Unleashed agency: Navigating sociopragmatic enablers and constraints for social transformation

This special issue examines agency as situated, relational and distributed rather than as an individual capacity. Across universities, mediation, migration control, grassroots support, acquired brain injury and informal street commerce, it explores how unequal social and institutional positions shape actors’ possibilities for action, access to resources, participation in community and institutional life, and capacity to be recognized as agents. Drawing on distributed agency, the contributions distinguish between having room for maneuver, enacting action, being recognized as its author, influencing what follows, and tactically converting imposed constraints into resources for action. Since actors differ along each of these dimensions, the studies examine how such unequal distributions are reproduced, negotiated or reworked in situated practice. Unleashed Agency thus refers not to agency freed from constraint, but to situated possibilities for action within particular unequal social orders.