Agency

I’ve learned a lot about human agency the past few months since starting my anthropology studies, and the question that echoes each time we even breach the subject is, “what gives people agency?” Agency is a human’s capacity to take action of their own volition, or even just having the power to do so. Sometimes, a lack of action is also agency, and thus also ‘resistance,’ to use a new favourite word the anthropologists have embraced.

But I’ve been thinking about the opposite question these days. What makes people to believe that they have no agency? That they have no power to change things, to make them for the better, even when their lives are terrible or when times are bad? Is it this rolling mass of human inertia, resulting out of laziness? Acknowledging a problem is the first step, but I don’t believe that it will resolve itself once you’ve recognized it. Of course you need to believe you have agency, but you also have to exercise that agency. What’s that space in between where so many dreams are lost?

Like any good liberal arts major, I know that ‘terrible’ and ‘bad’ are just filler words, shifting signifiers depending on perspective. Perhaps in third world countries or poverty-stricken areas that are closer to home, where there are social, economic and political factors out of people’s control that prevent them from taking action. But I’m talking about people who have all their basic necessities met, who don’t suffer from a condition (despite the fact that the pharmaceutical industry attempts to make all of us patients of something), but who still call or consider themselves unhappy.

I’ve been called alarmingly well-adjusted by my gynecologist and my brother’s psychiatrist. I never thought of myself that way, everyone has good days and bad days, times when they feel insecure, ugly and unwanted—and that’s normal. So are emotions like grief, jealousy, pain and anger. People should feel those things, they are a part of being human, but they should also feel happiness, comfort, friendship, love. The trick is to minimize bad days, or mitigate their effects, by sharing the burden with others, so that something can be done about them. So one can stop having them. So one can return to a state of contentedness. I am not a person who believes that happiness is the absence of sadness or worry, but sadness is a deviation from happiness.

Life’s too short to spend any of it unhappy, or at least any more than you have to. Cut out the people and activites that upset you, and direct your attention to those that deserve it.

Remember London?

Quick updates all this week because of midterms (I’ll write about CB tomorrow afternoon), but remember the Science Museum internship in London I wrote about a few weeks back, pretty much surrendering to the fact that they hadn’t picked me, because i hadn’t heard anything for 7 weeks?

Well, they picked me.

What happpened was that the UK changed their visa requirements so that it was nearly impossible for a student to obtain one for only 2 months to work in a job that might apply to their future career. Very strange. So unfortunately they had to cut out a few applicants, and forward only the ones who had either EU membership or Commonwealth status. So dear Canadian citizenship—thank you.

They based their decision solely on my application materials. I didn’t even need to be all charming in a phone interview! At first I thought, “what in the world did I even write in that cover letter?” It was apparently quite good. There were two internships I applied for, Climate Change exhibit and general curatorial, and I got the latter, which I prefer to do anyhow.

In any case, I got email in my inbox first thing this morning, and now I can’t concentrate on taking any midterms. It wasn’t even addressed to me, but to the program coordinator, who happily CC’ed me the news:

We would like to assign Faye to work on an exciting object based exhibition project that in currently in the early stages of development. In 2010 the Science Museum will be redisplaying James Watt’s Garret Workshop. Preserved as left when Watt died in 1819, it is a unique physical record of Watt’s working life, with artefacts representing everything from his pioneering work on the steam engine through musical and scientific instruments, to medical research and even sculpture copying. We would like Faye to be involved in research for the redisplay and some of the intriguing objects it is hoped will be newly interpreted for our visitors.

Did I tell you how much I adore the steampunk era? More fodder for my RP. Of course I know where my priorities lie!

In any case I shall be in London from June 15 to August 7 for the internship, and probably some travelling afterwards.