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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]

The discussion notes the extreme sensitivity of the technique with a despairing deprived girl with a deep dread of the future and of adulthood. Where defenses are identified, caring alternatives are always on offer, and gradually the patient's hope, curiosity, and sense of agency are freed up and fired up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparison of the Boston Study Group and the Relationalist's theories of enactments in which I maintain that enactments can be viewed either as an unknowable past expressing itself in present action, or as a process shift coming out of incremental shifts in the fit in here and now interaction. Often, it is difficult to distinguish enactments from any ongoing analytic experience oscillating between defense and revelation on the part of the analyst, analysand, or both. Yet, I agree with Goldin that change is not simply moving along, fitting together better, and reaching a higher level of organization as in infancy. An analytic interchange cannot be understood "separately from the project of grasping experience into words." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of 'pedagogic voice' emphasises the capacity of children to express their views on matters related to teaching, learning and curriculum. 'Pedagogic voice' aligns with children's rights to be listened to and the extent to which their views are fully considered and acted upon. Combined, these rights based approaches positively shape children's learning experiences. This paper draws on quantitative and qualitative data from the longitudinal mixed methods cohort study Children's School Lives to explore children's voice. Grounded in the sociology of pedagogic voice literature and building upon research on children's participatory rights, the paper explores children's experiences of being heard and actively participating in decision-making processes in diverse primary school settings in Ireland. It analyses children's voice by looking at their capacity to influence their own learning, contrasting their experiences and perspectives, to those of their teachers. Findings illustrate the interplay between children's and teachers' narratives regarding children's voice and their pedagogical encounters to explore the impact on teaching and learning processes, highlighting structural challenges to the realisation of children's voice in primary classrooms in Ireland. [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]

The February 2022 UNDP Special Report (SR) on Human Security, "New threats to human security in the Anthropocene: Demanding greater solidarity" marked a welcome return by the UN body to the field in which, in 1994, it had provided the seminal text. The SR stimulated a great deal of academic and policy debate, featuring prominently in the HDCA Human Security Thematic Group's sessions at the 2022 HDCA Antwerp conference. Conversations between the UNDP HDRO and HDCA led to the 2023 Human Security Policy Forum published in the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities. The papers produced in this forum have emphasised a broadening of the human security discourse and policy prescription to consider the SR's additional focus on the Anthropocene, agency, and solidarity. Several of the papers have also drawn attention to the interconnectivity of threats and spillover between them. While there is consensus among the papers on these issues, they are limited in the extent to which they address how such foci also lead to contestation, how they are situated in the wider policy discourse, and how they might best be operationalised. This paper revisits these discussions, adding additional insight on these points of reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the importance of understanding the social and cultural processes mediating pre-service teachers’ expansion of the power to act has been increasingly recognized lately, the way the concept of ‘agency’ is portrayed in most of the studies focuses almost exclusively on the subject of activity and therefore, there is insufficient theoretical attention to the reverse side of agency, the experience of being subject to and subjected to conditions. In this paper, the authors exemplify the process ofconscientizaçãoand agential development in the case study of Jefferson, a new teacher engaged in a school teaching education program. The purpose of this paper is to show how new forms of consciousness, expansion of the power to act, and increasing control over conditions simultaneously emerge for teachers in training during praxis and how agency is played out by the relations between being subject to and subjected to conditions. Implications for teaching education programs are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines urban migration and experiences of marginality and vulnerability in the context of neoliberal globalisation and increasingly precarious conditions of life and work. It will focus in particular on three films, which have powerfully addressed these themes:Last Train Home(Lixin Fan, 2009),Paper Dolls(Tomer Heymann, 2006) andI Don't Want to Sleep Alone(Tsai Ming-Liang, 2006). All three films are set in contexts of urban transition and transience. I take these films as social texts that reflect upon questions of marginality, the ways through which care and intimacy are expressed and how urban migrants might seek to overcome difficult conditions through agency and the force of their aspirations. This article seeks to consider the affective lives of migrants and the humanity that underlies experiences of urban hardship. Taken together, these films provide a comparative understanding of these themes of contemporary importance across different cities in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is interested in the hidden selves that hover silently in the spaces that all human relationships create. It asks how these hidden self-states can find the light of day and suggests that one way is through fictional creative writing. The author shares a piece of fictional writing in which an elusive character—Isobel—appears. This ethereal and fictional manifestation occurs in the context of excruciatingly painful relational experiences in which the narrator describes repetitive and painful struggles for transformation. Speculative attempts to understand the meaning of the fictional material reveal an emerging forward edge and a fledgling sense of agency. But more. It elaborates how the creative writing process offers a different kind of lens through which to locate, elaborate, see, experience and be empathic with our own and, by extension, with our patients' hidden self-states. [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]

