Abstract/Summary

This commentary interrogates the way agency was conceived of during the COVID-19 pandemic through three different frameworks: a linguistic framework that focuses on how agency is encoded in and enacted through language, a framework based on practice theory that focuses on how agency emerges through social interactions, and a framework informed by post-human and new materialist perspectives that sees agency as performed within networks of human and non-human actors. It ends by arguing that, while all of these perspectives provide insights into how language shapes agency, they do not provide an adequate roadmap for how to understand and enact agency in a global crisis such as a pandemic. For this, it is argued, a new perspective on agency is needed, one which focuses more on collective action, generosity, and learning to respond to others.