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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how traditional craft-knowledge and artisanal education generate varied aspirations, strategies and agentive capacities among handloom weavers by drawing from ethnographic fieldwork done in India among women weavers from the Ansari community.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how traditional craft knowledge and artisanal education generates varied agentive capacities among women handloom weavers. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork done with women weavers from the Ansari community in Western India, the paper critically looks at the dominant frameworks used to conceptualize agency, especially in the context of the informal sector. The informal sector is fluid and contains diverse strategies used by marginalized communities to respond to precarity and sustain livelihoods. I study ways in which artisans develop embodied and collective agency that does not necessarily fall within the neo-liberal feminist discourses and frameworks that imply agency as resistance to domination. Craft knowledge is not just technical skills and linear process-based knowledge but also social knowledge. The craft is the community in that sense. The knowledge and craft practice maintains hierarchies, organizes the community, and becomes a way through which women regulate, control and locate themselves and become participants. Women weavers become docile agents who use the very structure and their own subjectification to build capacity for action and change. The agentive capacity then is understood in ways in which they inhabit the norms and not just in acts of resistance. Agency here is embedded in temporal relational contexts and give rise to certain kinds of aspirations and open up new imaginaries of work.

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Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Iceland, the paper seeks to problematise agency in its relations to affective and temporal dimensions of anticipation. It explores the lingering effects of economic crisis and its impact on the present social understandings and actions.

Paper long abstract:

The intervention offers ethnographic exploration of how the 2008 economic collapse in Iceland sent its residents into crisis with unintended consequences. It unpacks the complex relationships of the past and the anticipatory modes of the (continuous) present, which alert to looming crisis future in most surprising ways. From economic and political turbulences to more mundane matters and materialities of the everyday life, there are vernacular timescapes that emerge, repeat and make the Icelandic present uncanny. They produce crisis future that haunts and is haunted; the crisis future that envelops, presses and ripples through the social atmosphere, pushing people to think thoughts and do things, including the creation of otherwise unthinkable alignments, that had once been difficult to imagine. The paper thus offers both, empirical and theoretical insights into anticipation as a form of agency; it highlights the affective ways of future-making and unpacks the practices of time-tricking. Focusing on contingencies of these processes sheds light on continuous ways of doing and undoing the world.

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Examining the persistence of the “orphan” concept in Andoque history, this paper explores how the Andoque’s engagement in slavery shaped their contemporary perceptions of graded agency across genders, kinship classes, and species, eventually reflecting in current extractive activities.

Paper long abstract:

Until the late nineteenth century, the Andoque, an Indigenous people from Northwest Amazonia, Colombia, engaged in slave trading, exchanging “orphans” for metal tools with non-Indigenous merchants. Contemporary hunters maintain this paradigm, negotiating with the nonhuman guardians of game for their “orphans.” Considering the persistence of the “orphan” concept, this paper addresses the question: How has the Andoque’s engagement in the slave trade shaped their contemporary perceptions of agency across genders, kinship categories, and species? Scholars have delved into Amazonians’ involvement in slavery, revealing hierarchical and dominative structures in an otherwise presumed egalitarian region (Jabin 2016; Lucas 2019; Santos Granero 2009), yet the influence of this history on current perceptions of graded agency/personhood remains underexplored, including the ontological grading itself, especially when compared to animist regions like Southeast Asia (Århem and Sprenger 2015). Drawing on oral history, myth, and rituals recorded during a 14-month ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate how, in a patrilineal society viewing both non-kin and nonhumans as potential affines, captains’ past ability to designate affinal and non-agnatic kin as exchangeable “orphans” has led to a conflation of agnatic identity, masculinity, and heightened agency. Challenging traditional views of slavery as depending on the dehumanization of individuals (Kopytoff 1982), I argue that the “orphan” status was transposed from humans to nonhumans, increasing the latter’s objectification—a crucial step for the Andoque’s integration into the regional post-slavery extractive economy. My analysis sheds light on the distributed nature of agency by emphasizing how kinship and gender categories mediate its manipulation across economic arrangements.