A growing number of studies on students' intercultural interactions and learning in higher education contexts have placed cosmopolitanism and agency at the centre of conceptual and empirical inquiry. The concept of 'cosmopolitan agency' has been proposed as a hallmark of intercultural relationships, such as friendships, between international and domestic university students, which are found difficult to develop in many countries. However, the literature has not established the conditions necessary for the (non-)emergence of this student agency. This paper fills this knowledge gap by presenting an ecological and person-in-context conceptual framework of cosmopolitan agency in intercultural student interactions on campus and beyond. Drawing on multidisciplinary literature (e.g. higher education, psychology, sociology, cosmopolitanism, urban and disability studies), the paper submits a theoretical proposal that cosmopolitan agency (as present practice) emerges at the dynamic experiential interface between cosmopolitan capital (as an individual resource built on past experience) and affordances in convivial proximity (as the environment triggering future projection). This proposal is elaborated through the empirical illustration of four (i.e. amicable, critical, latent and inactive) states of cosmopolitan agency that manifest different forms of intercultural interactions. The paper is expected to advance theoretical inquiry into the issues of power, privilege, morality and reflexivity in students' engagement in intercultural interactions, and to support a third option for interactions between passive presence and fully-fledged relationships. The directions for future conceptual and empirical research that are ultimately expected to serve for the improvement of student experience are also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing awareness that the effects of decarbonisation are highly spatial and will impact regions differentially. Old industrial regions are likely to be particularly affected but it is debateable how well equipped they are to engage with transition and for it to be just. Extant literature suggests that this will be highly contingent on the acceptability of this transition amongst old industrial communities, with a call to understand what and who will be impacted. There is, however, a need for more granularity of evidence on how acceptability is formed and how it plays out in practice. Taking the case of Port Talbot in the UK, this paper provides new insights into the interplay between place attachment and a 'just transition' in an old industrial region. This paper finds that there is a strong community understanding of and support for decarbonisation but an equally strong perception of powerlessness to act. There is an enduring sense of place attachment within Port Talbot but the lack of place-based consultation and engagement with the community means that there are no effective development strategies in place. Thus, it can be concluded that there is acceptability but without agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the role of private planning consultants as intermediary-actors and their implications in relation to planning theory and practice. To do so, the paper focuses on niche consultants involved in servicing neighbourhood scale plan-making in England, clarifying that they hold crucial agency in local planning processes and adding to the understanding of consultancy roles and co-production dynamics in planning. The paper draws together the literature on private sector consultancy and on intermediaries, along with theoretical work highlighting the diversification of planning, the rise of the collaborative turn and the effect of regulation on creating niche markets in planning expertise. The conclusions drawn help clarify the 'action on others' that planning consultants, as intermediary-actors, have in collaborative governance and planning in and beyond neighbourhood planning. [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]

It is difficult to identify direct causal relationships between school-based professional learning initiatives and changes in the participating teachers' competencies or their students' learning outcomes. This paper contributes a novel approach to examining the impact of such school-based professional learning by integrating the constructs of complex systems and agentic practice into how the processes in curriculum re-design contribute to professional learning outcomes. The paper first presents an integrated multilayered conceptual framework that combines perspectives on complex systems and agentic practices. Next, it outlines the main levels and aspects of the complex system that need to be considered when examining school-based professional learning initiatives. Then, using a case from a multi-school professional development initiative illustrates how this framework was applied to examine the impact of a professional learning initiative focused on a collaborative science curriculum redesign to support English Language Learners (ELLs). Analysing the agentic practices that emerged within and across different complex system levels provides a comprehensive insight into how the system, constraints or amplifies particular practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper raises three critical arguments against Deveaux's work in Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements. Firstly, the paper argues that a clear-cut definition as to what constitutes a legitimate poor-led social movement particularly its political goals and the means it is allowed to employ to achieve its objective is necessary. Secondly, the paper argues that the theory of recognition and its potential relevance for poor-led activism could have been presented in its strongest terms instead of giving it a reduced treatment. And thirdly, contrary to Deveaux's apparent over optimism about the poor as agents of global justice, there may be good reasons to be more 'realistic' about this position. [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]

