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1
2
Introduction: Privilege, Agency and
3
4
Affect – Understanding the
5 Production and Effects of Action
6
7 Claire Maxwell and Peter Aggleton
8
9
10
11
12
13
14 This book emerges from our longstanding interest in understanding and
15 finding ways to promote more equitable practices between people and
16 through institutions. In research projects and other activities, we have
17 examined relationships from the most intimate of levels (in sexuality,
18 gender violence, alcohol and substance use, and in sexual health research)
19 to those relationships which are structured institutionally (relationships
20 between adults and young people, health practices within schools, and the
21 intersections between gender, social class and schooling). In several differ-
22 ent studies, we have sought to conceptualise how ‘agency’ functions not
23 only at an individual but also at a more collective level. Much of this work
24 has involved consideration of how agency is shaped by broader structures
25 as well as how agentic practices affect, challenge, or are subsumed by wider
26 discourses, relations of power and the resources people operate with, and
27 within.
28 Much of our recent work has been focused on young women from rela-
29 tively well-off backgrounds, who are engaging in the process of developing
30 subject positions and imagined futures within the ‘bubble’ of private educa-
31 tion in England (Maxwell & Aggleton, 2010b: 3). This work has required us
32 to think carefully not only about ‘what is agency’, ‘how can it be observed’
33 and ‘how is it narrated’, but also about the dynamic between privileged
34 subject positions and/or the inhabiting of privileged spaces, and possibilities
35 for, and the outcomes of, agentic practices.
36 Two significant moments brought about the desire to publish this book.
37 The first was a discussion during an advisory group meeting1 for a UK Eco-
38 nomic and Social Research Council-funded Top Girls: Middle-Class Privilege
39 and Agentic Practice study. We were keen to examine whether positions
40 of privilege might in fact enable the development of practices that had
41 ‘radical potential’ (thinking about the young privately educated women in
42 our research study). This links to a broader issue we have been grappling
43 with, where there appears to be a theoretical tension in understanding
44 how opportunities for social change are made possible. On the one hand,
1

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2 Claire Maxwell and Peter Aggleton

1 it would be theoretically coherent to argue that it might be against the best

2 interests of ‘the privileged’ to seek to disrupt existing relations of power,
3 and yet for many forms of social change to occur and, more vitally, for such
4 changes to be sustained, there is a requirement for dominant regimes to be
5 willing to recognise, and be open to, such challenge (Fraser, 1997; Skeggs,
6 2004a).
7 In our advisory group discussion, Sally Power (Cardiff University) won-
8 dered what could be considered ‘radical’ and whether any of the practices
9 narrated to us or observed within our study could properly be understood
10 in these terms. Examples from our data included challenging dominant,
11 heterosexist norms within sexual and intimate relationships or embody-
12 ing an easy accomplishment and/or a desire for a different future to their
13 mothers’ lives (see Maxwell & Aggleton, 2010a, 2013a, respectively). If some
14 young women were seeking to ‘get out of the treadmill of reproduction’, as
15 Diane Reay (University of Cambridge) put it, might this constitute some
16 sort of radical, or perhaps more appropriately named, ‘progressive’ move?
17 Diane reflected on R. H. Tawney’s (1931) work, who as a man educated at
18 Rugby School (an eminent private school in England) and the University
19 of Oxford, developed a fairly radical political stance on equality. Yet, in
20 much other writing, radical potential is usually discussed from the perspec-
21 tive of those in marginalised, subjectified, less resourced positions – who
22 consequently ‘react back’ (Maxwell & Aggleton, 2012a), seek out the need
23 for recognition (Westhaver, 2006) or engage in a politics of performative
24 resignification (Butler, 1997). Therefore, a key question driving this book is
25 to explore whether and how ‘privilege’ not only makes agentic practice pos-
26 sible, but also whether such practices can have radical potential, or whether
27 in fact privilege and agency are mutually constitutive and also (socially)
28 reproductive.
29 A second significant moment was a series of conversations we had together
30 with Valerie Hey (University of Sussex), Jeannie Shoveller (University of
31 British Columbia), Grace Spencer (Nottingham University) and Marion Doull
32 (University of British Columbia) in Vancouver, where we reflected on how at
33 a certain historical moment, the universities and the Academy more gener-
34 ally had welcomed and arguably encouraged the promotion and visibility of
35 colleagues from more marginalised positions – women from working-class
36 backgrounds, and gay men and women. Colleagues who had benefited from
37 this wondered about the degree to which they had continued to open up
38 the academe by challenging dominant discourses, making it a ‘friendlier’,
39 more ‘caring’ space for newer members. This raised the question of ‘what is
40 privilege?’ and ‘how does it feel?’ It led to debates about whether and how
41 privilege is appropriated, accumulated and named, and whether privilege is
42 required before being able to/permitted to enter a particular space or whether
43 it is from the occupation of such a space that privilege can then be taken up
44 and embodied. Examining the feelings of belonging and practices of those