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In hyper-uncertain China, the well-educated youth chooses to stick with tech giants, despite the highly alienated and cruel competition. With a strategic agency of active alienating, they are convinced that technology can bypass the hegemony of the state and the market and lead them into the future.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the existential condition of young employees in contemporary Chinese Internet companies, which in the past few years have sparked widespread concern among academics and society at large, because of their draconian management and cruel competitiveness leading to extraordinary overtime and working intensities, such as ‘the 996 schedule’ and karoshi. However, in the face of extremely alienated work situations, China’s young generation still aspires to stick with Internet companies or make it their top choice for job search. Based on fieldwork and unstructured interviews with six leading tech giants in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, this paper tries to use the concept of 'alienation' as a diagnosis of human existence in the 21st century and would like to point out that well-educated youths generally have an in-depth understanding of the reality of alienation, but they still choose to actively alienate themselves not only to keep a position in neoliberal China, but also to pin their hopes on technology to get a place in a highly uncertain world. There, alienated ways of life and ethereal technological developments are integrated by a cognitive theory to overcome authoritarian regimes. ‘Alienating’, as their survival strategy, reflects the complex entanglement between contemporary Chinese dynamcis and the agency of the young generation.

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The presentation investigates shifting frameworks of collective agency endorsed or challenged by state and third-sector institutions in the context of urban development policies in Lisbon, focusing on people’s struggle for decent housing in three pivotal moments in Portuguese democratic history.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation is an inquiry into the multi-layered relationship between temporalities, city-making, and agency. The aim is to investigate shifting frameworks of collective agency that have been either endorsed, contested, or mystified by state and third-sector institutions in the context of urban development policies for people living in precarious housing conditions in Portugal. To do so, I undertake a comparative examination of two pivotal 20th-century housing policies — the first enacted during the democratic transition of 1974-75 and the second in the aftermath of Portugal’s entry into the EU single market, in the 1990s — plus a participatory development strategy for "priority intervention neighbourhoods" launched concurrently with the implementation of austerity measures in 2011. Relying on ongoing historiographic and ethnographic research in a cluster of social neighbourhoods and former slum territory in Lisbon, the emphasis lies on policies’ participatory mechanisms and people’s daily struggles and negotiations with state institutions. The study illustrates how collective agency was initially encouraged, then suppressed, and later “bureaucratised” by the state, aligning with local and global trends in urban planning and capitalist accumulation regimes. At a theoretical level, this contribution prompts an understanding of how agency is distributed over time and capitalised upon through generations — both as a consequence, and in spite of, state intervention — placing the concept in strict dialogue with Bourdieu’s notion of social capital. Simultaneously, this contribution sheds light on the porous and unsettled nature of hegemonic structures governing people’s action and underlines the agency-disguising mechanisms of participatory instruments.

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Despite being particularly hit by Barcelona’s housing crisis, women tend to take the initiative in struggling for homes. Their agency does not rely on rational, autonomous choice, but rather emerges both as a driver and as an outcome of social interdependencies within structural constraints.

Paper long abstract:

Throughout the housing crisis experienced in Barcelona’s metropolitan area since 2008, inhabitants differently positioned in hierarchies of gender, class, or citizenship status have been impacted unevenly. Coping with housing unaffordability, unstable tenure, or displacement pressures requires the deployment of a wide array of strategies in which people’s agency is mobilized, be it on an individual or a collective basis. Despite being over-represented among the victims of these circumstances and facing specific disadvantages due to the feminisation of poverty, job precarity, care responsibilities, or multiple forms of violence, women assume a particularly active role in the seek for solutions, as leading members of their households, clients of welfare agencies and charity institutions, or activists in Barcelona's vigorous housing justice movement. The results of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2021-22 among women affected by the housing crisis will inspire our reflection on the complex declinations of agency, understood as a relational and situated disposition to economic practice that does not need to be limited to rational and autonomous choice, and that is inescapably shaped by the structural constraints imposed by financial forces and institutional regulations. According to our data, agency may (re)produce interdependencies and value-loaded mutual obligations – sometimes even framed in emancipatory projects in creative ways – while at the same time involving planning, management, and calculation practices. The complex, specific combinations of these variegated aspects of agency result in women’s different abilities to manoeuvre while struggling to secure their livelihoods and homes.

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The paper discusses the entanglement of corporate, governmental, and activist modes of political efficacy as agency in Austria. The case are attempts to re-introduce wealth taxation in an era of “split and settle” strategies, which limit agency and pose new challenges of redistributive privilege.