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]

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]

This paper explores linguistic life-histories from five participants in a larger interview study with U.S.-based adults. These five interviewees were middle-class White women from monolingual English-speaking families who pursued multilingual learning trajectories in young adulthood. Having previously attained proficiency in one language through academic study, all five recounted similar pivotal decisions to deprioritize that language, and instead invest in another language that they now saw as more socially relevant. Through discursive analysis of the emotionality and (lack of) agency in their narratives of linguistic decision-making, the paper demonstrates how all five women, in dialogue with the interviewer, co-constructed ideologies of linguistic solidarity across lines of social difference. Drawing on Bakhtinian theory to analyze identity development as ideological becoming, the research explores elite contestation of dominant language ideologies within interview dialogues. [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]

This paper draws on interviews with Africans of binational parental heritage to expand the literature on identity formation in two ways. First, it takes on the factors that shape primary identity formation more fully by extending it beyond the current focus on state constrictures on primary identity formation. We argue in this paper that in addition to state constricture, closeness of family ties is yet another factor that shapes the primary identity of individuals with binationality. Individuals claim the identity of that parent whose extended family members have a cordial relationship with them as evident in communication patterns, visits, presence at rites of passage, and the extent to which extended family members embrace them as one of their own. Second, we interrogate the literature on hybridity beyond its focus on types to highlight the instrumental and intrinsic purposes to which hybridity can be put. We show how individuals with a primary identity would choose a secondary identity for instrumental reasons such as the education or work opportunities it provides. The intrinsic value of secondary identity is the entertainment options and sense of self it provides. This piece, focusing on both the factors that shape primary identity as well as when/for what purpose such individuals choose a secondary identity, highlights the agency of such individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper critically analyses how the British Army exercises control over the production of knowledge about women's war labour in 'front line combat' and how women exert agency to resist this. 2018 saw all British military roles opened to women, yet it is a myth to say that women are only now able to serve in 'front line combat'. The paper reveals a complex negotiated gender order or 'bargain' between the British Army and servicewomen seeing the latter controlled through their co-option, embodied by compliant military femininities, whilst permitting them some agency to resist. Driven by military need, sustaining this ordering has repeatedly seen women exposed to unnecessary risk. This critical feminist history contributes to conceptual development through deconstructing gendered knowledge systems, arguing that foregrounding women's voices is central to furthering the cultural turn in war studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing climate crisis has shown how children and young people can be a political force to be reckoned with. While Greta Thunberg and many other young climate activists from around the world personify this force, there is another – largely hidden – story to be told about the everyday practices that young people adopt, in our homes, in our schools and in local communities to respond to environmental concerns. This issue brings together leading commentators to advance the future direction of research into young people's everyday climate crisis activism. In this editorial introduction, we outline some of the new terrains for research, analysis and action that these articles collectively open up. The journal Children's Geographies invites scholars to consider it as a place for the publication of articles that respond to the agenda-setting outlined in this collection and further advance work on young people's everyday climate crisis activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue of Information, Communication and Society explores what can be understood as 'digital landscapes'. The term draws our attention to the complex and overlapping contours of off- and on-line information flows, exchanges and meanings, and how these embody cultural, political and epistemic processes. The term also points to the ways in which social actors navigate the geographies of this landscape, and whether and how they have the resources to do so, indeed, whether they can create new geographies, and so new maps, in the process. This agency has therefore to be seen as highly contextual, a mix of both local and global dynamics. The papers brought together here examine the discursive, ethical, legal and infrastructural aspects of the digital landscape. In doing so, they open up for discussion on how we are best to understand, map, critique and importantly differentiate and contextualise the diverse forms of social engagement found within this landscape and its off-line instantiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western political philosophy has been dominated by the idea of speech as the locus of subjectivity constitution, individual and collective. This has led to a neglect of silence and silent forms of political being. Taken for the absence of speech acts, silence has come to stand for the want or failure of agency. This special issue reconsiders silence in relation to both speech acts and other forms of political action. Equipped with new understandings of silence, it re-assesses the role of silence and of silent agency in both democratic and authoritarian systems. [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]

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]

