Distributed Agency

Distributed Agency

Author: N. J. Enfield

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-01-04

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0190457228

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Distributed Agency presents an interdisciplinary inroad into the latest thinking about the distributed nature of agency: what it's like, what are its conditions of possibility, and what are its consequences. The book's 25 chapters are written by a wide range of scholars, from anthropology, biology, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, geography, law, economics, and sociology. While each chapter takes up different materials using different methods, they all chart relations between the key elements of agency: intentionality, causality, flexibility and accountability. Each chapter seeks to explain how and why such relations are distributed-not just across individuals, but also across bodies and minds, people and things, spaces and times. To do this, the authors work through empirical studies of particular cases, while also offering reviews and syntheses of key ideas from the authors' respective research traditions. Our goals with this collection of essays are to assemble insights from new research on the anatomy of human agency, to address divergent framings of the issues from different disciplines, and to suggest directions for new debates and lines of research. We hope that it will be a resource for researchers working on allied topics, and for students learning about the elements of human-specific modes of shared action, from causality, intentionality, and personhood to ethics, punishment, and accountability.


Distributed Agency

Distributed Agency

Author: N. J. Enfield

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 019045721X

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"This book presents the latest thinking on the distributed nature of agency: its nature, its causes, its consequences. The book opens up fundamental questions about human agency, and offer answers that are state-of-the-art and interdisciplinary, yet accessible"--


Agency Without Actors?

Agency Without Actors?

Author: Jan-Hendrik Passoth

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-03-29

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1136851267

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"Agency without Actors? New Approaches to collective Action is rethinking a key issue in social theory and research: the question of agency. The history of sociological thought is deeply intertwined with the discourse of human agency as an effect of social relations. In most recent discussions the role of non-humans gains a substantial impact. Consequently the book asks: Are nonhumans active, do they have agency? And if so: how and in what different ways? The volume offers a critical state-of-the-art debate of internationally and nationally leading scholars within Sociology, Social Anthropology and STS on agency (Latour, Law, Michael, Rammert etc.). It fosters the productive exchange of empirical settings and theoretical views by outlining a wide range of novel accounts that link human and non-human agency. It tries to understand social-technical, political and environmental networks as different forms of agency that produce discrete and identifiable entities like humans, animals, technical artifacts. It also asks how different types of (often conflicting) agency and agents actors are distinguished in practice, how they are maintained and how they interfere with each other"--


Technology and Agency in International Relations

Technology and Agency in International Relations

Author: Marijn Hoijtink

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0429871740

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This book responds to a gap in the literature in International Relations (IR) by integrating technology more systematically into analyses of global politics. Technology facilitates, accelerates, automates, and exercises capabilities that are greater than human abilities. And yet, within IR, the role of technology often remains under-studied. Building on insights from science and technology studies (STS), assemblage theory and new materialism, this volume asks how international politics are made possible, knowable, and durable by and through technology. The contributors provide empirically rich and pertinent accounts of a variety of technologies relevant to the discipline, including drones, algorithms, satellite imagery, border management databases, and blockchains. Problematizing various technologically mediated issues, such as secrecy, violence, and questions of how authority and evidence become constituted in international contexts, this book will be of interest to scholars in IR, in particular those who work in the subfields of (critical) security studies, International Political Economy, and Global Governance.


Scientific Explanation, Causality, and Agency

Scientific Explanation, Causality, and Agency

Author: Majid D. Beni

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-12

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1040093159

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This book draws on advances in computational neuroscience and theoretical biology to provide a clear and accessible agentive account of the nature of causality and scientific explanations. Instead of attempting to establish the elements of scientific explanation, such as causality, in a reality unadulterated by a human perspective, this book relies on scientific facts about cognition to describe the structure of agency from a distinctly human perspective. The book draws on the Free Energy Principle to reinforce the agency theory of causality and extend it to an account of explanation as well. This principle not only provides a theoretical account of how self-organising systems engage with the causal structure of the environment, but it also offers a viable notion of agency and is compatible with the projectivist aspects of the agency theory. Scientific Explanation, Causality, and Agency will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of science, philosophy of cognitive science, epistemology, computational neuroscience, and theoretical biology.


Knowing Nature

Knowing Nature

Author: Mara J. Goldman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-04-15

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0226301419

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In addition, they examine how various environmental knowledge claims are generated, packaged, promoted, and accepted (or rejected) by the different actors involved in specific cases of environmental management, conservation, and development.


Agency and Media Reception

Agency and Media Reception

Author: Susanne Eichner

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2014-01-21

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 3658046732

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What happens to our sense of agency, our general ability to perform actions in our life worlds, in the course of media reception and appropriation? Whilst considering media communication as a special form of social action, this work reconsiders the key concepts of social action theory, pragmatism, communication theory as well as film, game and television theory. It thus integrates agency as the key to understanding ‘doing media’ and at the same time conceptualizes agency as a specific mode of involvement across media boundaries. This approach amalgamates miscellaneous ideas and conceptions such as interactivity, participation, cognitive control, play or empowerment and applies the theoretical considerations on the basis of textual analyses of the films Inception and The Proposal, the TV shows Lost and I’m a Celebrity and the video games Grand Theft Auto IV and The Walking Dead.


Critical Security Methods

Critical Security Methods

Author: Claudia Aradau

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-08-13

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1134716265

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Critical Security Methods offers a new approach to research methods in critical security studies. It argues that methods are not simply tools to bridge the gap between security theory and security practice. Rather, to practise methods critically means engaging in a more free and experimental interplay between theory, methods and practice. This recognises that the security practices we research are often methods in their own right, as forms of surveillance, data mining, visualisation, and so on, and that our own research methods are themselves practices that intervene and interfere in those sites of security and insecurity. Against the familiar methdological language of rigour, detachment and procedural consistency, Critical Security Methods reclaims the idea of method as experiment. The chapters offer a series of methodological experimentations that assemble concepts, theory and empirical cases into new frameworks for critical security research. They show how critical engagement and methodological innovation can be practiced as interventions into diverse instances of insecurity and securitisation, including airports, drug trafficking, peasant struggles, biometrics and police kettling. The book will be a valuable resource for students and researchers in critical security studies, politics and international relations.


Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems

Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems

Author: Catrin Misselhorn

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-09-01

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 3319155156

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This book brings together philosophical approaches to cooperation and collective agency with research into human-machine interaction and cooperation from engineering, robotics, computer science and AI. Bringing these so far largely unrelated fields of study together leads to a better understanding of collective agency in natural and artificial systems and will help to improve the design and performance of hybrid systems involving human and artificial agents. Modeling collective agency with the help of computer simulations promises also philosophical insights into the emergence of collective agency. The volume consists of four sections. The first section is dedicated to the concept of agency. The second section of the book turns to human-machine cooperation. The focus of the third section is the transition from cooperation to collective agency. The last section concerns the explanatory value of social simulations of collective agency in the broader framework of cultural evolution.


Agents, Actors, Actorhood

Agents, Actors, Actorhood

Author: Hokyu Hwang

Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing

Published: 2019-04-05

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1787560821

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This volume gathers a range of institutional perspectives investigating what the devolution of state power and the so-called democratization of social action means for the nature of authority and how the multiplicity and variety of social actors impacts societies worldwide, extending from focus on agents to actors to actorhood.