Search results for "Agency"
showing 10 items of 578 documents
Cultural Politics of Love and Provision among Poor Youth in Urban Tanzania
2015
This article examines how urban youth in the poorest neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam negotiate the terms of transactional intimacy, that is, heterosexual relations in which men are expected to provide for women materially. Using the concept of ‘affect’, I argue that this negotiation involves different levels of male providership, as well as moral values attached to notions of ‘true love’ and the Swahili concept of tamaa. Poor men and women view their agency differently within transactional intimacy, with women describing themselves as exploited by men who do not fulfil their end of the transactional bargain, and poor men portraying themselves as deeply disempowered in comparison to wealthie…
The construction of academic identity in the changes of Finnish higher education
2013
This article sets out to explore how academics make sense of the current transformations of higher education and what kinds of academic identities are thereby constructed. Based on a narrative analysis of 42 interviews with Finnish academics, nine narratives are discerned, each providing a different answer as to what it means to be an academic in the present-day university. Narratives of resistance, loss, administrative work overload and job insecurity are embedded in a regressive storyline, describing deterioration of academic work and one's standing. In a sharp contrast, narratives of success, mobility and change agency rely on a progressive storyline which sees the current changes in a p…
Agentic perspective on fostering work-related learning
2017
Despite the increased recognition of the role that professional agency plays in work-related learning, little is known about what supports it. Based on current theoretical notions, the first purpose of this paper is to show that professional agency is closely intertwined with work-related learning. The second purpose is to introduce some main principles that promote professional agency and describe three work-related training settings that are aimed at fostering learning by taking into account agentic perspectives. These complementary settings include an identity coaching programme, a leadership coaching programme, and a work conference. Based on the qualitative meta-synthesis, the paper fu…
Negotiating female judoka identities in Greece : A Foucauldian discourse analysis
2015
Abstract Objectives The objectives of this paper are to trace the discourses through which female Greek judokas articulate their sporting experiences and to explore how they construct their identities through the negotiation of sociocultural beliefs and gender stereotypes. Design This article is based on interview data from a larger ethnographic research with women judo athletes, grounded in a cultural praxis framework. Method Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted during fieldwork in Greece. Interview data were analyzed drawing on a Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis. Results We identified four concepts—biology, gender, femininity, and judo/sport—that were central to unearth…
Striving for Inclusion through Participatory Practices in Social Enterprises
2019
The aim of this research case is to shed some empirical light on the effects of participatory practices from the perspective of Sen’s capability approach in a Finnish social enterprise. Using a mixed method approach we explore how participatory practices build social inclusion by enabling both company’s employees and customers to engage in social agency. The case study findings articulate the importance of participatory practices to employees’ perceptions of meaningfulness of life and being able to meet customers (who are mentally disabled) needs on the one hand and customers’ experience of information sharing and feedback giving to the employees and helping other customers. peerReviewed
CLIL Challenges : Secondary School CLIL Teachers’ Voices and Experienced Agency in Three European Contexts
2020
This qualitative interview study focuses on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) teacher agency in three European contexts, Austria, Finland and Andalusia, Spain. The aim of the study is to understand how individual CLIL teachers experience their agency when encountering challenges in their work and to demonstrate the multifaceted quality of their agency. The study employs the Listening Guide method (Gilligan, 2015) to listen to the voices of three secondary school subject teachers from three diverse contexts. The analysis shows that CLIL challenges both empowered and disempowered the teachers depending on how meaningful they found their work and what their possibilities to act w…
Creating learning paths, influencing, participating: A pilot study on teacher students’ experiences of agency in their first-year small group studies
2014
The purpose of this pilot study was to examine teacher students’ agency. In this study agency was defined as the students’ possibilities and resources to influence their studies, pursue goals, make choices, and act autonomously and responsibly. The main aims were to find out what kind of agency teacher students experience in their studies and what kind of factors they perceive as supporting and constraining their agency. The pilot also aimed to ascertain suitable methodology for investigating student agency. The data were collected with teacher education students’ interviews (n = 2) and written self-reflections (n = 3). The analysis indicated that teacher students’ agency was manifested as …
Exploring agency and entrainment in joint music-making through the reported experiences of students and teachers
2022
This qualitative interview-based study draws on the reported experiences of students and teachers to explore how agency and entrainment resource and constrain each other in joint music-making. The participants were 23 students of Grades 6 and 11 music teachers from different primary schools. The qualitative content analysis of the 11 student pair interviews and 11 one-to-one teacher interviews indicated that experiences of music-related interpersonal entrainment intertwine with different dimensions of agency. In the analysis, four themes were identified as follows: presence, belonging, safety, and continuity. These findings provide insights into the relationship between agency and entrainme…
Students’ agency profiles in relation to student-perceived teaching practices in university courses
2020
This study addresses the gap in our understanding of the role of pedagogy in agency construction among higher education students. In the present study, profiles of students’ agency experiences were identified and analysed with respect to the students’ perceptions of teaching practices in their courses (i.e., student-centred learning activities, forms of instruction, and student-teacher roles). The Agency of University Students (AUS) Scale (Jääskelä et al., 2017) was used to assess the students’ experiences of their personal, relational, and participatory resources of agency. Agency profiles were found to be associated with students’ perceptions of teaching practices in the courses. The find…
Displaying agency problems at the outset of psychotherapy
2016
In order to present him- or herself at the outset of psychotherapy as a credible client, the person needs to, on one hand, formulate a sense of lost agency in accounts of his/her life situation, and on the other, to present him- or herself as willing and able to take part in conversational self-exploration. In this study, we looked in detail at how one person, seeking psychotherapy, constructed accounts that served this double function. We sought to develop the usefulness of the concept of agency as an integrative theoretical construct of core processes in therapy and introduced a model of five aspects of agentic vs. non-agentic presentation, developed and applied in an earlier study on cli…