Against Agency 

NeMLA 2027 

Chairs: Nicholas Bujalski (Oberlin College) and Valeria Dani (Hamilton College) 

Over the last three decades, the humanities and social sciences have virtuously signaled their moral superiority with the empty utterance of words such as agency and resistance. The professional managerial class, in Catherine Liu’s apt analysis, “reworks political struggles for policy change and redistribution into individual passion plays, focusing its efforts on individual acts of ‘giving back’ or reified forms of self-transformation.” In our current moment of passive horror, instead of discursively gesturing toward idealist (and condescending) notions of “empowerment,” shouldn’t we critically map the precise landscape of those constraints that foreclose agency and limit the ability to collectively determine social futures? Critical theorists (e.g., Adorno, Althusser, Liu, Marcuse) and historians (e.g., Johnson, Krylova, Moss) have posed a series of challenging questions to the transdisciplinary “turn to agency”: against liberal notions of autonomous selfhood, universality, and choice, they ask us to contend with the ways in which people make history, yes, but not under conditions of their own choosing. 

In line with this predicament, this roundtable seeks to host an interdisciplinary conversation around the contingency of agency, intended not as a metaphysical horizon, but as a complex dialectic of volition and structure. We are interested in contributions that theorize “against agency.” What are the processes that limit, curtail, overdetermine, or foreclose our ability to both understand and change the world (e.g., the “pitiless constraints” of material conditions, structural interpellation, epistemological violence, social domination, and mute compulsion)? How do they find expression in cultural production and academic discourses? Moreover, as members of an increasingly apolitical, elitarian class stratum, we must seek a reckoning: for this reason, we value perspectives that courageously examine how a certain “ideology of agency” in our contemporary discourse might play an operative role in limiting our horizons of action.

The roundtable will be structured around two parts: each participant should be prepared to give an eight-minute spoken intervention, and then space will be opened up for informal, critical conversation.

Please submit a 200-300 word abstract by 9/30 here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22448