Tamara Handy Elizabeth B. Kozleski University of...

Running Head: YOUTH AGENTIC ACTIVITIES 1

Examining Youth Agency in Post-war school settings

Tamara Handy

Elizabeth B. Kozleski

University of Kansas

YOUTH AGENTIC ACTIVITIES 2

Abstract


Examining Youth Agency in Post-war School Settings in Sri Lanka

Understanding youth agency in post-war contexts requires acknowledging the textured

ways in which agency is understood and enacted since agency itself is rooted in the cultural,

historical, political, ethnic and economic contexts of specific regions of the world. Bandura’s

work in the 1980s which linked self-efficacy to human agency stemmed from a number of

research studies completed in the United States in the context of White-dominant universities

(Bandura, 1982). In 2000 Bandura asserted:

Social cognitive theory adopts an agentic perspective in which individuals are

producers of experiences and shapers of events. Among the mechanisms of

human agency, none is more focal or pervading than the belief of personal

efficacy. This core belief is the foundation of human agency. Unless people

believe that they can produce desired effects and forestall undesired ones by

their actions, they have little incentive to act. The growing interdependence of

human functioning is placing a premium on the exercise of collective agency

through shared beliefs in the power to produce effects by collective action (p.

75).

In this paper we grapple with how minoritized1 youth exercise agency in the aftermath of

war in which their families, language, customs, and political structures were subordinated to the

majority population. We also challenge the assumption underlying the construction of self-

efficacy and its link to agentic actions. To reveal agency in all its complexities requires

theoretical lenses that account for the philosophical and epistemological assumptions that

undergird social order in specific contexts such as non-Western cultures (Kozleski, Artiles, &

1 We use the term minoritized because it pinpoints that despite being demographic minorities, some groups

are further minoritized by hegemonic majority cultures.


Waitoller, 2011). To this end, we situate our examination of youth agency within the theoretical

constructs of cultural historical activity theory and feminist post-colonial theory (Lewis & Mills,

2003).

Constructs that drawn from feminist post-colonial theory/third world feminist theory is

imperative in understanding the context of a post-war, post-colonial country like Sri Lanka

(Jayawardena & De Alwis, 1996). These theories remind us that agency is enacted in spaces

where those in power often use their influence to oppress and silence groups with specific

intersectional identities (Spivak, 1988). Yet despite oppressive conditions, those in subaltern

positions often engage in agentic activities even when those activities are unappreciated and

unrecognized (Carrillo Rowe & Malhotra, 2013). Cultural historical activity theory helps to

explain how these agentic activities are undertaken (Cole & Engeström, 1993). It reveals the

culturally mediated nature of agentic activities which helps to identify and appreciate the

affordances and constraints that animate agency in post-war settings.

Social and structural exigencies abound in post-war settings. They include (but are not

limited to) extreme poverty (Justino, 2009), disablement (Trani, Kett, Bakhshi & Bailey, 2011),

domestic violence (Catani et al., 2010), inadequate infrastructure (Shah, 2012) and fragmented

social relationships (Seymore, 2014). The intersectional nature of these constraints affect men,

women, and children in different ways depending on individual markers of identity such as

education, religion, cultural and familial experiences, and linguistic and intellectual capacities.

Schools are specific community sites where these intersections collide, conflate, and conspire to

alter everyday life. The experience of war, the degree to which reconciliation is possible and

sanctioned, access to and the distribution of resources all affect how schools are reconstituted

and for what purpose.


While the re-establishment of post-war schools symbolize normalcy and well-being

(Buckland, 2005; Winthorp & Kirk, 2008), they may become sites for the reproduction of

violence that is embedded within the individual and collective victimization experienced within

communities (Handy & Annamma (in review). Some schools in post-war settings tolerate a wide

range of teacher practices that result in physical and/or emotional violence that are often justified

as discipline (Haines, 2014; Handy & Annamma, in review).Within these troubling contexts,

schools perpetuate various forms of violence in ways that significantly diminish the well-being

of youth and children (Haines, 2014; Handy & Annamma, in review).

