Introduction: The Urgency of Agency

The world we live in urgently calls for a better understanding of agency, and for using new understandings to promote positive change. Increasingly people face complex challenges and situations that require breaking out of the status quo and transforming the ways we have become accustomed to living, producing and organising. Studies of agency are crucial if we are to grapple with pressing societal and environmental problems – not merely responding to them but collectively striving towards alternative futures shaped by the common good (Reference Blachet-Cohen and ReillyBlanchet-Cohen & Reilly, 2017; Reference Boyte and FindersBoyte & Finders, 2016; Reference Haapasaari and KerosuoHaapasaari & Kerosuo, 2015; Reference SanninoSannino, 2022). This is anything but a neutral agenda. Focussing on agency forms part of a critique and corrective in research and theory, disrupting notions that assume neutrality while privileging dominant agendas (Reference Cole, Kaptelinin, Nardi and VadeboncoeurCole et al., 2016). Nardi notes ‘a good deal of theorizing in the last decades has undercut our ability to argue for and promote social justice and freedom. If we do not make commitments, we will not see results’ (Reference Nardi2017, p. 2). The urgency of agency is intimately connected with the idea of scholarship as ethically responsive and responsible (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2021).

Understandings of agency as an inherent quality residing within the individual, or as an outcome of a vaguely defined interplay between individuals and their social contexts, are ontologically and epistemologically fallacious, morally wanting and insufficient to respond to today’s pressing societal needs (Reference SanninoSannino, 2022). Yet this is precisely what dominant psychological and sociological conceptualisations of agency typically offer: categorising different types of agency but remaining silent or unclear on the processes of its emergence and development (Reference SanninoSannino, 2022). Rather than taking up agency ‘dangerously’ – in the active struggle for a better world (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2020d) – many scholars work with agency in ways that we might characterise as ‘safe’, as a matter of curiosity but not of challenge to vested interests and as a radical means to usurp the status quo.

Cultural-historical theorising was born in the dramatic events of the early twentieth century, embodying a revolutionary ethos (Reference SanninoSannino, 2011; Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2021). The challenge today is to develop and put to use relevant conceptual and methodological solutions in the service of making alternative futures possible. Key to this is the emergence of self-organised collectives addressing basic human needs that are not otherwise properly serviced by the state or the market – and which can therefore be regarded as fields or commons that are alternative to capitalism (Engeström & Reference SanninoSannino, 2020). We are compelled to radically refashion many received notions, to take a stand and to clarify the positions we occupy in the political struggles of our times (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2021).

We argue that agency is one of these ‘received notions’ that we need to disrupt – not least in its association with individualism or its negation in social accounts in which the agentive self becomes a casualty (Reference Stetsenko and ArievitchStetsenko & Arievitch, 2004). Elaborating the inner workings of cultural-historical theories regarding agency is far from complete (Reference Engeström, Nuttall and HopwoodEngeström et al., 2020; Reference MorselliMorselli, 2021). We must accelerate the (re)invigoration of cultural-historical theories and methodologies of agency. This is not a quest for a singular, once-and-for-all cultural-historical view of agency but rather a charge to expand and, where necessary, critically supersede established ways of thinking to strengthen the arsenal available to us in building futures that ought to be. While this requires recognising pressing crises and causes for dissatisfaction with the status quo, this work should not be confined by notions of recovery and response. Instead, it must be fuelled by a politics of transcendence, rebelling against and rejecting that which perpetuates inequality, exclusion and degradation.

In this book, we bring together contributions that recognise the urgency of agency – theoretically and as a means to intervene in the world. They build on dynamic and future-orientated hallmarks of cultural-historical work, addressing mind and material action, person and society in their dialectical interplay (e.g. Reference EngeströmEngeström, 2020a; Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2017). In this opening chapter, we problematise accounts of agency that render it a (falsely) slippery concept before outlining features of cultural-historical approaches that overcome common problems. We then establish motives, mediation and motion as three specific cultural-historical motifs that provide a basis for distinctive ways of theorising and promoting agency. Each motif gains special meaning, significance and connection to the others through its embedding in wider cultural-historical frameworks. Such positioning also gives rise to important connections with questions of learning and development. This is crucial in rendering agency as something we can be ethically responsive to and responsible for as researchers; that is, as something that we can facilitate pedagogically. In order to understand the significance of this stance, we must first confront problems with the ways in which agency has been approached – problems that have led many to be understandably, but unnecessarily, queasy about agency.

Agency: A Slippery Concept?

Agency is often referred to as a ‘slippery’ concept (Reference CampbellCampbell, 2009); it is hard to grasp, a source of strain and confusion, a ‘black box’ (Reference Emirbayer and MischeEmirbayer & Mische, 1998). But what if instead of being a property of agency itself, this slipperiness were a product of the way we think about it?

