ABSTRACT

This chapter moves from the internal motivations for taking action on the part of individuals to the actual acts of transformation individuals engaged in. The chapter discusses the narratives of conflicts and resistance experienced by participants. Participants’ stories alluded to struggles and conflicts (discursive and material) that they experienced and that were experienced by other people within the institution. Here I discuss how the participants engaged in discursive and material battles when taking action to effect change and how, as actors, they can be seen to have been materially produced by discursive constructions. These stories provide a window into the struggles that occur in universities and point to the fact that there exist wider arenas of conflict than the participants’ own personal experience of conflicts. The chapter portrays the relationship between structure and agents in the sense that it illustrates the felt nature of the interaction between agents and structural relations. It also highlights the individual’s capacity for choice as it reveals the choices individual agents make amid enabling and limiting conditions in the university. The idea of agency as individuals engaged in battles then, locates agency not only in the individual but also in the interaction between individual actors and other individuals and structures in the wider university (and indeed societal) context.