{"id":557,"date":"2020-02-25T00:20:56","date_gmt":"2020-02-25T00:20:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/?p=557"},"modified":"2020-02-25T00:20:56","modified_gmt":"2020-02-25T00:20:56","slug":"agency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/2020\/02\/25\/agency\/","title":{"rendered":"Agency"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>What I have described as essential to an ambient rhetoric\u2014its embodied and embedded or situated character, its dispersal across things that themselves have gradations of agency, and its dynamic emergence within an environment that occasions certain effects\u2014suggests that intent is only one element in a large array of things, feelings, peoples, and forces all complexly interacting. (Rickert 36)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The concept I\u2019ve heard across multiple readings is the concept of gradations levels of agency. Rickert (2014) speaks about this in regards to ambient rhetoric and the fact that graduations of agency within an environment has different effects. Latour (1994) makes similar arguments in \u201cThe Berlin key\u201d when he writes about the need to give nonhumans agency and power in their own right. Bennett (2010) brings forward Latour\u2019s work and makes similar points in \u201cPolitical Ecologies\u201d, stating, \u201cThese various materialities do not exercise exactly the same kind of agency, but neither is it easy to arrange them into a hierarchy, for in some times and places, the \u201csmall agency\u201d of the lowly worm makes more of a difference than the grand agency of humans (98). Her point is that many actants, including human and nonhuman, have agency at varying levels. The scholars differ in their articulation of the concept of agency. While Bennet and Latour leverage terminology from Darwin comparing \u2018small agencies\u2019 with \u2018grand agencies\u2019, Rickert calls it \u2018graduated agency\u2019, which indicates a step-by-step process. While many terms have been used to describe this, I will call it \u201cElastic Agency\u201d because I believe this form of agency is not sequential nor constant. At any point in time the human and nonhuman actants can adjust the scale, scope and impact of their agency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What I have described as essential to an ambient rhetoric\u2014its embodied and embedded or situated character, its dispersal across things that themselves have gradations of agency, and its dynamic emergence within an environment that occasions certain effects\u2014suggests that intent is only one element in a large array of things, feelings, peoples, and forces all complexly&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,3],"tags":[156,159,158,157],"class_list":["post-557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes","category-ph-d-digital-portfolio","tag-agency","tag-bennet","tag-latour","tag-rickert"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":558,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions\/558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}