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Introduction 3

1 academics who enter the academe with different (less privileged) histories
2 might reveal a less obvious story about privilege and agency, and offer insight
3 into the role of affect in driving agency or mediating between privilege and
4 agency.
5 This book is an attempt, therefore, in collaboration with colleagues from
6 around the world to explore these broader questions in more depth. We have
7 invited academics working in various fields, and with different theoretical
8 starting points, to consider the issues. Crucially we have asked them to put
9 to work their theoretically driven understandings of privilege, agency and
10 affect by drawing on empirical data, to see how different understandings of
11 these concepts can help make sense of what has been narrated to them and/
12 or observed. By asking authors to review each other’s chapters as part of the
13 writing process, we were subsequently able to put the authors into conversa-
14 tion with one another in order to begin to answer the following questions:
15
16 • How might privilege and agency be mutually constituted? What role does
17 affect play in the constitution of practices of agency? How does privi-
18 lege – as a position held or a space occupied – shape affect (and therefore
19 potentially agency)?
20 • What implications does the mutually constitutive nature of privilege,
21 agency and affect have for processes of cultural and social reproduction
22 and/or ‘radical potential’?
23 • Is there an assemblage of situating parameters (Block, 2012) which, no
24 matter what theoretical positioning a writer takes, appears to guide work
25 on agency?
26
27
28 Privilege
29
30 What might be meant by the concept of privilege? For many, this term is
31 synonymous with belonging to a higher social class in a stratified society.
32 Numerous writers draw on the work of Bourdieu to explore how the differ-
33 ent capitals allow people to navigate institutional processes to their own
34 benefit (Stevens, 2009; Reay et al., 2011; Stefansen & Aarseth, 2011; Davey,
35 2012). Vincent et al. (2012), for example, consider how the possession and
36 the activation of different forms of capital (economic capital, objectified and
37 institutionalised cultural capital) distinguish between the educational strate-
38 gies evident in their research with middle-class families of Black Caribbean
39 heritage, which were shown to lead to differential outcomes in terms of
40 their children’s engagement with and ‘success’ in schooling. In many studies
41 that use the term ‘privilege’, the word appears largely to be employed as a
42 descriptor. As a result and in an effort to move beyond this towards greater
43 theoretical purchase, in our own writing (Maxwell & Aggleton, 2012b) we
44 have tried to follow in the footsteps of Bernstein (1977), Ball et al. (2004),

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4 Claire Maxwell and Peter Aggleton