Much effort has been expended addressing individual autonomy in its relationship to social structures (e.g. Reference ArcherArcher, 1996, Reference Archer2003; Reference GiddensGiddens, 1984). Such approaches do not necessarily pit these as exclusive, natural opponents (Reference FuchsFuchs, 2001), as in Reference WeberWeber’s (1920/1965) notion that cultural developments are internalised by people, extending their ability to act. However, they do create difficulties in establishing the need to bridge gaps between agency and structure (Reference Elbasha and WrightElbasha & Wright, 2017; Reference FuchsFuchs, 2001; Reference SwansonSwanson, 1992), a gulf between the individual and ‘structural effects that impinge on them in the manner of a transcendent destiny that no one has willed’ (Reference LatourLatour, 1996, p. 232). They also fail to distinguish agency as a category in its own right (Reference Emirbayer and MischeEmirbayer & Mische, 1998) and are susceptible to misplaced emphasis: exaggerating individual independence or disappearing individual contributions in overly social accounts, where people become robots programmed by social structure (Reference CampbellCampbell, 2009; Reference SwansonSwanson, 1992).

Despite longstanding critiques, individualistic approaches to agency remain. Many of these consider agency as a ‘sense’ of our capacity to change the external world through our own behaviour (Reference MooreMoore & Obhi, 2012). The awareness of being in control of our actions comes from an ‘intentional binding’, linking a deliberate action and its intended outcome to the fact we could have acted differently (Reference FrithFrith, 2014). ‘When we make voluntary actions we tend not to feel as though they simply happen to us, instead we feel as though we are in charge. The sense of agency refers to this feeling of being in the driving seat when it comes to our actions’ (Reference MooreMoore, 2016, p. 1).

Approaches to agency as a sense have serious internal problems. These include evidence that the ‘experiences of agency’ can be quite divorced from the ‘facts of agency’ (Reference MooreMoore, 2016, p. 2) and that the sense of agency is often illusory (Reference FrithFrith, 2017). Despite apparent outward moves to culture and society, the approach leads ever inwards and downwards, generating questions of whether the sense of agency is ‘personal or subpersonal’ (Reference BermudezBermudez, 2010). Further problems arise in trying to explain this ‘sense’ as presiding over both highly predictable actions and those that are more precarious and uncertain (Reference LukitschLukitsch, 2020). ‘If our experience of action doesn’t really affect what we do in the moment, then what is it for? Why have it? Contrary to what many people believe, I think agency is only relevant to what happens after we act – when we try to justify and explain ourselves to each other’ (Reference FrithFrith, 2017).

Reflection on our actions alongside discussions with and instructions from others can lead us to change our behaviour, argues Reference FrithFrith (2014). So we are not automatons limited to reacting to the world – we can change it. While we recognise that reflection can play an important role in agency, we disagree that agency is only relevant after we act.

Reference BanduraBandura’s (1997) social cognitive theory of human functioning seeks to eschew dichotomous approaches and disrupt opposites of freedom and control. It confronts the limitations of views according to which human beings react to the external environment that moulds them by suggesting that people are producers as well as products of the social systems and broader sociocultural influences within which personal agency operates. Reference BanduraBandura (2001) distinguishes direct personal agency, proxy agency (relying on others to act at one’s behest) and collective agency exercised through interdependent effort. Such distinctions fail to capture the individual and collective essence of agency. While Bandura’s work does bring human action into view, agency remains primarily a matter of self-influence through mental states, from which historical and material features have been purged. The process of developing control over the circumstances of life becomes unduly abstracted from culturally and historically situated, embodied, material and productive actions.

Other approaches remain tied to individuals. Reference CampbellCampbell (2009), for example, outlines two contrasting ways in which agency relates to the individual: power that individuals possess that enables them to realise their chosen goals and the power of actors to operate independently of the determining constraints of social structure. The former

In the first form, agency loses all grip on social change, while in the latter social structures are overcome to the point of actions being independent of them. There are no social consequences in the former; no social contingencies in the latter. Instead of being a mysterious ‘sense’, agency becomes an equally mysterious ‘power’ where volitional acts fail to account for wider change and the origins of such power, if it indeed acts independently of social structures, remain murky. There are clear counter-facts that people are effecting change in the wider world and that social structures do not simply disappear and their forces evaporate in this process. Agency is not in itself slippery: ahistorical, individualistic, disembodied and immaterial ways of understanding it make it so.

Before proceeding, we address a different approach to overcoming the apparent slipperiness of agency: accounts ‘on the side of things’ (Reference Caronia and MortariCaronia & Mortari, 2015). These question assumptions about human agency deploying quasi-inert material objects that are domesticated in order to make sense, giving ontological primacy to human beings (Reference Cooren, Fairhurst, Huët, Leonardi, Nardi and KallinikosCooren et al., 2012; Reference Ueno, Sawyer and MoroUeno et al., 2017). Following, among others, Reference LatourLatour’s (2007) work, the subject no longer refers to a human being but a competence in originating action, creating meaning and delineating available ways of life; a competence that objects ‘have’ to the point that they can be considered intentional subjects (Reference Caronia and MortariCaronia & Mortari, 2015). We do not agree. There are many ways in which a strong role for materiality can be maintained while preserving an essential quality of human intention. For example, Reference SchatzkiSchatzki (2002, Reference Schatzki2010) defends a ‘residual humanism’ that rejects symmetry, arguing that objects make a contribution but that contribution ‘depends on us’ (Reference SchatzkiSchatzki, 2002, p. 117). Nicolini acknowledges the importance of materiality but notes: ‘While human and non-human elements are different, in that intentional agency can be attributed to the former but not to the latter; such intentional agency does not emerge in a vacuum but within the temporally-emergent structure of real-time practices’ (Reference Nicolini2012, p. 170).