Paper long abstract:

The paper centres efforts to tax value generation processes spanning several countries. Value generation is a highly distributed process in contemporary capitalisms. Large corporations or networks of associated corporate forms, e.g. holdings, strategically “cut and settle” value generation processes into legally distinct corporate entities and their emplacement in jurisdictions that promise low costs and little capture via taxation. The paper’s first part introduces practices that distribute corporate liability and tax responsibilities from corporations headquartered in Austria. The second part expands the question of agency to governmental action of redistribution. Governments frequently understand themselves as torn between attempts to foster the settling of such split corporate activities on their territory and trying to capture parts of its value to finance government and redistribution.

In the third part, I will discuss how corporate and governmental agency meets with activist attempts to re-introduce wealth taxation in the run-up to the 2024 general election in Austria. Among the activists, instructive discussions emerged about redistributive privileges, specifically about countering austerity in a wealthy country by taxing distributed processes, hence redistributing in Austria what was extracted elsewhere.

It is these processes and negotiations of political agency in contemporary tax states in capitalism that the paper focuses on, and their relational and power-laden conditions for efficacious action/ agency.

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Drawing on my fieldwork among professionals and jobseekers in Berlin, I describe how employment resources allow those who procure and mobilize them to experience, on a diminutive scale, what they are denied at large writ: a sphere of agency through which to carve out a socially validated meaning.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on my fieldwork on the work lives of professionals and jobseekers in Berlin, I identify a tension between a widely shared ideal of employment as free, empowering, and meaningful, and an equally widely shared understanding of the circumstances that enable and limit one’s employment possibilities. This apparent contradiction is resolved by a rescaling. Specifically, in a reality heavily circumscribed by the dynamic of accumulation, resources are afforded, primarily in and through employment, which allow those who procure and mobilize them to experience, on a diminutive scale, what they are denied at large writ: a sphere of agency through which to carve out a socially validated meaning. I describe how this state-regulated and supported rescaling shapes the ways in which men and women in Berlin relate to their current or ideal employment.

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The paper explores how former inhabitants of organized squats in Rome navigate the aftermath of eviction and politically redistribute and recontextualize their agency based on the ‘housing political’ learned inside squats.

Paper long abstract:

The ‘housing political’ has primarily been studied as a contested zone where the fight for just housing intersects with the urgent domain of life sustenance, facing ongoing and constant expulsion from public space, the threat of eviction, and the violence of law and bordering regimes, among other issues. However, limited analytical attention has been given to what happens to squatters’ lives and their political agency after being evicted from buildings organized by housing movements, referring to the housing trajectories undertaken and the potential maintenance of radical practices. The purpose of this paper is to delineate the key historical, political, and existential frameworks underlying the past and ongoing geographies of post-evictions from organized squats in Rome, conceptualizing the latter as continually affective processes (Doboš et al., 2023). Consequently, home is considered not only a matter of physical infrastructures and relationships but also a collective political and pedagogical experience that shapes the agentive capabilities of individuals. Although eviction serves as a vehicle for social depotentiation and displacement, the paper focuses instead on how people deal with the aftermath of it and how they politically redistribute and recontextualize their agency with the ‘housing political’ learned inside squats.

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The economic collapse in Lebanon has forced civil society organizations to fill in for the state that has not been able to offer basic care for its denizens. In this paper, I consider how this collapse has directed the agency of these organizations that have been forced to act upon and amid it.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2019, Lebanon has been ravaged by an economic collapse of a magnitude not seen since the mid-1800s. People’s savings have evaporated due to rampant inflation of the Lira, shortages have rendered many basic goods unavailable, and people have resorted to desperate means to access their diminished savings to provide for their families. For many, the crumbling economic reality is yet another manifestation of the inability of the Lebanese state to care for its denizens, while media, international actors and Lebanese civil society have named Lebanon as a collapsed, failing, or already failed state.

Amid this economic crisis, Lebanese civil society has organized to deliver services, infrastructural maintenance and social benefits to fill in for the state that has failed to make the welfare of its denizens its priority. In this paper, I aim to interrogate how this economic failure has directed the actions of these organizations that try to mitigate the increased vulnerability of their beneficiaries. In doing so, I turn to ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lebanese civil society organizations that have acted as a surrogate state, providing basic support for those unable to provide for themselves. By looking at the ways these organizations have been forced to act not only upon but also amid the failures of the state, the aim is to consider the limits the present economic and political reality has set on doing, questioning the often Eurocentric and privileged notions of agency and capacity.

