Transformative agency as warping: how collectives accomplish change amidst uncertainty

Abstract

The research programme on transformative agency by double stimulation within cultural-historical activity theory is a resource for responding to pressing societal needs of our time. The peculiarity of this programme lies in the ambition to develop a rigorous approach to grasping processes of collective transformative agency and generating viable pedagogical instruments to support them. The metaphor of warping is useful for this endeavour. In this article the metaphor is applied to three empirical examples to show how collectives generate transformative agency, how the process evolves or flounders, and how it can be supported. The first example stems from a waiting experiment originally described by Vygotsky as a prototypical example of this type of agency. The second and third examples stem from data collected in a study on eradicating homelessness in Finland. The article discusses the implications of this approach for research and practice.