The Limits of Agency: Practical Reason, Ethnographically

Graduate / Professional

You march. You chant. You show up again the next week. When resistance feels obligatory but ineffective, we learn to find agency everywhere—especially where it changes nothing. This seminar follows a history of practical reason that turns not on what agency enables, but on what remains when it does not deliver: when nothing shifts, when violent worlds hold. Rather than something one possesses, agency appears as an ethnographic problem, a historically formed, analytically ambiguous discourse tasked with rationalizing lives lived under conditions that feel structurally totalizing. Read this way, our identities as agents are not the endpoint of inquiry but its provocation, with the unsettling potential to undo the very terms we use to enter into solidarity. While the field draws from moral philosophy, our entry into practical reason is phenomenological: from Pierre Bourdieu to Michel-Rolph Trouillot, action comes into view as embodied, sedimented, and constrained within uneven fields of power. Agency cannot be assumed; it must be accounted for. We track how this idiom was inherited, stretched, and made to bear explanatory weight it cannot always sustain. Across ethnographic works where the language of agency begins to fray, human and other-than-human forces refuse, comply, persist, improvise. Standing ground or in fugitivity, we endure and sometimes even thrive in the long meantime … come the revolution. Whether agency names a capacity, an effect, a misrecognition, or something else not yet named animates our time together. Without presuming an answer, the seminar invites a different kind of attention: to forms of life that do not announce themselves as “vita activa,” to transformations that register in unintended effects, and to the possibility that we may need other vocabularies—quieter, sharper, less assured—for describing how people live in worlds that do not yield, in worlds that refuse us. W 1:30pm-3:25pm