Constitutivism is a kind of metaethical theory according to which one can explain reasons or normativity in terms of what is constitutive of agency. Any constitutivist theory makes three basic claims: (1) that some feature is constitutive of agency, (2) that one can explain reasons or normativity in its terms, and (3) that doing so has plausible first-order normative implications. I consider the paradigmatic constitutivist theories of Christine Korsgaard and J. David Velleman and the more recent variant developed by Michael Smith, and I argue that each fails adequately to justify at least two of the three basic constitutivist claims. I then argue that a constitutivist strategy can nevertheless be adapted to explain the necessary connection between normative judgment and motivation. More specifically, I argue that practical deliberation has two constitutive features. First, it aims at proceeding in a rational way from premises to conclusions. Second, it has an internal connection with motivation: barring weakness of will, people are motivated to act in accordance with their deliberative conclusions. Because a person's normative beliefs guide the course of her deliberation, and her deliberation motivates her action, a person will be motivated to act in ways that correspond to her normative beliefs, which her sincere normative judgments express. This account provides a cognitivist explanation for a phenomenon often taken to be the most important evidence for non-cognitivism or expressivism.

ABSTRACT Low income housing delivery still remains a challenge in Botswana. The government initiated various programmes to address this problem and the Self Help Housing Agency (SHHA) is one of those programmes. This is an exclusive programme limited only to a prescribed low income group. While SHHA has proved to offer opportunities in sustainable low income housing delivery (due to the complimentary roles played by government and beneficiaries), housing problems still persist especially for the low income households. This, to a certain extent, is due to shortcomings within the programme. Any recommendations to address those shortcomings will enable government to achieve its objectives in low income housing delivery.

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Thesis advisor: James F. Keenan / This dissertation addresses a specific problem, which is that the Catholic ethical tradition lacks an adequate normative approach to social anger as a potentially constructive resource in the pursuit of social justice. In response to this issue, this dissertation advances the thesis that social anger is a cognitive interruption of the ideologies and structures of oppression, which is to say, an evaluative judgment that the members of a vulnerable social group suffer systemic deprivation of one or more of the social goods constitutive of basic human flourishing. I propose that the civic virtues of justice, solidarity, and prudence may be used as a normative anthropological heuristic for determining whether agents have rightly realized their social anger in regard to particular instances of structural participation, such as political resistance and institutional reform. In order to defend this thesis, the argument first diagnoses the main causes of the problem. In attempting to address social justice concerns, Catholic ethicists have generally retrieved the Thomistic virtue ethic of temperance or moderation in anger, which was designed for damaged interpersonal relationships in a premodern context, and applied it to the contemporary context of structural injustice in sociopolitical and socioeconomic relationships. This normative ethic, however, fails to observe the qualitative difference between the moral agency of individuals in relation to one another and the agency of structural participation. Moreover, this anthropological issue is exacerbated by an uncritical characterization of anger as impulsive and non-cognitive in itself, a problem that can be traced to the lack of an adequate philosophical psychology of emotion. In light of this diagnosis, I argue that Catholic ethicists should critically engage with the cognitive theory of emotion offered by Martha Nussbaum as well as her feminist account of universal human capabilities. Once combined with the contextual anthropology of human agency in history found in modern Catholic social thought, these resources can provide the basis for an inductive natural law methodology appropriate to the task of understanding social anger in relation to the pursuit of social justice. Employing this methodology, I explicate the moral significance of social anger as cognitive interruption and offer a critically reconstructed normative ethic appropriate to the contemporary context of political resistance and institutional reform in public life. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: Arthur Madigan / This dissertation is based on the claim that Taylor, in his immense philosophical writings, looks for the unifying forces, principles, and those desires in the human agent that can transform modern partial comprehension of reality into a new collage, i.e. a deeper and more meaningful picture of who we are and what is most essential for us. I argue that Taylor in his reflection on modernity adopts Hegel's concern for how to unite two ideals - radical freedom and expressive fullness. In search for an answer to Hegel's concern, Taylor repeatedly comes to the same conclusion. Adequate understanding of modernity, moral sources of modern identity, human agency, and human language, requires insertion in its context; therefore, the description of time, space, and other factors that condition modernity, is crucial. There are some aspects in Taylor's reflection on modernity that either preclude or impede the modern agent's search for fulfillment and freedom (i.e., reduction of the human sciences to the principles of the natural sciences), or open neglected or undiscovered perspectives for investigation, and offer new answers (i.e., challenge of achieving peaceful coexistence in a multicultural society). Underneath these aspects of modernity, Taylor perceives human desire to be free, authentic, and fulfilled. In the recent publications, Taylor brings into focus the closed horizons of modernity in the field of religion, especially the mainstream secularization theory. As long as modernity considers religion and spirituality as unimportant and pushes them aside from our daily life, it effectively closes off some possible answers regarding agent's fulfilment, flourishing, and freedom. It does not mean that every form of religious practice and belief brings us automatically to the goal; some might be narrow and exclusive as well, and therefore have to be examined in turn. Taylor's reflection unfolds the answer to Hegel's concern only gradually. In order to be free, fulfilled, and have a meaningful life, no dimension of human existence can be excluded, all dimensions remain to be examined. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

