a number of contemporary defenses of teleological reasoning in biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When I fiddle with my hair, or adjust my posture, it is plausible that these activities fall well below my cognitive radar. Some have argued that these are examples of ‘sub‐intentional actions’, actions which are not intentional under any description at all. If true, they are direct counterexamples to the dominant view on which the difference between actions and other events is their intentionality. In this paper, I argue that the case for sub‐intentional actions fails. Firstly, I show that the main argument for the sub‐intentionality of these actions has a structural fault. Secondly, I argue that two apparently natural ways to remedy this fail. Thirdly, I argue that one of the main arguments for thinking of the phenomena as actions undermines thinking of them as sub‐intentional. Finally, I argue that a natural defensive move for the defender of sub‐intentional actions actually undermines the theoretical significance of the view. Ultimately, my aim is to show that although the case for sub‐intentional actions seemed both simple and compelling, it is in fact deeply troubled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The devaluation of women of Color (WoC) by way of gender discrimination and systemic racism is well documented. For WoC in engineering a chief cause is the observable wage gap. Women who identify as Asian, Black/African American, Latina/Chicana, Indigenous/Native American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Native Alaskan, and/or multiracial have reported stark wage disparities. In this paper, we offer a phenomenological study of how WoC engineering faculty across U.S. academic institutions describe the challenges and practices associated with wage disparities and how they navigate these disparities. This study, which is based on participant interviews, is guided by three research questions: (1) What do WoC engineering tenure-track faculty perceive about wage disparities based on their race and gender? (2) How do WoC faculty understand the institutional practices that contribute to wage disparities? and (3) How do WoC engineering faculty respond to and address wage disparities? Using structural racism and intersectionality as our guiding conceptual framework, we interviewed 32 self-identified WoC who identified structures and systems of institutional racism related to the maintenance of wage disparities. In terms of findings, we note that WoC have two primary strategies to respond to wage disparity: advocacy and agency. The experiences of WoC engineering faculty in our study highlight unsatisfying institutional responses, and thus WoC often rely on their own agency to advocate for themselves and to advocate for and mentor other WoC faculty. We found a few notable cases where men advocated for women to help close the wage gap. Our work reveals that pay inequity for WoC is often coupled with other forms of exclusion and marginalization. Reducing wage disparities in academia is critical to advancing diversity efforts and ensuring equitable support for WoC faculty. Our findings suggest that institutions can work diligently to rectify wage inequality, including making sustainable structural and salary modifications and sharing the burden of combatting wage inequities. Finally, our findings also highlight the importance of making policy changes to reduce pay inequalities, such as providing transparent pay information and more opportunities to earn merit raises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stories of children moving in and out of refugee camps are not uncommon yet are often overshadowed by the dominant narratives of oppression, political failure, and war—the stories told of rather than told by refugees. Dominant narratives on refugees largely shape perceptions about children and youth in displacement as vulnerable, voiceless, and passive. Instead, stories told by these populations highlight their identities as capable and determined. Employing a narrative approach to inquiry in relation to agency, this study seeks to understand how lived experiences of female refugee youth are shared through storytelling. Written narratives of 55 adolescent girls in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya revealed not only the complex and complicated circumstances of their educational journey but also their agency. This paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of storytelling, which enables us to better understand the needs of the displaced populations, but also their capabilities, aspirations and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines how digital technologies support innovation in teaching and learning the English language across Palestinian Higher Education Institutes. A European project collaborated to build staff capacity in knowledge and skills, shown here through the redesign of curricula, pedagogical training, the design and implementation of interactive textbooks, the creation of language labs, helping to develop expertise in creating and utilising Open Educational Resources (OER) and significantly, the development of individual agency as a form of OER. In this paper, we draw on three years of data to present a model for teacher innovation showing how digital innovation is firstly personal at a practitioner level and shaped by need, before becoming driven by collaboration at an organisational level with like-minded colleagues. Shared practice at this level can lead to community discourse through practitioner networks, which in turn can lead to dialogue initiating instances of organisational change. This resonates with literature which shows innovation has three outcomes: originality (practitioner-based agency); scale (going beyond the site of creation) and value (how this produces benefits for others). We perceive that the resulting capacity-building extends beyond the redesign of curricula mentioned to professional enrichment, collegiality through cascading innovation to other areas, and enhanced practitioner agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Determining the agency-status of machines and AI has never been more pressing. As we progress into a future where humans and machines more closely co-exist, understanding hallmark features of agency affords us the ability to develop policy and narratives which cater to both humans and machines. This paper maintains that decision-making processes largely underpin agential action, and that in most instances, these processes yield good results in terms of making good choices. However, in some instances, when faced with two (or more) choices, an agent may find themselves with equal reasons to choose either - thus being presented with a tie. This paper argues that in the event of a tie, the ability to create a voluntarist reason is a hallmark feature of agency, and second, that AI, through current tie-breaking mechanisms does not have this ability, and thus fails at this particular feature of agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on Seligman's (2011) PERMA components (positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment) of well-being. Teachers' reflection data have been analysed deductively to identify components of PERMA as relevant to themselves as well their perceptions of their learners' well-being during and after a longitudinal classroom action research project in India. The original British Council study was not focused on well-being but instead on exploring the feasibility of working with children in partnership in classroom research. Teachers reported positive emotions, high