Privilege, Agency and Affect: Moving Further Debate

Abstract

This book seeks to bring into dialogue ideas and approaches from a group of academics variously engaged with some or all of the following concepts: privilege, agency and affect. In recent research examining the agentic practices of young women who are privately educated, we ourselves have been moving towards a focus on all three of these concepts: we see the affective as both driving and being an expression of the agentic (Maxwell & Aggleton, 2012a), but we also recognise that class position and the privileged environments the young women are schooled in create specific discursive and material possibilities for agency (Maxwell & Aggleton, 2012b; 2012c). Many of the colleagues who have so generously contributed to this volume have also been actively working with these ideas, albeit in different ways. The time is ripe therefore for discussion across research fields and perspectives, with a view to identifying common ground as well as uniqueness and specificity.