This study aims to capture how left-behind children in China experience their life with their parents’ migration and how they exercise agency to negotiate with structural and cultural contexts when living under these circumstances. The fieldwork was conducted in a middle school in a rural region of the inland province Hunan, with the data mainly being obtained from in-depth interviews with 16 focal left-behind children. An integrative theoretical framework is proposed to explain the dynamic process of living with parents’ migration by explicating the interaction between structure, culture, and agency. The research findings indicate that the left-behind children’s experiences can be conceptualised as “ambivalence” in that they incorporate simultaneous existence of opposing emotions towards their parents’ migration. Such experiences are grounded in the structural and cultural contexts associated with migration on the one hand, and on the other, provide the driving impetus for children to reproduce and/or transform their structural and cultural contexts by adopting agentic strategies either more engaged with the present or more directed towards the future. An integrated theoretical framework has been developed to capture a dynamic understanding of left-behind children, wherein ambivalence is proposed to act as a bridging concept to link agency with structure and culture. This framework challenges the univalent orientations in conceptualising agency as rational choice or resistance and emphasises the mutual sustaining relationships between culture and structure, which could contribute to the debates in the sociology of childhood field by advancing theoretical integration so as to transcend the agency/structure dichotomy. By highlighting left-behind children’s ambivalent experiences, this research further contributes to the literature that challenges the image of passive victims attributed to them, and adds to the knowledge on how to address their needs as well as to facilitate their exercising of agency, which can inform related policy and service provision.

This thesis is an analysis of female prophecy as it is constituted, represented or performed in seventeenth-century texts. I consider both the way in which prophecy is socially constructed and the role of prophetic experience in the development of feminine subjectivity. I argue that interpreting prophecy within the context of psychopathology or feminism (to take two examples of critical practice) colludes in the early modern objectification of women's speech and somatic experience. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I argue that prophecy needs to be understood as a media event and as a site of discursive proliferation. In this study, I examine texts which participate in the explication of a prophetic event and interrogate their intentions and functions. I suggest that an inclusive reading of prophecy allows the critic to recuperate women's agency. My study of prophecy combines the seventeenth-century notion of prophecy as a category for diverse linguistic and bodily manifestations with an analysis of the rhetorical strategies of the prophetic text. In the course of this thesis I consider: 1. the work of various scholars who have attempted to explicate the relations between gender and radical religiosity; 2. how a comparison between hysteria and prophecy illuminates the primacy of psychopathology in the interpretation of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century women's experience; 3. the interplay between scriptural models of prophecy and early modern biblical exegesis; 4. the role of texts in (in)validating female bodily experience and 5. how seventeenth century antisectarian texts attempt to police the female creative imagination.

(Im)politeness research has often focused on either the importance of social norms or on the intentions of the speaker, overlooking the active role played by the recipient(s) in assigning social meaning. This limitation pertains particularly to so-called “discernment languages” such as Korean and Japanese. This work addresses this gap by focusing on recipient agency in interpretations/evaluations of impoliteness. Two sets of data are drawn from the naturally occurring computer-mediated communications that appeared in two popular internet portal sites in South Korea. Both sets of data contain metapragmatic discussions of impoliteness that involve recipient evaluation of a speaker’s actions and language use as offensive or not. I focus on how the recipients in the data agentively evaluate the language used by speakers, including inconsistent evaluations of non-honorific language, or panmal. The results show that variability in the interpretation of (im)politeness cannot be explained solely by social norms or intentions, and must also include the socially-mediated agency of the recipient(s). / 2021-04-30

