Whose Agency Now?

This introductory chapter details the key arguments and rationale behind this volume and shows the manner in which the chapters are interlinked in highlighting the power of space and agential spaces of power over different regional contexts in India. The author argues that while patriarchy may be universal, its construction is not uniform. The link between the gross geographical contexts and the social construction of gender roles in India is reiterated. It is emphasized that in India, the constructs of gender vary by region, and these initial constructs lay the foundations for a variety of capabilities and constraints, such as gendered access to public spaces, household resources, participation in public life, decision-making and degree of personal or collective agency. Based on these, a notion of regional genderscapes is advanced. The idea of personal or collective agency can only be understood in the context of these genderscapes, which underline the importance of geographical and social locations.

Teamwork and collaborative problem solving competencies are important 21st century skills and considered key graduate attributes for employability and lifelong learning (e.g., Csapó & Funke, 2017). For students to develop collaborative skills and competencies, group work and peer learning are widely-used approaches in higher education. Effective teamwork skills are often implicitly taught and notoriously disliked by students for many reasons including freeriding (social loafing), member dominance or disengagement. Well-functioning teams are underpinned by social-affective dimensions of group work such as respect for reviewers (Carless & Boud, 2018) and social cohesion (Bakhtiar et al., 2018). To positively influence group cohesion and develop team skills, formative peer evaluation of team members’ contributions have been shown to effectively support student agency in this process (Stenalt 2021, Sridharan et al., 2018). This case study explores the affordances of the digital peer review tools Feedback Fruits and Peer Assess Pro to facilitate feedback processes for the successful completion of high-stakes capstone group projects. Bachelor of Science students engage with anonymous team member evaluations of task completion as well as self-evaluation of team skills. To aid a major curriculum transformation at our university towards relational pedagogies, we embarked on an iterative and deliberate approach to scaling peer feedback. The approach aligns with educational design research integrating research and design processes for theoretical and practical outcomes (McKenney & Reeves, 2012, p. 76). Specifically, we aimed to understand 1) the student perception of technology facilitated peer feedback as learning for improved outcomes and raised self-awareness of teamwork skills, and 2) provide a non-threatening environment that enabled personal and collective agency for students as providers and receivers of feedback underpinned by Bandura’s (2001) social cognitive theory and human agency. Applying Bandura’s notion to group work, student agency can be enacted through a learner’s capacity to self-reflect on own capabilities (personal agency) as well as socially coordinated and interdependent efforts towards desired outcomes (collective agency). Questionnaire data on self-regulation (N=42) confirmed the usefulness of peer evaluation of team members’ contributions. However, only half of the students thought that peer feedback positively impacted group coherence and effectiveness such as time management, quality of submissions, or their own performance. Feedback and self-reflections on students’ own strengths and weaknesses were found to be empowering and generally supported team effectiveness. This was also evident from students’ comments (N=110) within the Feedback Fruits tool where students rated their self- and peer efficacy on six criteria: initiative, engagement, contribution, ideas and communication, focus, and harmony. We identified issues with timeliness and active engagement of the feedback received requiring further iterations of purposefully designed rubrics for intended learning outcomes. The impact of peer feedback on perceived self- and collective efficacy is highly complex and influenced by personal as well as sociocultural values (Bandura, 2001, p. 14). Our emphasis on feedback as a learning-centred process under controlled conditions (technology enhanced with clear rubrics) has shown that students can make the information work for themselves and their teams to improve high-stakes group project outcomes. Importantly, in agreement with Molloy et al. (2019), the development of feedback literacy helps to build academic skills, supports self-regulation and acknowledges feedback as a reciprocal process for future employability.

The role of shared intentions in the emergence of service ecosystems

This article brings together the history of the social sciences and the history of social thought in Socialist Romania. It is concerned with the development of ideas about the social beyond collectivism, especially about the relationship between individual and society under socialism, from the early 1960s to the end of the 1970s. The analysis speaks to three major themes in the current historiography of Cold War social science. First, the article investigates the role of disciplinary specialization in the advancement of new ideas about the social in the postwar period. Specifically, it asks how the debate over the relationship between sociology and Marxism-Leninism has challenged ideas about collectivism from Stalinist social science. Second, the article shows how social practice, individual and collective agency, and people's subjectivities became theoretically relevant in the 1960s, and how they were integrated, via empirical sociological research, into the reworked conceptual apparatus of post-Stalinist Marxism-Leninism. This complicates accounts about the role of quantification and theorization in postwar social science by foregrounding the intense reflection on the role of empirical research in sociology under state socialism. Third, the article shows how the relationship between individual and society became a topic of interest across social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. The Marxist humanist approach to the social, although it never achieved the institutional status of a distinct discipline, adds an important perspective from East Central Europe to the existing historiography of the ‘thinning’ of the social in social sciences and social thought beginning in the 1950s.

