Agency and Co-production: A Multimodal Perspective
Abstract
Building on multimodal (inter)action analysis as a theoretical and methodological framework, this article introduces and develops the theoretical/methodological tool called primary agency. Taking the mediated action as a unit of analysis, agency can be analysed as a feature of action. However, there is a lack of empirical approaches for the study of agency, and an overemphasis on language as the most important site for identifying agentive action. I develop primary agency through an analysis of three co-produced higher-level actions from a research project into high school tutoring. These are the higher-level actions of conducting research, tutoring and reading a text. Applying co-production and the modal density foreground/background continuum I explore how the researcher, the tutor and the student co-produce these higher-level actions. Through this analysis, I identify the most significant mediational means for each higher-level action, and the social actor with ownership or agency over these mediational means. I define this social actor as the one with primary agency over the co-produced higher-level action. Finally, my analysis outlines the implications of primary agency for co-produced higher-level actions, including the role of the researcher, the attention/awareness participants pay to overarching research projects, and links between primary agency and successful learning.
Funding statement: The Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders, Fellowship.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- The Role of Music in City Audio Guides in Italian and in English
- Agency and Co-production: A Multimodal Perspective
- Representations of the Black Death: Multimodality and Assessment in the History Classroom
- Arguing Against Corporate Claims Visually and Multimodally: The Genre of Subvertisements
- Book Reviews
- Cornelia Müller: Body - Language - Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction
- David McNeill: Why We Gesture: The Surprising Role of Hand Movements in Communication
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- The Role of Music in City Audio Guides in Italian and in English
- Agency and Co-production: A Multimodal Perspective
- Representations of the Black Death: Multimodality and Assessment in the History Classroom
- Arguing Against Corporate Claims Visually and Multimodally: The Genre of Subvertisements
- Book Reviews
- Cornelia Müller: Body - Language - Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction
- David McNeill: Why We Gesture: The Surprising Role of Hand Movements in Communication