Bill Watterson's comic Calvin and Hobbes problematises the complex feature of life called work for its sociological repercussions on human life. The preoccupation with work owing to the charm of capitalist excess entails a major transformation of lifestyle – of work as well as leisure – with a 'work minded' parallelism as will be discussed in this paper. In the comic's satire, it is within the contexts of subsistence, class position, technology, and other forces germane to contemporary market capitalism, that this work mindedness imperils the status of leisure and work. With its comical illustrations, Watterson brings into sharp focus the everyday play of the cultural economy. This paper further argues that the narrative universe constructed in Calvin and Hobbes explores the significance of agency and imagination, to struggle in turn for 'leisure mindedness' at all times, even at work, something which remains pertinent even 25 years after the last comic strip bid us goodbye. This paper frames that leisure mindedness, in relation to both social theory and the critical discourse of the comic, highlighting here the magic of the social world, friendships as well as sensory experiences, while positing philosophical questions about the importance of creativity and aesthetic freedom over work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Juxtaposed against literature that views mothers' role for their daughters' education as a human capital this paper reimagines their role by foregrounding Pakistani mothers' agency in contexts with limited opportunities. This is achieved by theorising negative capability (NC) as an analytical framework drawing on available theorisations of the concept and define it as an agentive passive refusal to be intellectually paralysed by disadvantage. We demonstrate how the concept can be applied for empirical analysis. The paper takes an ethical stance that researchers should acknowledge that regardless of contextual difficulties people's agentive and intellectual faculties remain intact. Structural inequalities need to be challenged but their agentive potential also recognised. With a firm commitment that opportunities need to be made equal this paper builds on the second point to argue that even in the face of extreme disadvantage mothers' intellectual capacities to progress towards goals remain functional. We challenge the objectification of the marginalised and propose an analytical approach to understand difficulties faced as well as agency exercised by mothers facing socio-economic constraints. This work has implications for the capability approach that falls short of addressing issues of power, and policy that fails to understand the context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how teachers see policy and how the visibility of various aspects of policymaking are mediated by our school contexts. As a perspective from a K-12 classroom teacher conducting policy research with other classroom teachers, this paper also explores how teachers, in turn, might make our policy work visible to ourselves and the implications for teacher agency. Teachers in the study took part in a two-year participatory action research endeavour, joining school-based policy inquiry groups where we identified policies, mapped policymaking processes, and discussed the implications of our contexts. On one hand, these engagements highlight the central role a school's institutional narratives and professional culture play in constructing the ways we see policy. At the same time, they point to how our seeing exceeds and moves with and through such constraints. With reference to postcolonial interpretations of agency, I describe how as part of inquiry teachers constructed spaces for ambiguity and alternative accounts, and in doing so movement and difference, in policymaking. [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 addresses debates on the role of agency in shaping the economic future of regions. Scholarship on agency departs from the earlier focus of evolutionary economic geography, which highlighted the role of pre-existing structural conditions. This paper challenges the notion that agency is only found in intentional action and is limited to key actors within a region. It questions exclusive focus on the impact of entrepreneurial leaders, place leaders and government, and identifies agency in the accumulated micro-decisions of multiple decision-makers, using the example of workers affected by the closure of Australia's passenger vehicle industry. In so doing, it underscores the twin roles of collective vision and meaningful implementation in the successful transformation of regions. [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]

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]

