In his 2003 essay, “On Agency,” Walter Johnson faulted the way scholars’ focus on agency presumed a “unidirectional trade between past and present,” treating “history writing as a mode of redress.” It marginalized “human-ness lived outside the conventions” of a “liberal notion of selfhood.” Restoring agency to the enslaved made the scholar feel better about themselves without making the world any better: “therapy rather than politics.” Looking back on this pivotal assessment of social history from the vantage of twenty years, its criticisms seem relevant to the use of agency in its time (and ours) more than to the concept’s original invention in the era of decolonization after World War II. In that time, drawing on anticolonial thought, history-from-below emerged precisely to contest liberal notions of selfhood and reform the existing, whiggish two-way trade between past and present. Revisiting that turn reminds us that questions raised by the category of “agency” were present at its making and that it is unlikely that academic scholarship can fulfill more than a therapeutic function without affiliated struggles to remake the academy and popular politics. Reminding us of history-from-below's foundational commitment to building up “the present-life of the past” and challenging the individuated ideal of selfhood, this essay notes the continued urgency of recovering alternative subjectivities as we face the planetary crisis created by dominance of Enlightenment notions of history and selfhood. Though scholarship in the academy may not be capable of the political impact Johnson imagined, it nevertheless furthers history’s actual end of internal transformation.
{"title":"The Forgotten Dreams of History-from-Below","authors":"P. Satia","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shad056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad056","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In his 2003 essay, “On Agency,” Walter Johnson faulted the way scholars’ focus on agency presumed a “unidirectional trade between past and present,” treating “history writing as a mode of redress.” It marginalized “human-ness lived outside the conventions” of a “liberal notion of selfhood.” Restoring agency to the enslaved made the scholar feel better about themselves without making the world any better: “therapy rather than politics.” Looking back on this pivotal assessment of social history from the vantage of twenty years, its criticisms seem relevant to the use of agency in its time (and ours) more than to the concept’s original invention in the era of decolonization after World War II. In that time, drawing on anticolonial thought, history-from-below emerged precisely to contest liberal notions of selfhood and reform the existing, whiggish two-way trade between past and present. Revisiting that turn reminds us that questions raised by the category of “agency” were present at its making and that it is unlikely that academic scholarship can fulfill more than a therapeutic function without affiliated struggles to remake the academy and popular politics. Reminding us of history-from-below's foundational commitment to building up “the present-life of the past” and challenging the individuated ideal of selfhood, this essay notes the continued urgency of recovering alternative subjectivities as we face the planetary crisis created by dominance of Enlightenment notions of history and selfhood. Though scholarship in the academy may not be capable of the political impact Johnson imagined, it nevertheless furthers history’s actual end of internal transformation.","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":"11 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138981166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Agency belongs to a distinctly moral understanding of the cosmos, buttressed by faith in an ultimately just and knowable universe. On some deep level, historians believe that the good will out. But looking at those moments when the agency concept creates cognitive dissonance—when, for example, Holocaust perpetrators’ “agency” was placed in the service of evil—reveals things about the moral universe historians think we inhabit. Using the example of post-1945 West Germany, the essay asks whether a shift toward increasingly diffuse forms of agency across various fields may be part of a larger historical, and not merely historiographical, pattern. In the “post-truth” early twenty-first century, will historians’ accounts of the past continue to be shaped by the idea of a benevolent and graspable universe, or will chaos make agency seem like an unrecognizable relic from a lost world?
{"title":"Agency’s Moral Universe","authors":"Monica Black","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shad059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad059","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Agency belongs to a distinctly moral understanding of the cosmos, buttressed by faith in an ultimately just and knowable universe. On some deep level, historians believe that the good will out. But looking at those moments when the agency concept creates cognitive dissonance—when, for example, Holocaust perpetrators’ “agency” was placed in the service of evil—reveals things about the moral universe historians think we inhabit. Using the example of post-1945 West Germany, the essay asks whether a shift toward increasingly diffuse forms of agency across various fields may be part of a larger historical, and not merely historiographical, pattern. In the “post-truth” early twenty-first century, will historians’ accounts of the past continue to be shaped by the idea of a benevolent and graspable universe, or will chaos make agency seem like an unrecognizable relic from a lost world?","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":"25 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138981012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to “On Agency” at Twenty","authors":"Sam Lebovic, Matthew B. Karush","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shad075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad075","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":"68 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138981610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Twenty years ago, Walter Johnson warned historians not to rely on a concept that let both user and audience alike feel better without doing better. The concept in question was agency. Down the metaphorical hall and many a literal one, environmental historians were also talking about agency. The proximity is not surprising: the new social history Johnson addressed in 2003 came up alongside environmental history.