Agency as a matter of how we realise the future that ought to be slips out of our grasp when we erase all analytical distinction between the human and non-human. But accounts that evacuate all materiality leave us with the equally slippery issue of an ethereal sense or intangible power. Reference GlăveanuGlăveanu (2020) argues that Vygotskian thinking helps us deal with these challenges. Without needing to postulate ‘object agency’, we can take up a view that agency is ‘distributed between person and environment’ (p. 346), recognising that material objects are not agents in the same way humans are and yet no human agency is possible without material support and social interaction. Cultural-historical approaches offer a means to conceptualise agency in non-dualist ways while retaining a crucial role for materiality that goes beyond approaches of practice theorists such as Schatzki and Nicolini, and presently fashionable human-less (posthuman) materialism (Reference Stetsenko, Sugarman and MartinStetsenko, 2020c, p. 75).

Motives retain their necessary status and agency remains entangled with matters of mind and volition, but they are also fundamentally grounded in concrete, embodied, productive action. In the following section, we expand on how cultural-historical perspectives conceptualise human agency without slipping into pitfalls of agency as an achievement of autonomous, isolated individuals or as puppets of extraneous forces outside of one’s control or even awareness (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2020a). This challenge is not to be taken lightly or neutrally: it is absolutely a matter of engaging with politics and struggle for and over the future. If our theorisations shirk from prioritising communal forms of social life and human development in favour of false solutions to dualism or theoretical stylishness (Reference SewellSewell, 1992), then ‘it’s game over for understanding and underwriting transformation’ (Reference NardiNardi, 2017, p. 1).

Cultural-Historical Approaches to Agency

Questions of agency have long been central to cultural-historical scholarship. However, recent years have seen a much-needed renewal with novel theorisations that address agency in its transformative and relational nature (Reference Edwards and EdwardsEdwards 2017; Reference SanninoSannino 2015a, Reference Sannino2015b; Reference StetsenkoStetsenko 2019, Reference Stetsenko2020a–Reference Stetsenkoe) and formative intervention methodologies aiming at supporting agency (Reference Bal, Bird Bear, Ko, Orie, Cavendish and SamsonBal et al., 2021; Reference SanninoSannino 2020, Reference Sannino2022). Cultural-historical approaches offer an important resource to mobilise the kinds of innovative, disruptive and emancipatory research that are needed to address the troubled living of our times. In this section we outline the dialectic foundations upon which cultural-historical approaches to agency are built, connect them with an overt and active relationship to struggles for a better world and explain how contemporary work on agency builds on longstanding – if not always explicit – currents in cultural-historical work.

Cultural-historical theorising provides a coherent but not monolithic means to avoid agency–structure dichotomies and problems with approaches that relegate agency to a ‘sense’ (see the previous section). Reference Roth, Tobin, Elmesky, Carambo, McKnight and BeersRoth and colleagues (2004) describe agency as a fundamental characteristic of human being(s) that cannot be considered simply as a property of individuals but rather as emergent and situated in social and material interaction. Dialectic thinking lies at the heart of cultural-historical views of agency, recognising that the social dimension of human activity is always present, even when individuals are seemingly acting alone (Reference ChaiklinChaiklin, 2019), as our actions and being are part of the continuous flow of historical becoming. A dialectic unit of analysis enables us to capture the interplay between volitional action and cultural resources used as means to break out of challenging situations and resolve them (e.g. Reference Lund and VestølLund & Vestøl, 2020). ‘Cultural-historical activity theory has a focus on human agency and its transformation of the world. Agency, however, is enabled and constrained by the same societal and material structures world that give rise to it’ (Reference Roth, Lee and HsuRoth et al., 2009, pp. 139–40).

Cultural-historical theories are uniquely positioned to grapple with rising social and ecological injustice exacerbated by diverse contemporary crises:

