Rethinking Agency –
Action, Intra-action, and Ethnographic Analysis

Research Seminar

What do we mean when we say that someone—or something—has agency? Classical theories have commonly associated agency with intentional action, reasons and mental states, while more recent approaches have extended or fundamentally rethought the concept. Karen Barad's notion of intra-action offers a particularly radical intervention: rather than assuming that independently existing entities precede their relations, it asks how agents and their boundaries themselves emerge through material-discursive practices.

In this Lunch-to-Lunch Seminar, we will use the concept of agency not as a theoretical end in itself but as an analytical problem for ethnographic research. Starting from an overview of different conceptions of agency, we will critically engage with Barad's agential realism and with recent criticism of her approach. We will ask what different conceptions of agency enable us to see—and what they potentially obscure.

For the first day, all participants will prepare the obligatory reading. For each of the three texts, a team will be assigned before the seminar to discuss its key conceptualization of agency and introduce it as a basis for collective critical discussion of its theoretical assumptions, analytical possibilities, and limitations.

For the second day, participants will bring two short ethnographic situations or vignettes from their own research in which questions of agency can be posed in different ways. Working comparatively with these materials, we will explore how different understandings of agency change our analysis of ethnographic situations. In a concluding discussion, we will ask what analytical, methodological and ethical consequences follow from these conceptual choices for ethnographic research.

Please register by 15 Dec 2026 on Moodle.