{"title":"On the Agency of Environmental History","authors":"Bathsheba Demuth","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shad057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad057","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Twenty years ago, Walter Johnson warned historians not to rely on a concept that let both user and audience alike feel better without doing better. The concept in question was agency. Down the metaphorical hall and many a literal one, environmental historians were also talking about agency. The proximity is not surprising: the new social history Johnson addressed in 2003 came up alongside environmental history.","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138980211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Concerns about “agency” in history are generally misplaced. Agency is pervasive in human interaction, not, as is often assumed, a relatively rare or heroic achievement. We live within social structures that are reproduced by social practices—but that are also constantly bent or reinterpreted in action, sometimes in minor ways but sometimes transforming the animating structures. I illustrate how this conceptualization works by recounting how French workers, previously divided into rivalrous single-trade organizations, arrived at a form of proto-socialist class consciousness in the years after the Revolution of 1830—by adopting, adapting, and repurposing the new regime’s liberal language and organizational forms. But “agency,” I argue, was equally present in the daily efforts of the pre-1830 workers’ organizations, many of whose modes of action were officially illegal. Agency should be understood as a pervasive feature of human social life, not as a badge of heroism.
{"title":"Is Agency a Useful Historical Concept?","authors":"William H Sewell","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shad063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad063","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Concerns about “agency” in history are generally misplaced. Agency is pervasive in human interaction, not, as is often assumed, a relatively rare or heroic achievement. We live within social structures that are reproduced by social practices—but that are also constantly bent or reinterpreted in action, sometimes in minor ways but sometimes transforming the animating structures. I illustrate how this conceptualization works by recounting how French workers, previously divided into rivalrous single-trade organizations, arrived at a form of proto-socialist class consciousness in the years after the Revolution of 1830—by adopting, adapting, and repurposing the new regime’s liberal language and organizational forms. But “agency,” I argue, was equally present in the daily efforts of the pre-1830 workers’ organizations, many of whose modes of action were officially illegal. Agency should be understood as a pervasive feature of human social life, not as a badge of heroism.","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":"4 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138980971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Two decades later, the conceptual problems of the term “agency” identified by Walter Johnson remain largely unresolved, in particular the analytic inhibitions that follow from what the historian Lynn Thomas has described as agency-as-argument. Taking the case of the colonial Zimbabwean chief Munhuwepayi Mangwende as a reference point, this essay argues that the microhistorical tracing of agency as meaning rather than causality is what may permit us to move past the “safe harbor” of agency-as-argument and begin to understand the full range of what people have chosen to do in the past—and to interact more effectively with what they might yet choose to do in the present.
{"title":"Meanings of Agency, Agency of Meaning: On Synthesis and Entanglement","authors":"Timothy Burke","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shad066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad066","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Two decades later, the conceptual problems of the term “agency” identified by Walter Johnson remain largely unresolved, in particular the analytic inhibitions that follow from what the historian Lynn Thomas has described as agency-as-argument. Taking the case of the colonial Zimbabwean chief Munhuwepayi Mangwende as a reference point, this essay argues that the microhistorical tracing of agency as meaning rather than causality is what may permit us to move past the “safe harbor” of agency-as-argument and begin to understand the full range of what people have chosen to do in the past—and to interact more effectively with what they might yet choose to do in the present.","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":"101 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138979562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As Caribbean postemancipation scholarship has deepened so richly in recent decades, writers have been able to shake major distortions such as the progressive teleologies of freedom that lurk as the very scaffolding of congratulatory imperial records. The full dynamism of repression directed at postslavery generations still demands attention, as does the difficult task of reconstructing communities’ and individuals’ responses to these serious restraints, efforts that sometimes yielded nothing. Especially given archival difficulties, Johnson’s exhortation to seek everyday understandings and actions, ineffable registers like love and fear, and internal community politics, including discord, continue to present high aims for scholars seeking to conceive and describe agency in such an archivally and politically difficult era.
{"title":"Into the Hills: Challenges of Writing Postemancipation Agency in the Caribbean","authors":"Anne Eller","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shad070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad070","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 As Caribbean postemancipation scholarship has deepened so richly in recent decades, writers have been able to shake major distortions such as the progressive teleologies of freedom that lurk as the very scaffolding of congratulatory imperial records. The full dynamism of repression directed at postslavery generations still demands attention, as does the difficult task of reconstructing communities’ and individuals’ responses to these serious restraints, efforts that sometimes yielded nothing. Especially given archival difficulties, Johnson’s exhortation to seek everyday understandings and actions, ineffable registers like love and fear, and internal community politics, including discord, continue to present high aims for scholars seeking to conceive and describe agency in such an archivally and politically difficult era.","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139010552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Walter Johnson’s point about “agency” can be extended to other central concepts of historical analysis: what might appear as a salutary extension of a foundational category of liberal democracy to the histories of enslaved people in fact forces those histories into frameworks that are, ultimately, those of enslavers. The interconnected insights of Black feminism and Queer theory—particularly about “domestic institutions”—suggest that politics is another of those categories that, like agency, risks forcing the histories of enslaved people into analytic categories of an ultimately white-supremacist liberalism.