Teachers' professional lives are situated at the intersection of local, national and global educational policy contexts. What they purposefully do (agency) and how they see themselves and their roles as teachers (identity) dynamically interact with such contexts. This study argues that in order to understand the meaningful professional development work of teachers, it is important to have an understanding of this interplay. Current dominant policy discourses concerning the 'improving teacher' and 'teaching as a craft' are examples of an over-reliant emphasis on more insular narratives of agentic teachers and teaching. As the research in this thesis shows, such narratives fail to take into account the complexities of factors and discourses that impact on the beings and doings of teachers, and are therefore inadequate. Based on an iterative dialogue between particular theoretical ideas and emerging case study data, the study proposes a multi-level integrating framework for understanding the experiences of teachers as they develop and locate a sense of their professional identity. Four teachers, from different types of English secondary schools, participated in the study. Data was generated from timelines, concept maps, lesson observations and interviews with the teacher participants. The case studies were presented as written portraits. Drawing on Archer's work (e.g. 2012) on reflexivity, the ways in which teachers' thinking mediated the links between their agency and structure were considered. The different modes of reflexivity that teachers employ and the ways in which teachers determine and facilitate personal projects of concern to them were found to be important to their professional identity and agency. The findings also suggested that the similarities and differences between the teachers were to do with how intersecting structural and cultural factors at global and local levels are mediated by individual forms of reflexivity. These forms of reflexivity are a reflection of evolving personal and social identities and an emerging social stance on society. The mediation produces particular professional concerns or projects that both suggest similarities that relate to powerful global discourses of education-such as performativity-but also particular types of agency and identity that are specific to those individual teachers' classrooms and general professional stance. The essence of the daily work of teachers appeared to reflect an intersection of personal biography and the situational structures and cultures of schools in which teachers operated, which brought about differences in professional thinking and doing. The thesis contributes to knowledge by adding to theory concerning identity and agency, as well as contributing to methodology by using portraits in understanding the nature of teacher agency and reflexivity. The factors that are identified and an insight into teachers' reflexivity contribute to the development of a toolkit for understanding teachers' identity and agency that may be useful for both teacher educators and policy makers.

Curriculum for Excellence (CfE, 2004), Scotland's most recent curricular reform, adopted in 2010, positions teachers as key stakeholders in the change process where they are not merely regarded as technicians delivering prescribed curricula but rather as designers and co-producers of school-based curriculum. This critical review considers the ways in which teachers engage with and enact this reform using the lens of teacher agency, to provide insight into how teachers relate to policy (Tao & Gao, 2017). Teacher agency has been defined as the ability to act (Bandura, 2001), to critically shape a response to a problem (Biesta & Tedder, 2006), and reflect on the impact of one's actions (Rogers & Wetzel, 2013). This critical review contributes to understanding of the factors that enable or constrain teachers to exercise agency as they enact new policy. Research in teacher agency is important because teachers may use their agency to support new policy, develop a critical stance or oppose educational change altogether (Sannino, 2010). CfE significantly altered the nature and purpose of Physical Education (PE) by relocating PE and dance to the newly created educational domain of 'Health and Wellbeing', but also offering dance as a unique subject within the Expressive Arts domain. The focus on PE is particularly salient, since PE teachers were not only managing the complexities of enacting whole school reform, but at the same time reconstructing the nature of their subject between the two educational domains. Given the complexities of enacting new policy in PE, this critical review examines the tensions, issues and challenges that PE teachers face when exercising agency to enact new curricular policy in their school setting. This critical review draws from three studies presented in six peer-reviewed international publications, analysing 525 Questionnaires and 50 interviews, that trace the policy formation process using Bowe, Ball and Gold's (1992) cycle of policy creation and enactment in practice. The six papers do not follow a linear path but can be read as a set of three interrelated research studies, conducted in 'real time', examining policy processes in practice. The first study investigated the creation of the CfE policy text by interviewing key policy constructors selected by the Scottish Government to create a vision for PE within Health and Wellbeing. The second study surveyed PE teachers in Scottish secondary schools and examined CfE at the implementation stage of the policy process, comparing policy intentions to teachers' translation of the policy text during the early years of policy enactment. The third study analysed PE teachers' perceptions, experiences and provision of dance in the curriculum using a ten-year longitudinal study to explore teacher agency from student through to experienced teacher. The studies identified the practical manifestations of the theoretically complex concept of collective context-bound agency that is exercised through policy enactment in the relational context of schools. The research established that policy enactment and agency were interconnected when actors were able to respond to tasks that involved them in a socially embedded process. Agency was exercised when teachers reflexively deliberated on the meaning of policy for their practice and negotiated the cultural, social and material contextual environment required to support reform. Teacher agency was enhanced by the collective experience in that, as a group, the PE teachers possessed emergent properties not possessed by individuals but by the power of the relationship that bound them together. The findings are relevant and timely in seeking to explore the information that sits beneath the surface of curriculum change by developing an understanding of the ways to support teachers' current and future practice.