We may not choose the circumstances in which we act, but we need not be resigned to them either (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2017). Human agency ‘can be duly restored without falling into the traps of traditional individualism and anthropocentrism’ (Reference Stetsenko, Sugarman and MartinStetsenko, 2020c, p. 66) and the importance of individual dimensions of agency can be reclaimed within a profoundly social and relational view of the self (Reference Stetsenko and ArievitchStetsenko & Arievitch, 2004). This directs our attention not to two sides of a binary and how they relate (one under the skull, the other ‘out there’ as social structures) but to reality between human beings and the world, at the nexus of individual and social (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2017, Reference Stetsenko2020b; Reference Stetsenko and ArievitchStetsenko & Arievitch, 2004). Various contemporary cultural-historical approaches tackle agency at precisely this nexus, including Reference SanninoSannino’s (2015b, Reference Sannino2020, Reference Sannino2022) transformative agency by double stimulation, Reference Edwards and EdwardsEdwards’ (2017, Reference Edwards2020) work on relational agency and Reference StetsenkoStetsenko’s (2017, Reference Stetsenko2020a–Reference Stetsenkoe) transformative activist stance. Elaborating on the latter, Stetsenko explains that while transformative practice is carried out by individuals through their unique, personal, but never asocial contributions, these contributions are inextricably related to other people, and thus to society and history: ‘individuals never start from scratch and never completely vanish’ (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2017, p. 191). Agency is not just linked to social practices but is a material-semiotic process that emerges within social practices and makes them possible (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2020a).

Another key current in cultural-historical approaches to agency is a sense of struggle. This takes us beyond the idea of ‘bouncing back’ from a stressor that can be implied when we think about risk and resilience (see Reference Edwards, Evangelou, Hedegaard and EdwardsEdwards & Evangelou, 2019). Instead, struggle invokes going beyond, breaking away, transcending the status quo (Reference VirkkunenVirkkunen, 2006), enacting a utopia (Reference SanninoSannino, 2020). A Vygotskian perspective shifts the focus away from what individuals lack and towards ‘investing in mediated activities that enable learning and agency’ (Reference SanninoSannino, 2018, p. 389). Struggle, rupture, contestation, commitment and imagination all imbue the world with undeniably human dimensions while invoking a world that is far from neutral or separate from us (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2020a). ‘The primary emphasis is on struggle and striving – on people en-countering, con-fronting, and overcoming the circumstances and conditions that are not so much given as taken up by people within the processes of actively grappling with them and, thus, realizing and bringing them forth in striving to change and transcend them’ (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2020a, p. 12 (emphasis in original)).

The authors of this book are not concerned with how people merely react or respond to what exists but with how they agentively co-create the world and themselves, going beyond what is presently ‘given’ (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2019), and enact seemingly impossible versions of the future (Reference SanninoSannino, 2020, Reference Sannino2022). Through cultural-historical perspectives, they ground agency in the very materiality of the world, not as some abstract sense or mysterious power (Reference SanninoSannino, 2020). While recognising individual contributions, these perspectives also recognise that agency is contingent on access to cultural tools, an access that is provided by society, created and recreated collaboratively and taken up by individuals and collectives. This raises questions of how societies both enable and stifle agency and links agency to issues of social equity and justice (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2019).

Struggle is not envisaged here as an object of study – something with which researchers have a detached relationship. Rather, cultural-historical researchers take up the struggle, take sides in battles for the future and are ready to intervene (see Reference Bal, Bird Bear, Ko, Orie, Cavendish and SamsonBal et al., 2021; Reference Engeström and SanninoEngeström & Sannino, 2021; Reference SanninoSannino 2020, Reference Sannino2022; Reference Sannino, Engeström and JokinenSannino et al., 2021). The contributions to this book eschew passive interest in how the world changes and work with agency in ways that help to make Vygotsky’s ideas ‘dangerous’ – useful in the struggle for a better world (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2020d, p. 7).

Vygotsky and his colleagues had a clear activist, interventionist agenda (Reference SanninoSannino, 2011). The socialist ideology introduced by the 1917 revolution in Russia appealed to progressive thinkers given its emphasis on social equality, liberation of oppressed workers and ethnic minorities and social transformation through equal access to education (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2020d). Agency was far from ignored by or absent from the work of Vygotsky, Leont’ev and others. The ‘rebellious gist’ of Vygotsky’s project requires an activist and radical-transformative scholarship ‘especially on the topic of agency’ (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2019, p. 11). Reference ShotterShotter (1993) described Vygotsky as concerned with how people change themselves and the conditions of their existence (e.g. also Reference EdwardsEdwards, 2020). Many see mediation as key to this, although ‘Vygotsky’s Western critics often look for agency in the wrong place’, mistaking active deployment of cultural tools and creative sense-making for passive receipt of culture in development (Reference Bakhurst, Daniels, Cole and WertschBakhurst, 2007, p. 72).

