The capacity of phenomena, human and more-than-human, to produce effects and make a difference through their relational entanglement.
Agency is the enactment of effects in the world: the situated doing/being that takes form in specific material-discursive arrangements, rather than a property that entities possess. It names the capacity for differential becoming that arises as human, nonhuman, material, and discursive bodies, technologies, spaces, and discourses intra-act, producing particular possibilities while excluding others. Defined this way, agency is eventful, relational, and always specific to and distributed throughout the entangled apparatus that brings it forth; it is not intention, will, or control, but the concrete forces that make some actions, meanings, and bodies matter here-and-now.
Departing from the humanist tradition that locates agency in individual intention, posthumanist and new materialist thought refigures it as a situated doing or being, rather than a property an entity possesses. Agency is understood as a vital force enacted by all bodies, what Bennett calls “thing-power,” the capacity of nonhuman materials to act as vibrant players in the world. This capacity emerges within a specific “assemblage,” to use the language of Deleuze and Guattari, where heterogeneous parts—bodies, tools, ideas, forces—connect to produce possibilities that none possessed in isolation. This relational doing is specified in Barad’s work through the concept of intra-action, where agency is the enactment of a causal relation within the mutual constitution of entangled phenomena. Agency is therefore eventful and relational, the concrete power to affect and be affected that is specific to a given material-discursive arrangement.
This understanding of agency moves inquiry away from uncovering human or individual intentions towards tracing material-discursive effects and mapping the performative force of assemblages. A postqualitative study attuned to the distributed agency within a phenomenon asks not “who is responsible?” but “how is responsibility enacted and distributed here?” It necessitates methods that can map how technologies, texts, bodies, spaces, and discourses all act as vital participants in producing outcomes. Research becomes a practice of tracing how agency is distributed among human and nonhuman elements (e.g., software, policies, architectures, bodies) and how specific capacities for action and meaning-making emerge, stabilize, or change within that entanglement. The agential capacities of all elements in an assemblage are important in how they intra-act to stabilize certain realities and foreclose others. This de-centers the human as the sole source of causality and opens up analysis to the complex and often unpredictable ways that the world configures itself.
The concept of distributed agency is necessary for analyzing AI-entangled writing. It allows an investigation of how authorship and the capacity to write, revise, learn, and assess is an effect of, and redistributed across, the entire pedagogical assemblage, which includes the instructor’s pedagogical design, the student’s embodied writing practices, the LLM’s algorithmic affordances and constraints, and the discursive narratives about AI’s role in education. Agency is distributed across the student, the LLM, the prompt design, and the platform’s interface. It provides a framework for understanding the LLM as more than a passive tool, and rather as an active participant with its own agential capacities to shape text, suggest ideas, and constrain possibilities. This perspective helps make sense of the lived, affective experience of instructors, whose own agency is reconfigured in relation to the agential capacities of the technology, leading to new pedagogical practices and a redistribution of classroom power and highlighting how agency is distributed, negotiated, and accountable within pedagogical assemblages, where boundaries between subjects and objects are continually negotiated and reconfigured.