Agency and Identity in the Collective Self

Contemporary research on human sociality is heavily influenced by the social identity approach, positioning social categorization as the primary mechanism governing social life. Building on the distinction between agency and identity in the individual self (“I” vs. “Me”), we emphasize the analogous importance of distinguishing collective agency from collective identity (“We” vs. “Us”). While collective identity is anchored in the unique characteristics of group members, collective agency involves the adoption of a shared subjectivity that is directed toward some object of our attention, desire, emotion, belief, or action. These distinct components of the collective self are differentiated in terms of their mental representations, neurocognitive underpinnings, conditions of emergence, mechanisms of social convergence, and functional consequences. Overall, we show that collective agency provides a useful complement to the social categorization approach, with unique implications for multiple domains of human social life, including collective action, responsibility, dignity, violence, dominance, ritual, and morality.

Values, Agency, and Identity in a Music Teacher Education Program

Many view music teacher education as a locus for socially just transformation of music education through the development of preservice teacher agency and identity development. However, few have directly examined values in music teacher preparation programs, and values are implicit in agency. The purpose of this exploratory, intrinsic case study was to investigate the visible values in music education courses at one institution to add a new dimension to research and practice. We collected data from four instructor and five undergraduate participants through observations, interviews, and syllabus review. Themes of critical thinking, agency, student centeredness, positive teacher-student relationships, and skills and knowledge for teaching emerged from the data. Findings indicate that values may be relative in practice despite shared language among preservice teachers and music teacher educators. We provide guiding questions for program review and future research through the lens of values.

From Exile to Migration

This chapter discusses the aesthetics and ethics of staging exile and migration as one of the focus points in the political theater of today. It argues that political theater has the power to engage with the strategies of critical countermapping of migration. Using affect, immersion, and embodiment, it can rehumanize migrants, the underclass, and national abjects. It can also stage the uniqueness of individual journeys within the impersonality of the global movements. Political theater can give voice to an asylum seeker and can return dignity to a victim. Telling stories about migration and confronting the bodies of the performers-refugees with the bodies of the spectators–their hosts, it can turn a nameless migrant into a proper individual, someone who possesses their personal history, memory, agency, and identity. Bringing stories of migration to the homes of those people who practice mixophobia, political theater can make the stranger relatable. The play The Jungle (2017), written by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin for the Good Chance Theatre, and presented by the National Theatre and the Young Vic in London, serves this chapter as its primary example of how political theater can educate its audiences about the other and help them realize that this other is already within us.