Agency is Positionally Distributed: Practice Theory and (Post)Colonial Structures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Why are some practices available to some actors in world politics, but not to others? In this theory note, we develop a theory of agency as positionally distributed: In global politics, the action potentials of groups and individuals vary depending on their location in the macrostructures inherited from common histories of colonial domination and exploitation. We contribute to the understanding of subordinate agency by exploiting the many synergies between International Practice Theory and Postcolonial Theory. Where the former sometimes struggles to capture deep macrostructures, the latter emphasizes the constitutive effects of coloniality. Conversely, where the postcolonial gaze faces the aporia of giving voice to the subordinate, a practice approach helps make sense of the indexicality of agency, including defiance and subversion. Based on these complementarities, we develop a structural concept according to which agency, including subordinate forms, is a relational effect of an unequal playing field characterized by centuries of (post)colonial dynamics. Overall, the theory note helps explain why the very same practices, such as border crossing, seem to be distributed unequally across groups depending not on their competence but on their position in social and international structures such as the North–South divide or the global color line.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".