Abstract
A theoretical concept and approach for looking at human agency as embedded in everyday actions—“ordinary agency”—is introduced and discussed here. Recent anthropological re-readings and advancements of Foucault’s work on ethical practices are employed in the development of this approach. The ways in which “ordinary agency” responds to this work, as well as to social sciences of sustainability calls for acknowledging the forms of personal environmental politics that laypeople develop and enact, are discussed. Furthermore, the concept is situated in relation to a critique of “neoliberal agency” and ideas about the connections between approaches to time and understandings of human agency that come from the anthropology of time.
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Moroşanu, R. (2016). How the Light Gets In: A Theoretical Framework for “Ordinary Agency”. In: An Ethnography of Household Energy Demand in the UK. Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59341-2_2
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