Sexuality and relationship education (SRE) for trans young people is fraught with ongoing institutional and informational erasure, even as trans young people display considerable agency in navigating their SRE needs. This paper reports on a survey of 112 Australian trans young people, who shared their experiences of SRE (in terms of delivery and content), and their views on three story completion tasks where they were asked to respond to prompts about three fictional stories focused on trans young people (and for some their cisgender partners) and intimacy. Participants reported that SRE was delivered in class and focused on puberty and anatomy, although many participants accessed SRE information informally. Participants overwhelmingly reported the erasure of trans-specific SRE content and suggested that SRE content should include a trans focus. Responses to the story completion task emphasised the agency of the fictional trans young people in asserting their boundaries, deserving respect, being knowledgeable about their bodies and ensuring their safety. Fictional cisgender young people in the story completion tasks were expected to be respectful, and to be guided by trans people (but also to educate themselves). The paper concludes with recommendations for harnessing trans young people's agency in the context of SRE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to calls to revisit the engagement of students in academic development, the authors - an educational development consultant and a graduate student - share the findings of a nation-wide study which explored how Canadian teaching and learning centres (TLCs) partner with graduate students in academic development (AD). This paper highlights the benefits and challenges identified by the participants and draws on students-as-partners (SaP) literature to frame the recommendations and lessons learned about how to engage graduate students meaningfully and ethically in AD activities. We share pragmatic strategies while emphasizing the importance of aligning partnerships with the SaP principles of respect, reciprocity, and responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the notions of creativity and agency have each received considerable attention in the literature on computational systems, the connections between these two concepts have rarely been addressed. In this paper, I contribute to this debate by discussing the results of an online questionnaire aimed at testing the interactions between the attribution of agency and creativity to human and artificial subjects. Findings of the study indicate that the ascription of agentive capabilities to a subject is positively correlated to the level of creativity attributed to the process they perform. This result supports the claim that a better understanding of the steps needed in order to achieve agency can help also shed light on the development of creativity in computational systems. I conclude the paper by suggesting that the technological revolution of the last decades is compelling us to re-think concepts such as authorship, ownership, agency, and creativity that, so far, have been typically attributed to humans only, and to consider how these notions are being transformed in dynamics of interaction between humans and machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a compelling and provocative paper, 'Solving the Self-Illness Ambiguity: The Case for Construction Over Discovery,' Sofia M.I. Jeppsson distinguishes two ways of addressing the self-illness ambiguty problem. The first is the Realist Solution, which postulates a pre-existing border between the self and the illness and frames the goal of treatment in psychiatry as helping the patient 'discover' this boundary. Addressing the shortcomings of the Realist Solution, both in terms of its feasibility and possible outcomes, Jeppsson proposes and defends the Constructivist Solution, according to which the patient, through self-reflection and deliberation with others, including the clinicians, decides, which parts of her experiences they identify with themselves and which parts they attribute to their illness. This paper critically evaluates Jeppson's arguments and addresses some of the shortcomings of Jeppsson's positive argument, i.e. the Constructivist Solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the moral encroachment thesis, moral features of a situation can affect not just what we're practically justified in doing but also what we're epistemically justified in believing. This paper offers a new rationale for that thesis, drawing on observations about the role of reflection in agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to the COVID–19 outbreak, food insecurity was already a serious public health problem in Canada, impacting 12.7 percent of households. In recent years, activists, practitioners and researchers from a range of health–related disciplines, have debated the legitimacy of food banks and other charitable food programs, contending that policy and programs at the federal level must be prioritized to address the underlying root causes of poverty. This paper challenges the discourse that charitable food programs prevent or distract from Canada's social equity goals. Alternatively, this paper argues that programs and initiatives at the local level can emerge to bring short–term stability and self–sufficiency to local communities while also advocating for longer–term structural change. Drawing upon structuration theory and critical ecologies of anti–Black racism, we examine the work of BlackFoodToronto, a food sovereignty initiative, to illustrate the negotiation of power and agency, and how groups and networks react to and reshape confining and enabling structures through collaborative practice. In addressing Canada's food security crisis, this paper offers an alternative perspective of community–based, nonprofit and charitable programs, which in practice, can help inform future food security policy and related health equity and community development strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labor history and international relations (IR) each offer insights regarding the extent to which women contribute to non-state armed groups and the value of their labor. Yet questions remain about how agency in joining armed movements – and, conversely, the forced participation of women – are operationalized and even fetishized by observers. Positivist empirical work in IR has operationalized agency and coercion as a dichotomy in gendered wartime labor, implying that where women's labor is coerced it may have a lesser impact on the conduct of conflict or conflict outcomes. This paper challenges the existence of an agency-coercion binary, drawing on the case of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Analyzing archival sources in a manner informed by both feminist international relations and labor history scholarship, I show the complex interplay of agency and coercion in women's lived experience within a non-state armed group. I further reflect on how a temporal understanding of labor relations, examining coercion and choice at the moments of entry, work, and