This paper outlines the critical role of personal agency in influencing health and development outcomes and presents a framework for implementing non-therapeutic cognitive-behavioral interventions that foster agency, especially for women, in resource-poor settings. The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has placed "empowerment" at the center of global targets, particularly to improve individuals' health and development. Despite extensive research on individual and community empowerment, there is limited focus on the role of psychological and behavioral approaches directly fostering individual and collective agency in health programs. Fundamental to this process is the understanding that decision-making is an interaction between mental processes and one's current context. Approaches that allow individuals to understand how their beliefs, values, emotions, and thoughts impact their behaviors and can be modulated to increase their personal agency are needed. This model is illustrated through a pilot behavioral intervention with women engaged in sex work in Pune, India, demonstrating substantive benefits.

Recent studies exploring public opinion on participatory democracy show that disadvantaged social groups tend to hold favourable views on participatory processes. At the same time, research has also found that these groups frequently express feelings of weak agency and lack of competence to make valuable contributions to political processes. How then is support for democratic participation to be understood, if people see themselves as unskilled and incapable agents? To address this question, a series of focus groups were conducted with young, middle-aged, and older Spanish adults in situations of socioeconomic disadvantage. Like other studies, the analysis found that the participants had positive views of participatory reforms, but this was modified by low levels of personal and collective agency (internal and external efficacy and horizontal mistrust). While some scholars argue that such ambivalence is coherent with populism, the analysis suggests that many participants (particularly younger and middle-aged adults) are keenly appreciative of the complexity of such proposals and that negativity relates to the implementation of participative processes without genuine redistribution of knowledge and power, as well as a lack of mechanisms to guarantee responsiveness and commitment to bottom-up democracy.

This chapter presents the results of a specific phase within the broader research process carried out as part of the Islands4Future project, conducted on the island of Ponza (Italy). Like other micro-insular contexts, Ponza is marked by the significant impact of territorial and social marginalization on youth, yet it also possesses untapped potential for endogenous local development. To address the challenges and opportunities facing educational systems and pedagogical practices on islands, this chapter seeks to establish a dialogue between educational studies and island studies. The outcomes of this phase point to an educational model that proved to be highly generative, owing to the integration of innovative pedagogical strategies and community-driven initiatives aimed at fostering both personal and collective agency.

Book synopsis: Soyinka’s representation of postcolonial African identity is re-examined in the light of his major plays, novels and poetry to show how this writer’s idiom of cultural authenticity both embraces hybridity and defines itself as specific and particular. For Soyinka, such authenticity involves recovering tradition and inserting it in postcolonial modernity to facilitate transformative moral and political justice. The past can be both our enabling future and our nemesis. In a distinctive approach grounded in cultural studies, Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka locates the artist’s intellectual and political concerns within the broader field of postcolonial cultural theory, arguing that, although ostensibly distant from mainstream theory, Soyinka focuses on fundamental questions concerning international culture and political identity formations – the relationship between myth and history / tradition and modernity, and the unresolved tension between power as a force for good or evil. Soyinka’s treatment of the relationship between individual selfhood and the various framing social and collective identities, so the book argues, is yet another aspect linking his work to the broader intellectual currents of today. Thus, Soyinka’s vision is seen as central to contemporary efforts to grasp the nature of modernity. His works conceptualize identity in ways that promote and modify national perceptions of ‘Africanness’, rescuing them from the colonial and neocolonial logic of cultural denigration in a manner that fully acknowledges the cosmopolitan and global contexts of African postcolonial formation. Overall, what emerges from the present study is the conviction that, in Soyinka’s work, it is the capacity to assume personal and collective agency and the particular choices made by particular subjects at given historical moments that determine the trajectory of change and ultimately the nature of postcolonial existence itself. Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka is a major and imaginative contribution to the study of Wole Soyinka, African literature, and postcolonial cultural theory and one in which writing and creativity stand in fruitful symbiosis with the critical sense. It should appeal to Soyinka scholars, to students of African literature, and to anyone interested in postcolonial and cultural theory.

