The Dark Side of Agency
A Life Course Exploration of Agency among White, Rural, and Impoverished Residents of New York State
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12875596 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Laura Obernesser (0000-0002-4654-472X, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, corresponding author), Elizabeth Seale (0000-0002-9296-5250, SUNY Oneonta) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 46-69 |
| Publication date | 2024-04-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Qualitative Sociology Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1733-8077 • E-ISSN: 1733-8077 |
| Publisher | University of Lodz Press (PUBLISHER • PL) |
| DOI | 10.18778/1733-8077.20.2.03 |
| OpenAlex | W4396670417 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 32 |
This study examines how people who have been constrained by extreme or chronic poverty, rural location, and adversity in interpersonal relationships make decisions and engage in agency through their narratives and everyday experiences. As a social scientific concept, the agency indicates the intentional behavior of individuals in the context of their environments, relations, and situations. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were collected with sixteen participants in rural south-central New York state who were living in extreme and/or chronic poverty. While exercising agency is viewed as important to the upward mobility of families and individuals in poverty, our participants encountered not only complex contexts for doing so but, at times, engaged in rebellious or counterproductive forms of agency. Furthermore, family ideology, such as traditional family values, shaped the perceived possibilities for forming one’s life course. We find the structure-agency dichotomy less useful than a framework that incorporates additional sources of constraints on agency, such as embodiment and culture. We also encounter difficulty in applying the concept of agency to the experiences of our research participants in ways that point to the necessary reworking of the concept
Agency (philosophy · Great Rift · Life course approach · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science · Structure and agency · White (mutation · Homelessness and Social Issues · Psychology · Social Psychology · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics
Ain't No Trust
Relationships in Time and the Life Course
Food Insecurity and Mental Disorders in a National Sample of U.S. Adolescents
“Shift-and-Persist” Strategies
Dyadic Coping and Couple Resilience After Miscarriage
Outline of a Theory of Practice
Agency as a Sociological Variable
A Case Study of the Working Poor Single Mother Experience
The Effects of Child Abuse and Exposure to Domestic Violence on Adolescent Internalizing and Externalizing Behavior Problems
Third places in rural America
Working, but poor
Poverty and Serious Mental Illness
The Emotions of Hope
Qualitative research
Beyond the 50-minute hour
The Life Course as Developmental Theory
The Other Side of Agency
Time, Human Agency, and Social Change
Diverging destinies
Culture in Action
Social Networks and Coping with Poverty in Rural Areas
What They Tell You to Forget
Introducing Dyadic Interviews as a Method for Collecting Qualitative Data
Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty
Coping with Rural Poverty
Critical Race Theory Speaks to the Sociology of Mental Health
Relationship Timelines, Dyadic Interviews, and Visual Representations
Single Mothers "Do" Family
Everything's There Except Money
Time, Self, and the Curiously Abstract Concept of Agency
The deinstitutionalization of American marriage
Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |