No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Is it structure or agency that shapes human actions? The question remains a central one for historians, and social scientists more broadly. This forum offers a deep dive into what it means to think about the relationship between agency and structure. It is set in motion with a deliberately provocative essay by the Russian historian Anna Yu. Krylova. “I wonder,” Krylova writes, “whether the challenge for historians has recently become not to find a historical subject with agency but a historical subject without it.” And she asks, “how useful is such an indiscriminately expanded category that no longer asks a historian to make choices in her analysis?” Drawing upon her research on shifting gender roles in the Soviet military during World War II, Krylova advances the novel concept of the “not-knowing actor” to understand the ways in which she argues “historical protagonists can untangle from their learned, internalized, and necessarily ideological societal competence to participate in the construction of alternatives to their historical predicament.” We invited five historians—William H. Sewell, Jr., Judith R. Walkowitz, Geoff Eley, Angela E. Zimmerman, and Vivien Tejada—whose research and writings explore critical dimensions of historical agency to respond to her essay. The forum concludes with a short rejoinder by Krylova reflecting on the complex interplay of ideology and power in the making of human agency.
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.