1 Ball & Vincent (2007), Vincent et al. (2012), and others, who elucidate dif-
2 ferences between various middle-class fractions within a particular temporal-
3 spatial moment, allowing us to further ‘deconstruct the sometimes vague
4 notions of privilege’ (Davey, 2012: para 2.5).
5 The concept of privilege is more widely used in the North American and
6 Australian literatures, especially in relation to discussions of ‘whiteness’
7 (Gillespie et al., 2002; Hatchell, 2004; Solomon et al., 2005, Ringrose, 2007,
8 Moore, 2008, for instance). Some of this work draws on McIntosh’s (1990)
9 concept of an ‘invisible knapsack of privilege’, which highlights the numer-
10 ous ways in which ‘white privilege’ is practised and rendered invisible –
11 resulting in unearned entitlements and conferment of dominance. In
12 recent years, this work has been significantly extended by colleagues such
13 as Howard (2008), Gaztambide-Fernández (2009) and Khan (2011) studying
14 elite education in the USA. Howard (2008), in particular, offers a theorisation
15 of privilege as identity. Here, the economic, social and cultural advantages
16 people have help construct an understanding of the self, a vantage point
17 from which they understand the world and also their own ‘privilege’. In this
18 way, Howard (2008) is able to argue how people positioned as privileged,
19 or those who inhabit privileged spaces, ‘establish and sustain relations of
20 domination’ (p. 27).
21 We have chosen to continue to utilise the concept of ‘privilege’ in this
22 book because we feel it facilitates an immediate connection to social spaces
23 and self-understandings, dispositions and worldviews that see power as
24 natural or unquestioned (as in the literature on white privilege). This can be
25 linked to Bourdieusian notions of habitus and capitals, but these ideas we
26 believe need fuller articulation if they are to help us think more carefully
27 about how different histories and spaces activate particular capitals, enliven
28 habitus, shape affects and drive, sustain or alter practices.
29 Many contributors to this volume draw on understandings of privilege as
30 linked to social class location and/or the possession and activation of capi-
31 tals. What is exciting to see is how different writers conceptualise notions of
32 privilege – as connected to a person (as a set of attributes or as an identity),
33 as embedded within a space that shapes or interacts with subjects who cross
34 or inhabit this terrain (online or within elite institutions), or as lying within
35 the pervasive discursive structures shaping social relations. These different
36 understandings and theoretical starting points offer important and interest-
37 ing ways of thinking about how privilege may shape agency. Significantly,
38 all the authors detail how feelings and affect emerge as central to an under-
39 standing of the relation between agency and privilege.
40
41 Affect
42
43 Affect and the body have received increased attention in sociology and social
44 theory in the past few decades (Radley, 1995; Williams & Bendelow, 1988;

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Introduction 5

1 Ahmed, 2004; Blackman et al., 2008; Clough, 2008; Turner, 2008; Kenway &
2 Youdell, 2011). The need to integrate a focus on emotionality, affect and the
3 material with a fuller understanding of agency is widely recognised (McNay,
4 2000; Walkerdine et al., 2001; Skeggs, 2004; Reay, 2005; Hey, 2006; Renold &
5 Ringrose, 2008; Maxwell & Aggleton, 2012a). Affective responses to experi-
6 ences, or the desire and need for recognition (Honneth, 1995; McNay, 2008),
7 are key motivators of a wide range of social practices (Clegg, 2008; Gordon
8 et al., 2008; Youdell & Armstrong, 2011; Maxwell & Aggleton, 2012a), with
9 some writers engaging with notions of affect that see the body as central to
10 understanding affective responses and affect-informed actions (Grosz, 1994;
11 Shilling, 2004; Ivinson, 2012).
12 In this book, affect is principally elided with the concept of emotion,
13 where emotions are understood as profoundly social (Ahmed, 2004). Affect
14 is largely understood as structuring spaces, interactions, processes of sub-
15 jectivation (Williams, 1977) – in the school, within higher education, and
16 through online chatrooms. Affect can be the symbolic representation of
17 unspeakable desire (as it is within psychoanalytical perspectives), it can
18 drive the fundamental need for recognition (even where subjectivation
19 interpellates the subject as abject), or it can infuse broader discourses, as
20 Berlant’s (2011) work on cruel optimism suggests. Fundamentally, we under-
21 stand affect as driving and underlying agency – infusing and circulating
22 around the space, the person and broader discourses. Contributors to this
23 volume offer different ways of defining the concept as well as illustrating
24 how affect and agency are related.
25
26 Agency
27
28 Agency is a concept we have been struggling with for some time now (Maxwell
29 and Aggleton, 2010a, 2012a). The question of agency highlights one of the
30 most central debates in sociology – namely, how best to understand the
31 interface between factors structuring and producing action. Recent years have
32 witnessed growing engagement with this concept across different bodies of
33 social theory (Archer, 2000; Barnes, 2000; McNay, 2000; Clegg, 2006; Maxwell
34 & Aggleton, 2012a). Symbolic interactionism, actor-network theory, critical
35 theory and post-structuralism among other perspectives offer different ways of
36 conceptualising agency, its dynamic links to structure(s), and its relationship
37 to subjectivities.
38 Despite this work, there exists little consensus on how to define ‘agency’.
39 Emirbayer and Mische (1998) offer a ‘chordal triad of agency’ (p. 970) which
40 sees temporality as central to ‘reflective choice(s)’ (p. 964) within constraining
41 and enabling contexts. Coole (2005) suggests agency should be thought of as
42 a continuum from non-cognitive bodily processes through to transpersonal
43 and intersubjective processes, and differentiates between individual and col-
44 lective forms of agency. Campbell (2009) argues for two ‘types’ of agency – the

