ABSTRACT
Focusing on actor-oriented human agency may be a paradigmatic ideological stance, but it is not closed, as Collins supposes. Taking human agency seriously led me to interpret the party after the women’s humiliation as a context for analysing embodied action and how transformative capacities emerge and function. The women’s retaking of the site of their humiliation reveals several contingent transformations. In short, human agency is continuously and mutually constructed by researchers and the people they research in varied dialogical situations. This notion can lead to an epistemological break by critically reviewing the literature on industrial workers and farmworkers. It is no exaggeration that denouncing exploitative practices in order to defend workers has the opposite effect, because the denunciations portray workers as powerless and virtually imprisoned under ‘structural conditions’.
