RESEARCH
Agency and Social Transformation
How can movements for transformative social change create radically new patterns of community life and build the institutional structures needed to support them?
Modern efforts to address social injustices often strive to harness the disruptive powers of political conflict. But existing patterns of hyper-partisan fragmentation suggest that such methods have reached a point of diminishing returns. In response to this fragmentation, the Agency and Social Transformation research track explores various social movements and systems of thought–whether religious or secular, contemporary or historic, rooted in the Global South or in the Global North–that aspire to channel the limitless powers of the human spirit into collaborative and constructive processes of social change.
Book Projects
Radical Constructive Agency: Pursuing Social Justice in an Age of Transition
by Michael Karlberg and Derik Smith
Modernity has given rise to recurring debates about the ends and means of social change. What should those ends be? Do the ends justify any means? Should the means prefigure the ends? In this book, Michael Karlberg and Derik Smith offer a fresh perspective on these questions by accounting for the transitional nature and trajectory of modernity. The authors first trace the evolution of thought on social justice as a primary end, to discern a common horizon toward which diverse movements for justice are all oriented. Then they engage evolving debates about the means of pursuing this end. By historicizing these debates, they bring into focus the growing need for radical constructive agency – or the construction of fundamentally new social structures and norms capable of supplanting prevailing ones – as a central means of this axial age. They conclude by discussing the challenging modes of social learning this entails and the expanded constructive imaginary needed to motivate and guide such learning.