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6 Claire Maxwell and Peter Aggleton

1 ability to initiate and maintain action and the ability to act independently
2 of (constraining) structures. McNay (2000) defines agency as ‘the capacity to
3 manage actively the often discontinuous, overlapping or conflicting relations
4 of power’ (p. 16).
5 Despite varying understandings of the concept, several core ideas appear
6 to run through these different perspectives on agency, or remain as ques-
7 tions about which different contributions do not necessarily agree. In the
8 light of these tensions, Block (2012) has suggested the need for an assem-
9 blage of key parameters in defining agency. Based on our reading and own
10 work, we suggest some of the following reference points for considering
11 further what might constitute agency and how agentic practice might be
12 defined:
13
14 • How is power conceptualised and what is its relation to the subject?
15 Does power lie within discourse, which itself hails the subject (as post-
16 structuralist understandings might argue – Youdell, 2006) or is the pre-
17 existence of the subject necessary for power to flow, as DeLissovoy (2010,
18 2012) writes?
19 • How does power imbue social relations and how does the interaction
20 between ‘field’ and ‘habitus’ structure these relations and therefore possi-
21 bilities for agency (Bourdieu, 1990)? These different ways of understand-
22 ing power and the conceptualisation of its relationship to the subject
23 must influence how agency is defined.
24 • For many writers, (critical) reflexivity is central to (sustained) agentic
25 practice. Critical reflexivity can be seen as necessary in order to uncover
26 unthought categories of habit (Adkins, 2003), to help organise a narrative
27 which navigates and makes sense of disjunctures experienced (McNay,
28 2000; Keddie and Williams, 2012) or responds to injured subjectivities
29 (Youdell & Armstrong, 2011; Maxwell & Aggleton, 2012a). Reflexivity also
30 plays a vital role in Cooley’s (1964) theory of ‘looking glass self’, whereby
31 one sees oneself as the object and reflects back on how others appear to
32 perceive us (Jackson & Scott, 2010), which in turn drives practice.
33 • Linked to the possible need for critical reflexivity is attention to tempo-
34 rality – which understands practices and subjectivities as developing and
35 changing over time, which according to some theorists creates a desire to
36 offer a narrative of a developing, yet stable subjecthood (McNay, 2000).
37 • Alongside the suggestion of reflexivity is the question of where imagina-
38 tion (and the affective nature of desire – Braidotti, 2003) might encourage
39 the possibility of inhabiting wider vistas (Gordon & Ellingson, 2006) and
40 drive the potential for internal psychic resistance (Ringrose & Renold,
41 2010).
42 • Finally, possibilities for critical reflexivity and for drawing on the
43 resources of the imagination or desire require us to consider the linguistic
44 resources required for agency, which will be culturally mediated (Ahearn,

