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On becoming political: the political in subjectivity

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Abstract

This article explores mundane political agency. We introduce the notion of the political ordinary as agency based on the capacity of human beings to carry out acts that are undetermined and unexpected, and thus capable of challenging, opposing, negotiating, maintaining, and readjusting prevailing conditions. We approach subjectivity from a pragmatist and phenomenological point of view and argue that it is the condition of possibility of political agency. The paper demonstrates how political subjectivity can be located in the ways in which people take up issues that stand out as important to them. To this end, we look into the everyday life experiences of an eleven-year-old girl whose struggles related to proposed subject positions provide examples of mundane political agency. We conclude by arguing that political agency is the subject’s action when in a state of becoming prompted by future-oriented demands and contingencies of social life.

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Notes

  1. The field work involved 162 participants from Southern Finland and Northern England and was carried out with anthropologically oriented child-centered methods, respecting children and young people’s right to decide the extent to which they wished to participate in our research, if at all.

  2. All names we refer to are pseudonyms and the specifics concerning the field work setting have been removed. We use throughout the name Anna Lena to refer to our participant’s given name, and Annie and Lena to refer to her nicknames.

  3. The following analysis has close parallels with the analyses by Callaghan et al. (2016) and Ivinson and Renold (2013). While not discussing political subjectivities or agency per se, we see the situations and activities they describe as apt examples of political ordinary unfolding in children’s and young people’s distinct mundane contexts.

  4. We refer to phenomenology not as a school of thought but as a particular perspective that highlights human experience at the root of political agency.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the Academy of Finland (grant SA258341) and the RELATE Centre of Excellence (grant SA307348) for financially supporting this work, and the Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG) at the University of Tampere for an inspiring research environment. We are also grateful to the editors of Subjectivity and the two anonymous reviewers for their engaged and helpful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Space and Political Agency Research Group, School of Management, University of Tampere, 33014, Tampere, Finland

    Jouni Häkli & Kirsi Pauliina Kallio

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  1. Jouni Häkli
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Correspondence to Jouni Häkli.

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Häkli, J., Kallio, K.P. On becoming political: the political in subjectivity. Subjectivity 11, 57–73 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-017-0040-z

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