Precarious Agency: The Role of Uptake

How do we overcome the agency dilemma, that is, account for the fact that power relations heavily affect our agency without neglecting the many ways in which oppressed people act meaningfully? This article offers a solution by paying special attention to socially complex uptake in a framework of communities of practice. In order to explain the role of uptake in agency, I build on the notion of uptake provided by speech act theory. I show that if we are concerned with social agency, we need to depart from speech act theory's narrow focus on individual actions and their uptake in isolated settings. Rather, we should look at patterns of actions and the socially complex uptake they get. The relevant questions then are: Uptake by whom? How is it socially backed up? And how do different communities and practices that make uptake more or less likely relate to each other? Addressing these questions and understanding agency within the proposed framework allows us to address how power relations affect people's agency while building on and empowering the action of disenfranchised people within their existing possibilities. My account of agency thereby also provides tools for antioppressive struggles that aim to foster agency sustaining ecologies.