levels of engagement, closer relationships with learners in their classes, and they also felt that their work became more meaningful and purposeful. Researching classrooms in partnership with children has the potential to promote many benefits for both learners and teachers, including increased levels of well-being. The paper argues therefore that working in partnership with learners may be an excellent starting point to promote well-being in any classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Too often when we think about agency, we think only about human actors. Increasingly, studies of animal-human relationships have explored the agency of animals who live alongside humans. This paper explores the agency of animals during interviews with trans young people and their families. A focus on the agency of animals is important in this context, given the unique meanings often attributed to animals by trans young people, who often experience the denial of their own agency. The data analysed in this paper constitute a subset of a larger sample of interviews with 17 trans young people and their families. The thematic analysis reported in this paper focuses on when animals were considered to show agency during video recordings, and what humans were saying during these portions of the recordings. Three forms of agency were identified: agency as affection, resistance, and proximity. The paper concludes by considering what it means to think about animal agency, what this means for trans young people, and more broadly what this means for research that seeks to involve animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores women’s agentic practices in expressing their sexual dissatisfaction in the context of male sexual ‘non-performance’. Much scholarly work on male sexual ‘non-performance’ in Tanzanian context largely focus on the voices of men in making sense of their sexual performance concerns. Common limitations of these studies are isolating women from male sexual ‘non-performance’ and their narrow focus on the voices of women. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Tanzania, and building on the Afro-feminism perspective, this article demonstrates women’s cheating habits, breaking up with their partners, naming and shaming and, participating in non-sexual intimate matters as agentic practices of their sexual dissatisfaction in heterosexual relationships. While these practices that women devise to handle their male partner’s sexual ‘non-performance’ challenge the patriarchal structures of sexuality and gender relations on the one hand, they performatively reproduce them on the other hand. The findings of this paper indicate that women are active social actors, who are often sexually expressive and devise various agentic practices for handling their partners’ sexual ‘non-performance’. In a nutshell, women’s viewpoints in this paper highlight the need to further consider how women demand and achieve sexual satisfaction in their sexual relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on critical childhood studies and childism, this paper analyses children's participation in family law cases in Denmark. Spurred particularly by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, together with a general shift in the view on children, several jurisdictions, including Denmark, have implemented legislative reform in the last decades to accommodate children's participation rights. Even though such legal participation rights have increased, research in the family law field indicates that children's perspectives are often undermined or excluded. An analysis of qualitative data (workshops, observations, and interviews) establishes how the positioning of children and children's perspectives (as well as how "listening to children" is enacted) can be crucial to understanding the mechanisms that either subsidize or undermine children's perspectives in family law cases. The paper argues further that "listening emergent" to children can offer a path to deconstructing the norms and structures that undermine and exclude children's views—and thus offer a childist contribution to childhood research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although child-centred care is increasingly referred to within the nursing literature, a clear definition of child-centred care and clarity around the concept is yet to be achieved. The objectives of this review were to examine the following: (1) What constitutes the concept of child-centred care in healthcare? (2) How has the concept of child-centred care developed? (3) What is the applicability of child-centred care and what are its limitations? (4) How does the concept of child-centred care benefit and inform children's healthcare? In total, 2984 papers were imported for screening, and, following the removal of duplicates and screening, 21 papers were included in the scoping review. The findings suggest that child-centred care is an emerging, ambiguous poorly defined concept; no clear consensus exists about what constitutes child-centred care. Although it seems antithetical to argue against child-centred care, little robust evidence was identified that demonstrates the impact and benefit of child-centred care. If child-centred care is to be a sustainable, convincing model to guide practice and compete with other models of care, it needs to establish robust evidence of its effectiveness, the impact on children and their families, as well as the wider impacts on the healthcare system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to offer a nuanced understanding of how the rural responds to and speaks back to the urban in the context of increasingly blurred rural‐urban landscapes. The prevailing theorizations remain entrenched in an intellectual impasse that still treats the rural as a residual space or a reactive actor besieged by external urban forces. Using lineage spaces as an empirical lens, this paper delves into rural geographies of lineage landscapes in post‐reform China by articulating rural agencies in more active, non‐lineal ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in rural Wenzhou, southeast China, this paper argues that the articulation of rural voices amidst China's urban modernity unveils a spatial paradox of landscape de/reterritorialization at the dimensions of discourse, practice and (trans)locality. We first reveal how official rural discourses de‐territorialize and lessen lineage groups' control over their symbolic buildings while simultaneously opening up opportunities for them to mobilize officially‐sanctioned discourses to expand lineage spaces and reterritorialize their power. Second, we show how villagers embrace the de‐territorializing practice of landscape commodification, which becomes a crucial source of finance for them to perform ritual activities at specific festivals, thereby re‐asserting rural collectivism, sociality and sacredness. Third, we unpack the trans‐local dimension of rural de/reterritorialization by exploring how villagers forge lineage‐based rural networking that transcends space‐time, which paradoxically reinforces the spatial claim for territorializing rural power that is demarcated from urban/modern orientations. We further argue that these multiple spatial processes of rural de/reterritorialization challenge a reactive or neatly‐divided account of rural agency during its engagement with urbanizing relations and processes. In all, this paper offers a more complex, paradoxical account of relational rurality in a rapidly urbanizing China, and foregrounds an agenda towards more 'inclusive' rural studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]