Human agency in the broader social context

More on Agency (from Susanne Eichner, Agency and Media Reception: Experiencing Video Games, Film, and Television)

Practice theories locate human agency in the broader social context. Agency is therefore always related to context, whether in terms of Bourdieu’s habitus and the practical sense or through Giddens’ more self-conscious stratification model, allowing for a discursive consciousness. The latter treatment of agency articulates a more independ- ent and powerful subjective engagement with agency, since humans maintain a continuing theoretical understanding of the ground of their activity. As Giddens demonstrates, agency is not necessarily intentional, but agency does rely on what he calls the could have acted differently sensibility at its core. Nor is agency considered a fixed possession to be obtained (or not) by members of society, although agency is related to and determined by resources such as knowledge resources, a theme significantly developed by Foucault with his theoretical relation power/knowledge. Perceiving power and agency as interrelated concepts allows both to be considered without the ethical bias with which these ideas are often encumbered (e.g., as sources of oppression, coercion and/or liberation). The pragmatic conception of creativity of action, finally, introduces the notion of radical contextualisation, which is a re-framing of agency in terms of pragmatically meaningful situations rather than the intentions of actors, revealing their ability to adapt social actions based on past experience to new situa- tions with creative agency.