Reference Engeström and SanninoEngeström and Sannino (2021) suggest that agency has been a consistent, albeit at times implicit, focus of what they refer to as ‘four generations’ of cultural-historical activity theory (focussing on work through the Finnish school of activity theory). In the ‘first generation’, agency is associated with grasping the historically evolving nature and emancipatory possibilities of one’s actions. In the ‘second generation’, agency is framed more explicitly as an expansive movement from individuals and collectives who transform their activity. Reference Engeström and SanninoEngeström and Sannino (2021, p. 8) explain how this built on Leont’ev’s argument that the elevation of goals to collective motives creates a ‘different fate’ (Reference LeontievLeont’ev, 1978, p. 134). The language of a different fate again upholds a thrust that is occupied with rejecting what seems to be given and concretely acting towards envisioned alternatives. The ‘third generation’ focussed on multiple intersecting activity systems wherein features of agency involving recognition and negotiation of deviations, differences and complementarities of expertise positions became more prominent in analysis (e.g. Reference Engeström and SanninoEngeström & Sannino, 2021). There are interesting parallels here with threads in Reference EdwardsEdwards’ (2005, Reference Edwards and Edwards2017, Reference Edwards2020) work where agency is contingent on people recognising and working with differences as to what matters. The ‘third generation’ also highlighted fluid collaborations that are reconstructed as the object shifts. The ‘fourth generation’ involves work on transformative agency by double stimulation, where agency has been approached as a means to enacting utopias in heterogenous work coalitions (Reference SanninoSannino, 2015b, Reference Sannino2020, Reference Sannino2022; see also from this volume Sannino, Chapter 2; Engeström et al., Chapter 5; Bal and Bird Bear, Chapter 8; Francisco Junior et al., Chapter 12; Kerosuo and Jokinen, Chapter 13).

Reference EdwardsEdwards’ (2005, Reference Edwards, Sannino, Daniels and Gutiérrez2009, Reference Edwards and Edwards2017, Reference Edwards2020) work on relational agency pursues complementary but distinctive features of agency. Relational agency is a capacity to work with others to expand interpretations of the world and take action (Reference Edwards and MackenzieEdwards & Mackenzie, 2005), explaining how two or more people from different backgrounds are able to work with different object motives when tackling shared, complex objects of activity (Reference EdwardsEdwards, 2020). Companion concepts of relational expertise (the capacity to elicit what matters to others and draw on associated understandings when needed) and common knowledge (a mutual understanding of what matters that can mediate – as a second stimulus – responsive collaborations on complex problems) enrich Edwards’ account, which focusses on a ‘middle layer’ of analysis between the system and the individual (Reference EdwardsEdwards, 2012). The kind of work, often at sites of intersecting practices, that Edwards’ framework captures and promotes is ‘deeply ethical’ as it allows for creative responses which stem from what is important for each individual, at the same time connecting people dialogically to each other and to a common good’ (Reference Edwards and Edwards2017, p. 2; see also Chapter 4 by Edwards and Chapter 9 by Rai in this volume).

Motives, Mediation and Motion

The motifs of motives, mediation and motion provide a basis for articulating a learning- and development-orientated perspective on agency. The three motifs gain distinctive meaning(s) and connectedness from their location within a broader cultural-historical framework. Rather than suggesting singular notions of motives, mediations and motion, we highlight different ways in which these ideas are taken up by cultural-historical scholars, rehearsing a diversity of thinking that is reflected in this book’s subsequent chapters. We do not conceive them as isolated concepts but as foci and points of departure that are useful in understanding agency as a process for change and in promoting agency and its facilitation by pedagogic means (Reference Engeström, Nuttall and HopwoodEngeström et al., 2020).

Towards a Learning- and Development-Orientated Perspective on Agency

Today’s crises and challenges do not have obvious, ready solutions. There is a need more than ever to strengthen agency. This raises questions of what the role of learning might be in the emergence and expression of agency, and how agency might be facilitated pedagogically (Reference Engeström, Nuttall and HopwoodEngeström et al., 2022).

Cultural-historical perspectives offer a coherent but as yet not fully articulated or realised basis to understand the role of learning in agency, and to develop relevant pedagogic means to foster agency not just in response to problems and crises but to transcend them based on radically different visions of the future. Indeed, it is through cultural-historical approaches to understanding learning that we can overcome serious shortcomings in other views of agency. Ecological views see agency as an emergent phenomenon of the conditions through which it is enacted, not as a property or capacity of individuals (see Reference Biesta and TedderBiesta & Tedder, 2007; Reference Emirbayer and MischeEmirbayer & Mische, 1998; Reference Priestley, Biesta and RobinsonPriestley et al., 2015). Such conceptualisations of agency focus on how people respond to problems and act under given circumstances (Reference Emirbayer and MischeEmirbayer & Mische, 1998). Biesta and Tedder argue that ‘under current societal conditions, individuals are increasingly “forced” to take control of their lives’ (Reference Biesta and Tedder2007, p. 147). Although recognising the value of such relational and ecological approaches, Reference StetsenkoStetsenko (2019) suggests they tacitly erect a wall between person and world because they do not leave scope for our setting in place the conditions under which we act before we get a chance to act on them. Such ecological notions can also lack the necessary political commitments: ‘Paraphrasing Kohn, I would say – show me a conception of agency that operates with the notion of responding to the world and stays away from politics, and I will show you a conceptual terrain tacitly defined by behaviorism and neoliberalism’ (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2019, p. 11).