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Introduction 7

1 2001). Just as bodies and emotions drive and make agency visible, so too
2 does language – itself a form of social action. In our own research, we
3 have found that privileged young women are able to draw on a strong
4 ‘I-voice’, a discursive frame that calls forth the need for reflexivity and
5 the imperative of performativity, a process of becoming and the need for
6 continuous cultivation, which leaves both the impression of being agen-
7 tic, as well as also making agency possible (Maxwell & Aggleton, 2012a,
8 2013a, 2013b).
9
10 As detailed above, affect and privilege are also central to any understanding
11 of agency – and we aim to make this case through the contributions that
12 comprise this volume. What has so far been less explored is the extent to
13 which agency is felt or played out beyond ‘the self’ – whether agency should
14 in fact be a collective practice and whether moments and practices should
15 only be defined as agentic if new modes of sociability are made possible and
16 lived out. This latter point is intimately linked to the motivation behind
17 this book, which seeks to understand whether and how privilege begets or
18 is constitutive of agency, and whether or not the outcomes of such agentic
19 practices of necessity reproduce social relations rather than offering possi-
20 bilities for social change.
21
22 The contributions in this book
23
24 This book is organised in five sections. The first of these focuses on elite
25 schooling, the reproduction of privilege and the role of affect. Jane Kenway,
26 Johannah Fahey and Aaron Koh examine the complex relationship between
27 privilege, agency and affect in the libidinal economy of the globalising elite
28 school market. In such a system, educational desires become commodified,
29 and the privileged become captives of their own desires, manifested in a
30 strong urge to invest in the self. Such investments propel a particular form
31 of affective agency which has the effect of energising and driving forward
32 capitalist investments. Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, Kate Cairns and
33 Chandni Desai, in their chapter, explore how elite identifications are con-
34 structed in two quite different but nonetheless elite schooling contexts in
35 North America. Thinking about the emotional geographies of these two elite
36 schools, they argue that it is the affective attachments created within these
37 which create a sense of entitlement to the privileges of an elite education.
38 This sense of entitlement is also shown to drive students’ agentic potential
39 in their perceived capacity to act and to be agents in the world. The third
40 chapter in this section by Joan Forbes and Bob Lingard explores in detail
41 the production of an elite girls’ school habitus in Scotland. Drawing on the
42 concept of ‘assured optimism’, the authors demonstrate how the school
43 seeks to produce protagonists through the acquiring of particular forms of
44 intellectual, physical-corporeal and social capitals which call upon young

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8 Claire Maxwell and Peter Aggleton

