While the concept of “Agency” lends itself to multiple interpretations within multiple contexts, the word and its varied meanings possess an intriguing specificity: the very idea of agency exists as a challenge to power, and probes where power rests, and how power shifts over time. At its core—and through its philosophical reiterations by pillars of Western thought ranging from Kant to Marx, from Descartes to Althusser—agency refers to the dynamics of human social relations, the relationship between object and subject. Our agency is unearthed at the intersection of our awareness, our identity, and our efficacy.

For some, people are agents of change in the same way that they are carriers of disease. Others define the subject as moral agent, and subjectivity as the coincidence of knowledge, identity and agency. The theme of agency is intended to provoke and stimulate, asking not how we can structure or assemble meaning, but, rather, how meaning is being implemented and applied, what the effects are of our being.

Questions of action and intervention in social relations and political life were at the core of this year’s multilayered expeditions into the concept of agency. A growing number of artists and thinkers create their own language in exploring agency, and in so doing touch on ideas such as responsibility, consciousness, connectivity, ecology, and momentum. As participants in the Vera List Center’s programs, they develop and showcase innovative models for collaboration and engagement.