The idea that agency is a matter of reaction and response weakens the idea of agency as something transcendent, projective and future-orientated. Agency as a means to enact utopias (Reference SanninoSannino, 2020) is hard to square with agency as a response under given conditions. The research literature on utopias is moving precisely in the direction of adopting utopias as critical means in learning to imagine and act beyond the prevailing system (e.g. Reference BarkinBarkin, 2020; Reference Bina, Inch and PereiraBina et al., 2020). Notions of insurgent agency point to resistant acts that manipulate and manoeuvre conditions to achieve ends that are structured as unachievable (Reference BierriaBierria, 2014). While these can corrode structural domination, they still operate within violent constraints of power. As such, Reference StetsenkoStetsenko (2019) points to radical-transformative agency as specifically about overcoming accommodation of, adaptation of or acquiescence to the status quo, including the power imbalances, exploitation, oppression and violence of neoliberalism.

Cultural-historical theories offer a notion of learning – linked to agency – that is not at all trapped in given conditions and is precisely about what is not yet there (Reference EngeströmEngeström 1987/2015, Reference Engeström2016). Within Change Laboratories (Reference Sannino, Engeström and LemosSannino et al., 2016), research about learning serves as a catalyst for participatory analyses supporting agentive change processes through expansive learning that entails the development of new visions and transformed activities. A Change Laboratory is a learning and agency formation journey towards the unknown, full of obstacles. This learning goes beyond the acquisition of well-established sets of knowledge and participation in relatively stable practices. This type of learning goes hand in hand with transformative agency (by double simulation), which is both a core process and outcome of expansive learning (Reference SanninoSannino, 2022).

Importantly, cultural-historical notions of learning depart from views in which learning is reduced as a matter of individuals acquiring existing knowledge. Rather collaborative, joint activities are viewed as constituting the irreducible developmental realm, superseding dualisms of person and environment, agency and structure (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2019; Reference Vygotsky and RieberVygotsky 1960/97). This is apparent in Reference Edwards and EdwardsEdwards’ (2017) work that reveals how the production of common knowledge – a mutual understanding of what matters to others collaborating on complex problems – can drive expansions in the ways people interpret situations and the actions that become possible. Learning is thoroughly grounded in collective human activity through which we confront the material conditions of our lives, break away from them by developing new concepts and transcend what appears to be given (Reference EngeströmEngeström, 2016; Reference VirkkunenVirkkunen, 2006).

A Vygotskian approach places pedagogy and learning centre stage because these processes are precisely the pathway people follow to acquire the cultural tools that allow for their contribution to practices, their own development and the world (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2017). The starting point to understand this process is that learning is always mediated by concrete artefacts or linguistic tools that must be adopted and actively used by the learner (Reference SanninoSannino, 2020; Reference Vygotsky and WertschVygotsky, 1981). This is the very nature of human learning: we need artefacts to develop and to transform the world around us, and to act volitionally (Reference SanninoSannino, 2020; Reference Tomaz, Sannino and EngeströmTomaz et al., in press). Within this perspective, learning becomes radically agentive, grounded in the generation of new concepts (linking back to motion and the ascent from abstract to concrete), motives and practices (Reference Haapasaari, Engeström and KerosuoHaapasaari et al., 2016; Reference Kajamaa and KumpulainenKajamaa & Kumpulainen, 2019). There is much at stake here as we seek to incorporate agency into a theory of human development and learning within an explicit quest to enact utopias (Reference SanninoSannino, 2020) and to achieve justice and equality by creating necessary conditions under the assumption that this can and ought to be achieved (Reference Stetsenko, Martin, Sugarman and SlaneyStetsenko, 2015).

Because development and learning are thoroughly contingent on cultural tools provided by society, we cannot account for individual or group failures or successes in terms of some biological endowment, capability or innate sense (Reference Stetsenko, Martin, Sugarman and SlaneyStetsenko, 2015). We agree with Reference Biesta and TedderBiesta and Tedder (2007) that learning may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for agency. The accomplishment of agency is contingent on the resources that are available and the possibility of the uptake towards desired ends. We also agree with Reference Biesta and TedderBiesta and Tedder (2007) that it is not merely the case that people need more resources to be more agentic. Cultural-historical perspectives reveal that relevant resources may in fact abound, but transformative agency is contingent on their take-up as particular agentic instrumentalities (for example, as second stimuli that enable volitional acts and give new meaning to conflicted situations; Reference SanninoSannino, 2022). We remain concerned with the inequities in the availability of the cultural tools of agency (Reference StetsenkoStetsenko, 2017), recognising that resolving this is far more than a matter of presence and quantity. Indeed, this points to the need to better understand how we can pedagogically facilitate the use of available resources as tools of agency, the development of new tools and the more equitable distribution of those that already exist.

The work of understanding the connections between learning and agency, and how agency can be facilitated pedagogically, is far from complete (Reference Engeström, Nuttall and HopwoodEngeström et al., 2020). The three motifs of motive, mediation and motion also have potential to be understood through cultural-historical perspectives at the nexus of learning, development and agency. Taking up this agenda is crucial. If theories of agency are divorced from those of learning, there is a risk that, however sophisticated our understandings, we miss out on crucial – perhaps the most powerful – means to go beyond describing or classifying agency, and instead actually promoting it.

Overview of This Book

This book embraces diversity within cultural-historical perspectives, and its contributing chapters reflect different theoretical nuances, conceptual emphases and methodological approaches. In Chapter 2, Sannino tackles the hidden, unrecognised and often suppressed power of hybrid coalitions coming together and contributing to the making of a more just and sustainable world. Arguing that transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS) is intrinsically a power-sensitive conceptualisation of agency, Sannino engages in dialogue with and expands on the proposition of power in the sociology of real utopias. A chronological account of two subsequent studies on eradicating homelessness supports an expanded proposition in which TADS can serve a key generating and mediating function of power.

Engaging in similarly fundamental and also methodological questions, Stetsenko (Chapter 3) argues that to advance cultural-historical activity theory during the current severe sociopolitical and ecological crisis, it is imperative to amplify connections to the radical scholarships of resistance immersed in social justice struggles. Stetsenko builds on the transformative activist stance (premised on Marxist/Vygotskyan foundations, inclusive of a unified ethico-ontoepistemology) and connects to contemporary scholarship of resistance to further the notion of agency at the nexus of a seamless, ever-evolving/moving process of a mutual self-and-world co-realisation. This view also problematises reality as a task and gearing agency to the tasks of resistance. Furthermore, and anticipating issues that are taken up later in the book, Stetsenko sets the stage to interrogate charges of eurocentrism and anthropocentrism in Marx and Vygotsky (see chapters on decolonising, as well as those from the global south, outlined next).

Edwards (Chapter 4) helps us transition from these broader foci to the accounts of specific studies which follow. The author explores how insights from Vygotsky’s work on child and adolescent development can be employed to create a relational pedagogy that nurtures the agency of students as learners, enabling them to be creative makers of their and their communities’ futures. The case is made for school systems that create environments where teachers can support student agency. The role of motive orientation, imagination and agency in taking forward learners’ trajectories is discussed in relation to playworlds in early education settings, makerspaces in schools, the careful use of moral imagining in creating new futures for disengaged adolescents and responsive relational teaching in mainstream schooling. All four employ pedagogies which aim at the unfolding of student agency and which can be explained by Edwards’ now widely recognised concepts of relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency.

Ideas of motive orientation, agentic action and new futures are also taken up in Engeström et al.’s (Chapter 5) account of a Change Laboratory supporting adolescents to work on motive conflicts and to construct and implement projects they found significant. Informed by TADS, they analyse the evolution of students’ projects as efforts to move from mental future orientation to practical and material future-making. Engeström et al. argue that it is time to make the shift from studying young people’s future orientations as private mental phenomena to fostering and analysing future-making as material public actions that generate use-value and have an impact beyond the individual.

Themes of schooling continue to be woven into discussions of agency, transformation and motives in Daniels et al.’s (Chapter 6) writing on exclusion of young people from school. They explore how young people might be agentic in processes of school exclusion and how that agency might be strengthened. Drawing on the cultural-historical theory of TADS and Bernsteinian insights on cultural transmission and pedagogy, they analyse data from a study of permanent school exclusions in a southern English city and connect these with novel theoretical considerations on transformative agency emerging from a wider multidisciplinary comparative study of exclusion. Daniels et al. draw our attention to the concept of the categorisation of exclusions when seeking to better understand the possibilities for young people’s agency in exclusion.

In Chapter 7, Hilppö and Rajala maintain a focus on children and young people, bringing to this book the idea of their responsible agency in the context of civic engagement. This brings into focus children and youth’s ethical and political aspirations and how they give meaning to their civic engagement. They analyse two examples of civic projects – important forms of civic engagement are personally resonant activities: P365 (centred on a Tasmanian boy, Campbell Remess, who since the age of nine in 2013 has been making teddy bears to comfort and support children battling cancer in long-term hospital care) and Climate Warriors (a large climate activist group of fifteen- to nineteen-year-old students and teachers in an upper secondary school in Finland). They explain how such projects emerge and are sustained and developed through the children and youth’s responsible agency as well as the re-mediation of social and material support.

Very different aspects of schooling and agency are examined by Bal and Bird Bear (Chapter 8), who focus on hyperpunishment of Indigenous youth in the United States. Framed as decolonising efforts in a settler-colonial nation, they describe a specific formative intervention, Indigenous Learning Lab, implemented at an urban high school in Wisconsin through a coalition of an Anishinaabe Nation in Great Lakes, the state’s education agency, the Wisconsin Indian Education Association and a university-based research team. The outcome was a culturally responsive behavioural support system, designed and implemented by Anishinaabe youth, families, educators, tribal government representatives and non-Indigenous school staff. Bal and Bird Bear reflect on how this was made possible by TADS, infused with a decolonising approach based on sovereignty and futurity and using funds of knowledge in Indigenous communities.