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Using the example of recent transformations in a child-protection NGO in Hungary, our paper inquires into professional discourses of ‘deinstitutionalisation’ and ‘community-based care’ in the context of postsocialist authoritarianism, and the consequent reinforcing of restricted imaginaries of care.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores how concepts of transnational policy-making become localised and gain their meanings in particular societal contexts. Specifically, using the example of recent transformations in a child-protection NGO in Hungary, it inquires into professional discourses of ‘deinstitutionalisation’ and ‘community-based care’ in the context of postsocialist authoritarianism.

The analysis exposes how financial scarcity pressured the management of the NGO in focus to redefine family-community-institution boundaries, in order to legitimise the downsizing of services and staff, and the reassignment of childcare duties to less-paid and less-recognised positions. Austerity measures disguised as emancipatory processes of deinstitutionalisation have already been described in numerous European contexts. Our paper nuances this picture, and shows how discourses of the East-West slope of modernisation emerging in Central and Eastern Europe, and recent discourses of familisation dominating public policies in Hungary enhance such discoursive shift. In this way we draw attention to the role of professional and political discourses, transnational and national, in reinforcing restricted imaginaries of care. By using the conceptual framework of distributed agency we also formulate the call for empirical analyses on how the caring for children unfold in hybrid – state and civic dominated - contexts, in practice, beyond simplistic and essentialising ideological categorisations of ‘family’, ‘community’ and ‘institution’.

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This paper explores the disconnect between discourses of parental agency and empowerment around children’s food amongst UK public health and industry actors, and the entanglement of parent enactments of kinship and care with branded children’s foods, which challenge agentive capabilities in practice

Paper long abstract:

How does the current food system crisis affect the agentive capabilities of parents/carers in the UK to feed their children? The failure of governments to regulate the food and drink industry coupled with neoliberal discourses of personal choice, freedom, and autonomy, have resulted in an intense responsibilisation of parents/carers for children’s diets (Lindsay and Maher, 2013; Maher et al., 2010). Both public health interventions and activity by children’s food brands to address poor diets and rising child obesity focus on education and information, with a rhetoric of empowering and supporting parents to make “good choices” for their children.

However, based on an ethnography of feeding children under ten in Brighton, UK, across a range of socio-economic backgrounds, this paper argues that parents/carers experience limited agentive capability around children’s food in practice. On top of well-documented resource constraints, parents feeding young children are caught up in a web of kinship relations and care practices, which are targeted by, and entangled with, branded children’s foods, shaping ideas about nutrition, feeding practice and parent subjectivities. Parents thus have very little agency to feed their children outside the norms of a processed food imaginary and to make the good choices advocated by public health guidelines; feelings of failure abound.

I conclude by exploring potential alternative experiences of agency opened up by children’s food brands in the face of unrealistic expectations of intensive parenting discourses (Hays, 1996) and public health, through the legitimatisation of the practical and convenient child feeding solutions they offer.

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In this paper, based on ethnographic research carried in Turin, Italy, I wonder how can we conceptualize the agency of the unemployed avoiding the individualism typical of neoliberal thought? My response is that agency should not be thought apart from the economic structure of opportunity.

Paper long abstract:

How can we conceptualize the agency of the unemployed avoiding the individualism typical of neoliberal thought? In this paper I ponder on this question with regards to my ethnographic research on the experience of unemployed in Turin, Italy, carried on during the long local recession that followed the Global Crisis of 2008. My ethnography shows that the unemployed – besides their financial problems – suffer from being deemed responsible and blamed for their predicament, after an individualistic explanation of unemployment which is a central feature of the neoliberal ideology. Furthermore, the policies of activation for unemployed people are based on the same individualistic premise.

However, it is patent that unemployment is above all, at a local level, a consequence of the persistent crisis linked to deindustrialization and the economic transition to a post-Fordist economy, so that the agency of the unemployed is severely conditioned by the limited structure of opportunity which offers very few good jobs.

Unemployed are not passive subject, as it is proved by the tactics of subsistence that they develop to counter the lack of economic resources. Still, if we have to avoid echoing the sirens of neoliberal individualism (Carrier 2016, After the crisis) the concept of agency itself needs to be carefully managed. What even the ethnography demonstrate is that structure and agency can’t be separated, because the agency of the unemployed can be understood only in relation with the economic structure of opportunity.