Objects are fundamental components of cosmology in Afro-Cuban religions; they serve to represent, pay homage to, and feed a constellation of covetous spirits. In a moral universe of practitioners materiality allures and potentially corrupts; it grounds personal and collective ritual agency; mediates thoughts-feelings; materializes the immaterial; and invariably transcends all these dichotomies and becomes gods, parts of people, concepts. In this article I wish to understand “things” as continuous with the unfolding of selfhood, but more contentiously, with and as affects. Drawing on my long-time research with practitioners of Cuban Creole espiritismo in Havana, for whom “representation” objects are essential to the development of spirits, muertos, and thus extended selves, I argue that the dolls and figurines that mediums regularly fabricate and care for are less “representational” than they are affective forms themselves. Dolls are not symbols for feelings-for-spirits made material or registers of affective perception towards one’s muertos; in a very real sense they are affects that may grow roots and bloom. In the ethnography I will describe these relations as a system of affectively invested selfhood, one that encompasses the very muertos in question.

This cross-disciplinary text is designed to appeal to a diversity of social science scholars. The central focus is on new ways of viewing the career, or how working lives unfold over time. Fresh views from psychology, social psychology, sociology, anthropology, organization theory, economics, and political science are among those represented in the twenty-five chapter anthology. The design of the handbook in three parts - current approaches, new ideas, and future directions - is intended to engage the reader in the debate from which new and better career theories can be developed.

The question of the gendered dimension of migrations is a topic that for some decades has involved a growing number of scholars – both historians and social scientists – in a sense, it is a theme that shows the gulf between the current approaches and the historiographical landscape where the (albeit innovative) History of Women edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot was conceived, written and published. Out of the five-volume work, only the one on the 19th century, edited by Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot themselves, included a specific section on migrations and travels (written by Perrot). Since then, growing numbers of studies have focused on female mobility and migrations and their features compared to male ones in the twentieth century and today as well as in medieval and modern times. The problematic presence of massive migration flows in today’s world has indeed prompted the interest in the mobility and migrations of the past. In this context, research on the circulation of female and male domestics over both short and long distances has played a rather important role. On the one hand, entering into service in someone else’s household has turned out to be a privileged channel for mobility and migration. On the other hand, servants and domestic workers constituted and constitute a key component among people flows on short, medium and long distances. This had and has significant implications for the subjective identity of the servants and domestic workers themselves, the experience of the (more or less socially and culturally distant) families where they work (ed), cultural circulation, cultural exchanges and conflicts, the accumulation of goods, the flows of resources, marriage patterns, urbanisation, colonisation, imperialism, the development of trans-national families, etc. My article will review these studies on servants and domestic workers, focusing on the themes they deal with, the results they have achieved and future research perspectives.

Topic modeling as an instrument of probabilistic clustering for text collections has gained particular attention within the computational social science in Russia. This chapter looks at how topic modeling techniques have been developed and employed by the Russian scholars, both for Russian and other languages. We divide the works on topic modeling into methodological, applied, relational, and those dedicated to modeling quality assessment. While the methodological studies are the most developed, the works explaining the substance of the Russian-language discussions cover an important niche in political and social science. However, there is a gap between method-oriented works that treat Russian as “language as such” and the works by computational linguists who focus on Russian but treat topic modeling as a method of secondary importance.

Current approaches and cultures for the economic evaluations of environmental and health policies may suffer from excessive reliance on a standard neoclassic economic toolbox that neglects alternative perspectives. This may prematurely limit the spectrum of available policy options. Here we show how the inclusion of neglected currents of thought such as non-Ricardian economics, bioeconomics and a set of qualitative-quantitative methods from post-normal science leads to richer perspectives for a more inclusive uses of quantitative evidence, and opens the analysis to more possible futures. We also present some case studies in the energy, water, health and climate domains that highlight the point in a practical context for a more policy-oriented audience. We situate our analysis in the context of recent calls in the EU for the inclusion of more perspectives from the social sciences and the humanities in environmental assessment works.

Abstract: Depending on whether creativity is studied by an economist, a sociologist, a psychologist, or some other social scientist, different terms—such as innovation or entrepreneurship‐are used to describe it. Therefore it is difficult to have a clear idea of what the boundaries of creativity research are, and what belongs to it. In this article a conceptual matrix is used to create a typology for creativity research, and it is applied to a sample of dissertations abstracts written in the last year for which complete documentation was available. The goals of the article are: (a) to provide a useful model for classifying studies in the field of creativity; (b) to provide an example of systematic library research on the topic; and (c) to show what the biases of different disciplines that study creativity are in terms of goals, methods, and perspectives.

Cluster analysis refers to a family of related techniques that are used to create groups of objects that, in some sense, minimize the distance between the objects within a cluster (Arabie, Hubert, & DeSoete, 1996; Hartigan, 1975). It is generally viewed as a type of exploratory data analysis in which the clusters emerge from the analytical procedures. Cluster analysis has been used extensively since the 1970s by social scientists, market researchers, numerical taxonomists, and many others. Cluster analysis is also at the heart of many current approaches in machine learning, pattern recognition, and data mining.