Still in the context of schooling, though now focussing more on teaching and teacher education, and focussed on a site in the global south, Rai (Chapter 9) takes up Edwards’ ideas of relational agency (connecting with Chapter 4). Rai is in search of dynamic and collective ways of thinking about agency in relation to transformative practice, addressing a methodological challenge of understanding how agency can contribute to processes of making/becoming and hence the need to research ‘incomplete’ forms of the practice rather than complete fossilised forms. Based on a six-month study of a rural primary school in Rajasthan (India), Rai shows how new motive orientations are formed and influence professional action of new teachers, tracing agency in their designing collective actions to ensure children’s long-term wellbeing. Here we find questions of ‘why’ and ‘where to’ being posed and addressed in a specific practice context as these new teachers worked with other teachers and children to respond to the complex challenges they encountered in the community and classrooms.

In Chapter 10, Lotz-Sisitka et al. begin a sequence of chapters that take us into contexts beyond schooling. Their focus is a struggle for land restitution in South Africa. Echoing the stance of Bal and Bird Bear (Chapter 8), their work is onto-epistemic and ethical-political, grounded in protracted struggles against colonial and imperial rule most explicitly characterised by racism and marginalisation of the black majority. This leads them to approach agency in terms of dialectical transformation of oppressive power relations via the emergence of emancipatory forms of transformative agency ‘from below’, by which they mean freedom-seeking forms of agency among the most marginalised and excluded, where freedom includes economic transgression of class structures but also decolonial and non-anthropocentric terms such as the absence of cognitive justice or addressing ecological ills. Here, as in Chapter 8, we see deliberate activist and empirical efforts that respond precisely to the critiques of eurocentrism and anthropocentrism that Stetsenko outlines in Chapter 3. Lotz-Sisitka et al. also connect closely with Sannino’s TADS conceptualisation (Chapter 2) and with other chapters that explore uses of and developments in Change Laboratory approaches (i.e. Chapters 5, 7, 11, 12 and 13).

Niy and Diniz (Chapter 11) bring us to a strikingly different context – that of childbirth care in Brazil, infusing cultural-historical ideas with insights from the pedagogy of autonomy proposed by Freire. They present two cases of transformative agency, focussing particularly on the elaboration of innovative mediating artefacts that contributed to significant change. This was brought about in the first case by an organised group of women who built cultural tools to expose the excess of c-sections in the private health sector, leading to a change in regulatory policy. In the second case, an institutional birth plan model emerged through a formative intervention inspired by the Change Laboratory methodology. Niy and Diniz understand both cases as efforts to promote social participation and informed choice, using mediating artefacts to foster agency. Freire’s pedagogy of autonomy is detected in the sense that these women were able to build knowledge and act on that knowledge in a meaningful and effective way.

Francisco Junior et al. (Chapter 12) join others within the book in engaging Change Laboratory methods and in taking up Sannino’s TADS (Chapter 2). The context here is an agroecological association geared towards environmental preservation and social inclusion by strengthening family farming and developing agroforestry systems. Francisco Junior et al. analyse how motives, movement and mediation interact in the formation of transformative agency. Through double stimulation, participants transformed the way they understood the origin of their problems, and the formative intervention created a space for reflection in which, with the support of auxiliary instruments, the participants were able to produce a transformative movement, analysing and understanding the structure of their activity, identifying conflicts of motives and building a new orientation for the future of the activity. The authors describe how this intervention led to a novel concept of the coordination of the association based on the principle of shared responsibilities, as well as to the construction of a proposal to develop the organisation.

The sixth encounter with Change Laboratory research comes in Chapter 13 by Kerosuo and Jokinen, where the use of mediational means to solve paralysing conflicts of motives is considered in the context of homelessness. Unravelling complex processes where multiple innovations were in play, they distinguish umbrella innovations from sub- and stand-alone innovations. These were linked together to serve as second stimuli which provided a joint platform for solving conflicts of motives and for expansive peer-learning. Kerosuo and Jokinen link these wider developments to specific features of workshops that enabled a fruitful movement from limiting situations to future-orientated transformation processes, wherein questioning and redefining central issues played important roles.

In Chapter 14, Wei brings our focus back to young people, now addressing agency in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically in China. He examines three Chinese children as they acted intentionally to transform their situation during the lockdown in the first wave of the pandemic. Wei argues that despite the constraints on physical movement imposed by the pandemic, these children responded with strong manifestations of agency by relying on a wide range of mediational means, including depictions of a rabbit wearing a red scarf of solidarity with the ‘heroes’ keeping people safe in such a difficult time. Wei nuances notions of agency with the idea of a process of efforts undertaken to find equilibrium in times of uncertainty.

Finally, Hopwood (Chapter 15) outlines ideas of agency as a matter of the direction and reach of action, located within a broader cultural-historical framework and linked specifically to motives, mediation and motion. This perspective grounds agency in material, embodied doings, and Hopwood shows how they can draw much-needed attention to questions of ‘towards what?’ our actions take us and ‘how far?’ they move us towards futures that ought to be. Hopwood then brings the book to a conclusion, revisiting previous chapters in order to detect the direction and reach of actions in the diverse contexts and conceptual terrain presented by the other contributing authors.

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank all the contributors to this volume.