Key note speech abstract

We are happy to share the abstract of the key note speech by Professor Margaret S. Archer.

The speech will be titled: Subjectivity, Identity and Belongingness: How Reflexivity links them. 

I maintain that any adequate explanation in the social sciences must incorporate ‘Structure’. ‘Agency’ and Culture’; in short, they come in a SAC. None of the three concepts in the title stands alone, despite often being treated as such in the literature. Reflexivity – the capacity of all normal people to reflect upon themselves in relation to their (social) circumstances and vice versa – is presented as the ‘missing link’, joining structure and agency, culture and agency and accounting for what agents actually do, as opposed to empiricist generalizations that ‘most people in situation X do Y most of the time’. Thus, both determinism, which presumes that objective social circumstances automatically govern subjective identification, or notions of ‘social conditioning’, where dominant (or natal) cultural discourses are held to orchestrate the subjects’ normativity and aspirations, turn agents into the trager of habitual belonging. The two have the same effect of depriving subjects of their agential powers that lead them reflexively to pursue different courses of action in the attempt to realize their own subjectively defined concerns.