About the Project

Agency as experience and capacity: social mechanisms, political implications

This four-year research project (2025–2028), backed by generous funding from the Kone foundation, examines the relationship between subjective sense of agency and the basic agentive capacities from the perspectives of analytic philosophy, critical phenomenology, and cognitive psychology. We explore how social mechanisms and political systems shape the experience of agency and its core capacities: decision-making, volition, and self-control. While previous empirical research has primarily focused on the neuropsychological aspects of these capacities at the individual level, social conditions and structural injustices, such as poverty, also have a significant impact.

The sense of agency plays a central role in both personal life and political participation. Restoring it is therefore crucial for supporting political engagement, particularly for individuals in vulnerable positions, such as neurodivergent people and those affected by poverty. The project not only formulates societal guidelines for supporting agency but also critically examines the boundaries of such support.

The project develops conceptual and methodological tools to understand how societal factors affect the experience of agency and its fundamental capacities. Empirical research is tightly integrated with theoretical analysis. Our research methods combine philosophical inquiry into the nature of agency, empirical psychological studies that map everyday conceptions of agency and their relationship to the experience of agency, and social-philosophical analyses of political utopias that support agency for all. The knowledge produced by this project contributes to a deeper understanding of the nature of agency and informs how society should respond to individual differences in the basic agentive capacities.

The team

Dr. Polaris Koi
Polaris Koi is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UTU. His research program is interdisciplinary and focuses on human agency, decision-making, and cognitive diversity.

Dr. Joonas Martikainen
Dr. Joonas Martikainen‘s research combines study of political agency and democracy with critical phenomenology and social theory. His book project, Political Poverty: Losing Faith in Democracy, under contract with Palgrave, explores disenfranchisement and citizenship.

Anssi Bwalya
Anssi Bwalya is currently finishing his dissertation in psychology at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include metacognition and executive function. He is also an accomplished science journalist. He blogs at Virhemarginaali.fi.