{"title":"Agency, Politics, and the “Impossible Domestic”: A Response to Walter Johnson’s “On Agency”","authors":"Angela Elisabeth Zimmerman","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shad065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad065","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Walter Johnson’s point about “agency” can be extended to other central concepts of historical analysis: what might appear as a salutary extension of a foundational category of liberal democracy to the histories of enslaved people in fact forces those histories into frameworks that are, ultimately, those of enslavers. The interconnected insights of Black feminism and Queer theory—particularly about “domestic institutions”—suggest that politics is another of those categories that, like agency, risks forcing the histories of enslaved people into analytic categories of an ultimately white-supremacist liberalism.","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":"23 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138980071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article reconstructs the historical context in which “agency” emerged as the key concept of social history, arguing that an unstated concept of the liberal individual was smuggled into historical explanation through a humanist anthropology underlying the social history renaissance. It then asks what would be involved in salvaging social–historical explanation, including its interest in historical possibilities for social solidarity and the political power of ordinary people, while jettisoning this liberal-humanist baggage.
{"title":"“Longing and Hope and Sadness and Anger”: Disentangling the Social and the Human","authors":"Gabriel Winant","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shad060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad060","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article reconstructs the historical context in which “agency” emerged as the key concept of social history, arguing that an unstated concept of the liberal individual was smuggled into historical explanation through a humanist anthropology underlying the social history renaissance. It then asks what would be involved in salvaging social–historical explanation, including its interest in historical possibilities for social solidarity and the political power of ordinary people, while jettisoning this liberal-humanist baggage.","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":"56 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138979209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jana Smith, Marie Sandra Lennon, Madeline Kau, Anja Noeliarivelo Ranjalahy, Liliane Ingabire, Charlotte Warren, Sara V Flanagan
Background: Postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) is the leading direct cause of maternal deaths worldwide, and women in low-income countries are at particularly high risk of dying from PPH-related consequences. Most deaths can be avoided through consistent provider adherence to prevention protocols and timely, appropriate management, yet providers do not consistently adhere to these best practices. USING BEHAVIORAL DESIGN TO DEVELOP SOLUTIONS TO IMPROVE PROVIDER CARE: We applied the behavioral design methodology to identify behavioral drivers, develop solutions, and build a program theory of change. Implementation research was conducted to understand the adoption, desirability, feasibility, and appropriateness of the solutions and explore suggestive findings related to impact. Data were collected through observation and in-depth interviews. Solutions developed included: (1) a timer to remind providers of the 1-minute window to administer oxytocin; (2) a glow-in-the-dark poster illustrating a simplified algorithm for PPH management; (3) badges to assign family members tasks to support providers during labor and delivery; and (4) a risk visualization exercise. Clinical mentors introduced the solutions during facility visits, and providers received orientation using videos. Solutions were piloted in 10 rural facilities in southeastern Madagascar during November-December 2020.
Results: Providers reported high adoption of the timers and task badges during routine deliveries. They remarked on the desirability and appropriateness of the timer, task badges, and algorithm poster, as well as the value of the cocreation process. Adoption of the timer solution shows promise in having a potential positive impact on increasing the awareness of and adherence to timely oxytocin administration.
Conclusion: This work highlights the promise of applying behavioral science to identify underlying drivers of gaps in clinical practice and to develop innovative and desirable solutions to address them.
{"title":"Harnessing the Power of Behavioral Science: An Implementation Pilot to Improve the Quality of Maternity Care in Rural Madagascar.","authors":"Jana Smith, Marie Sandra Lennon, Madeline Kau, Anja Noeliarivelo Ranjalahy, Liliane Ingabire, Charlotte Warren, Sara V Flanagan","doi":"10.9745/GHSP-D-23-00007","DOIUrl":"10.9745/GHSP-D-23-00007","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>Postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) is the leading direct cause of maternal deaths worldwide, and women in low-income countries are at particularly high risk of dying from PPH-related consequences. Most deaths can be avoided through consistent provider adherence to prevention protocols and timely, appropriate management, yet providers do not consistently adhere to these best practices. USING BEHAVIORAL DESIGN TO DEVELOP SOLUTIONS TO IMPROVE PROVIDER CARE: We applied the behavioral design methodology to identify behavioral drivers, develop solutions, and build a program theory of change. Implementation research was conducted to understand the adoption, desirability, feasibility, and appropriateness of the solutions and explore suggestive findings related to impact. Data were collected through observation and in-depth interviews. Solutions developed included: (1) a timer to remind providers of the 1-minute window to administer oxytocin; (2) a glow-in-the-dark poster illustrating a simplified algorithm for PPH management; (3) badges to assign family members tasks to support providers during labor and delivery; and (4) a risk visualization exercise. Clinical mentors introduced the solutions during facility visits, and providers received orientation using videos. Solutions were piloted in 10 rural facilities in southeastern Madagascar during November-December 2020.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Providers reported high adoption of the timers and task badges during routine deliveries. They remarked on the desirability and appropriateness of the timer, task badges, and algorithm poster, as well as the value of the cocreation process. Adoption of the timer solution shows promise in having a potential positive impact on increasing the awareness of and adherence to timely oxytocin administration.</p><p><strong>Conclusion: </strong>This work highlights the promise of applying behavioral science to identify underlying drivers of gaps in clinical practice and to develop innovative and desirable solutions to address them.</p>","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10698234/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85556642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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