exit, contributes to a more complete understanding of the gender dynamics of wartime labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a critical exploration of the emergence and manifestations of a phenomenon we refer to as "factional" or "succession" journalism within the state media in the context of the tussle over the succession of the late former Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe. Using the state-controlled Chronicle daily newspaper as a case study, we seek to examine the role and influence of editors and journalists in the negotiation of power in the context of reporting a contested succession of Mugabe in 2016. We locate "factional journalism" in the context of the capture of the state media by the ruling party and the virtual erosion of journalistic agency in the state media institutions. We argue that whereas the onset of the "Zimbabwe crisis" spawned the creation of different and polarised forms of journalism in the country (i.e. oppositional and patriotic journalism; see Ranger, 2005. "The rise of patriotic journalism in Zimbabwe and its possible implications". Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2: 8–17; Chuma 2008. "Mediating the 2000 elections in Zimbabwe: competing journalisms in a society at the crossroads". African Journalism Studies 29 (1): 22–41), within the "patriotic journalism" camp also emerged a new strand of "factional journalism" linked closely to the fierce contest for the succession of Robert Mugabe within Zanu PF. We also argue that the succession issue presented a poignant moment at which political journalism at the public media became subordinate to whichever faction held sway in the information/media portfolio in government, and which faction deployed its allocative powers to reward and punish specific forms of political reporting. We apply a limited qualitative content analysis of news stories on the succession issue and complement this with qualitative in-depth interviews with journalists reporting on the subject. This approach arguably provides a much more holistic picture of the factors at play in the production of political content on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper posits that the practice of remix offers students new learning pathways for process-based writing beyond the traditional workshop method and invites students to engage in creative writing practices beyond producing exclusively print-based texts. The paper details a Remix For (Re)vision assignment in an undergraduate Introduction to Creative Writing course. Students revise one of their written works by reinventing it in a new literary genre or remediating it as a multimodal text. The paper draws on interdisciplinary research – composition studies, literacy studies, and creative writing scholarship – alongside classroom praxis to demonstrate how the process of reconstituting an original work facilitates four key teaching and learning benefits: Remix (1) invites participation in a literary tradition (and popular online practice) of authorial borrowing and reinvention of existing works; (2) frames revision as imaginative play for active student engagement, agency, and discovery in the rewriting process; (3) enables the transfer of creative writing strategies and prior knowledge across genres and modes to develop multiliteracies; and (4) acknowledges that creative writing in the twenty-first century is increasingly engaged with digital communication practices and multimodal aesthetics. The paper outlines a sample student's project and addresses best practices for assignment design and assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emergency Contraceptive Pills (ECPs) are increasingly available over the counter as a form of hormonal birth control in India. As use of ECPs is increasing over time, this paper draws on ethnographic research in Dehradun, in Uttarakhand (Northern State) to highlight the everyday material conditions under which women create narrative around choice and agency regarding these ECPs. Women viewed ECPs as better options than abortion, appreciated the sense of empowerment these provided them because they could be consumed in houses where women had limited 'space and privacy;' and finally that ECPs and their advertisements could act as 'agents of social change.' Feminist scholarship on reproduction demonstrates that choice is a form of agency that is enacted within certain constraints. Using this framework, the research here highlights how women create narratives about ideas of contraceptive choice and notions of 'empowerment' when talking about ECPs and their advertisements. In revisiting the dilemma about women's agency and choice, this paper builds on Rosalind Gill's concept of 'critical respect' to propose 'critical ethnographic respect' as an ethnographic tool to help read women's responses and respectfully contextualise the materiality from within which these narratives emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–1891) was an English educationist, artist, philanthropist, and feminist. Her personal correspondence is quite extensive, containing letters exchanged with her family, friends, and acquaintances. The bulk of her epistolary archive though consists of letters sent to her. Instead of viewing this fragmentation and imbalance as a handicap, this paper argues that the silences her epistolary archive contains can be turned into a meaningful source of information and thus are methodologically relevant. To do so, it examines the extent to which Bodichon herself might have introduced silences ([un]consciously) as a strategy to exercise power over her own narrative. In order to tease out these epistolary silences and make them speak, this paper reads them through the lens of Lisa Mazzei's poetics of silence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the emotive-relational dimensions of family language policy (FLP), in the context of Hungarian families in Australia. The study explored parental experiences of family language policy implementation efforts and challenges. The research used an online survey (N = 80) which collected quantitative and qualitative data. Survey data were analysed using SPSS software to generate descriptive and t-test statistics. The results demonstrate that parents experienced emotional challenges around all three elements of family language policies: (i) ideologies; (ii) language practices and (iii) language management. This paper identifies six main emotive-relational dimensions of FLP: (i) linguistic-ideological, (ii) discursive; (iii) personal/relational; (iv) socio-relational; (v) agentive and (vi) pragmatic. The methods and the results of this study can be useful for researchers investigating the interconnectedness of language maintenance and parental subjective wellbeing. The findings inform current theoretical models and methods of researching family language policy and its complex dimensions. This paper concludes with an empirically tested emotive-relational model of FLP, which informs future research directed at exploring the emotional aspects of FLP from parents’ point of view as language planners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]