1 women to initiate and act within a globalised and liberal feminist spatio-
2 temporal world.
3 The second section of the book contains three chapters examining privi-
4 lege, agency and affect as they relate to higher education. Sue Clegg’s chapter
5 examines how the affective structures of modern higher education simulta-
6 neously erase emotion, privilege white male dominance, and promote the
7 prestige of discipline and research, while at the same time harnessing emo-
8 tion for the production of new neoliberal identities. The chapter concludes
9 with some reflections on possibilities for agency and the significance of
10 reflexivity for this process. In the second chapter for this section, Claudia
11 Lapping uses a Lacanian psychoanalytical approach to trace the unconscious
12 irruptions of desire in academics’ complex relations with the privileged
13 signifiers of institutional value and intellectual authority. Lapping explains
14 how these signifiers act as the channel or agency for the subject’s desire.
15 Valerie Hey concludes this section with a more personal account of the ways
16 in which the emotional order of the elite space within higher education
17 influences how agency and privilege remain seriously qualified, for some.
18 The third part of this edited collection focuses on how different spaces
19 structure hierarchical relations between families and communities. The first
20 contribution by Tracey Jensen considers how privilege, agency and affect are
21 played out on the influential website: Mumsnet.com. The chapter explores
22 how the architecture of the website invites a particular voice of its users, which
23 is scaffolded by neoliberal discourses of choice, self-reflexivity and agency. It
24 examines how social and economic divisions between Mumsnetters, and by
25 extension all mothers, are disguised and obscured by such discourses. The
26 second chapter in this section, by Yvette Taylor, illustrates how economic and
27 social regeneration policies and practices in the northeast of England entitle
28 particular (middle-class) protagonists to come forward as agentic, resilient
29 and mobile subjects. The affective consequences of such a divisive discourse
30 are examined for working-class and middle-class women, and mapped
31 onto the changing physical, material and also emotional geographies of
32 the region.
33 In the fourth section, we consider the potential of social justice efforts led
34 by privileged groups and the affect flows emerging from these. Diane Reay
35 analyses the social, educational, political symbolic, and psychic consequences
36 for white middle-class parents of choosing a multi-ethnic urban comprehen-
37 sive education for their children in England. She explores in detail how these
38 families balance their political ideals and commitments with social privilege
39 and tactical imperatives towards social reproduction. Adam Howard continues
40 on a similar theme in his chapter, which focuses on what happens when the
41 privileged enter non-privileged spaces, and what flows from these encounters.
42 Examining the motivations of affluent US college students engaging in social
43 justice efforts, he extends his theorisation of privilege as an enacted identity
44 to reveal how these engagements cause individuals to stress their own agency,

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Introduction 9

1 meeting affective needs through fostering positive self-understanding, thereby

2 securing and rationalising their privileged trajectories. The final chapter in
3 this section, by Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen, examines how social mobility across
4 three generations of Norwegian families alongside a strong political discourse
5 on gender equality have provided women in Norway with opportunities to
6 create new and more personally and family-centred understandings of gender
7 identification. Using a psychosocial approach, the concept of pre-reflexive
8 and reflexive registers of meanings is drawn on to consider the ways women’s
9 potential for agency is formed, galvanised and impeded.
10 The book concludes with three thought-pieces. The first is by Margaret
11 Wetherall who outlines the need for, and the development of, a new con-
12 cept of affective practices – an exciting addition to the theoretical repertoire
13 scholars can draw on to develop work further. Laura Ahearn offers some
14 reflections on the contributions contained within this book, drawing also
15 on her own extensive work on agency from a linguistic anthropological per-
16 spective. Finally, we close the book by returning to the three questions posed
17 at the start, seeking to answer these by bringing into dialogue each of the
18 various contributions. We focus in on how different authors would have us
19 understand privilege, agency and affect, as well as the interrelations between
20 them. We examine the possibilities for social change that may exist within
21 privileged spaces and/or which are led by privileged subjects. We end by
22 outlining how others – as academics, policy makers and practitioners – may
23 wish to further extend the work presented here.
24
25
Note
26
27 1. Members of the advisory group were Louise Archer (Kings College, University
28 of London), Valerie Hey (University of Sussex), Sally Power (Cardiff University),
29 Diane Reay (University of Cambridge) and Carol Vincent (Institute of Education,
30 University of London).
31
32 References
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Adkins, L. (2003) Reflexivity – freedom or habit of gender? Theory, Culture and Society,
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35 Ahearn, L. M. (2001) Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30,
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37 Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
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39 Archer, M. S. (2000) Being Human: The problem of agency. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Ball, S. J., & Vincent, C. (2007) Education, class fractions and the local rules of spatial
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42 Ball, S. J., Vincent, C., Kemp, S., & Pietikainen, S. (2004) Middle class fractions, child-
43 care and the ‘relational’ and ‘normative’ aspects of class practices. The Sociological
44 Review, 54 (4), 478–502.

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Fraser, N. (1997) Justice Interruptus. London: Routledge.
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