In this paper, we explore how youth who are consistently subjected to various forms of

violence engage in agentic activities. We explore these activities from the point of view of youth

who occupy the margins of society, revealing how they navigate these problematic spaces. We

draw on data from a qualitative study conducted between the years 2015-2016, in the conflict

affected Northern Province of Sri Lanka. Since gaining independence from Britain in 1948,

ethnic tensions reinforced by the divisive, colonizing impact of the British, grew over time

culminating in a civil war in 1983. The rebel organization, LTTE, which sought to take up

grievances of the Tamil minority, (despite very little support from the majority of Tamils) fought

for a separate state and succeeded in setting up a de-facto state in some parts of the North and

East in Sri Lanka up until 2009. In 2009, the Sri Lankan military ended the war by engaging in a

severe offensive that obliterated an already crippling LTTE. For 26 years, a generation of Sri

Lankans in the Northern Province lived in a state of war. What this history means for schools and

the children who attend them needs careful study, not only from the point of view of outside

agencies but also from the point of view of the children who live every day in these contexts.


Our study was conducted in an area where the militants had previously established a de-

facto state which was taken over by the Sri Lankan government after the war. Taking up youth

agentic activities in this setting requires understanding the relationships between war experiences

and school violence without conflating the two or ignoring their connections. While we

acknowledge that the processes used to negotiate violence during the war certainly mediate how

youth and their teachers negotiate school violence, in this paper we focus specifically on how

youth respond to violence in their present school settings. We explore agentic activities,

centering the ways in which youth, intuitively and deliberately, engage with violence in their

everyday lives. We begin by describing two common but somewhat problematic discourses that

position youth in war affected settings as pathological or exemplary. The review of these

discourses leads into our conceptual framework (Ravitch & Riggan, 2016), which introduces our

conceptualization of agentic activities and charts the conceptual terrain through which we

interpreted our data.

Agentic Constructions

How we construct agency may offer a more complete understanding of how youth

negotiate violence in their school contexts, particularly in troubled political and social landscapes

(McCarty, 2010). We seek to expose the full array of activities in which youth in post-war

settings engage to mitigate their exposure to violence. We position these activities as agentic

because we seek to disrupt how some of these activities may become easily misrepresented as

pathological or valiant, in reference to hegemonic discourses of pathology and resilience. We

view agentic activities expansively, meaning we avoid reductionist and essentialist dichotomies

of viewing agency as opposed to passivity and disruption (Rao, 2015; Reader, 2007). We focus

on the relational aspects that mediate agency, rather than focusing solely on the performative


aspects (Brayboy & Maughan, 2009). Our construction of agency is rooted in the experiences of

youth who use tactics to engage in their worlds that may be unfamiliar or suspect to their

teachers. These experiences expose fractures in hegemonic discourses that re-circulate and may

position war-affected youth in minoritized positions as problematic (McCarty, 2010).

Agentic activities include all activities in which youth individually and collectively

participate, actively and intentionally, in order to contend with violence in their school setting.

Intentionality does not suggest that youth realize successful outcomes (from the point of view of

an observer), nor does it suggest that each time youth engage in agentic practices that they are

deliberate and well thought out. Rather, some of these agentic activities seem habituated by

repeated, and somewhat successful use. For instance, some youth in this study chose to remain

silent when teachers unfairly disciplined them. Their refusal to speak up did not mitigate the

violence they experienced, yet youth enacted silence intentionally, not as victims but as actors

weighing the consequences of their actions (Visweswaran, 1994). And, it may be that these acts

of silence are interior markers to youth of their own resistance and thus, may be viewed by the

actors, as successful.

Our purpose is to provide a better understanding of the activities youth undertake as

agents in trying to alter their present realities. Therefore, we do not seek to adjudicate their

activities based on arbitrary judgments of good and bad, and useful or damaging. We avoid

making a priori assumptions about youth (e.g., traumatized, resilient) in interpreting their

activities (Mohanty, 2003). Instead, we pay close attention to all the complexities that surround

agentic activities and, through the voice of youth provide their perspectives on their activities.

Recognizing agentic activities foregrounds the importance of building and supporting youth in

war-affected settings in transforming violence in their schools (Seymore, 2014). Positioning


youth as active agents does not disregard the enormous power differentials that render some

agentic activities futile or even harmful. Nor does it contend that all agentic activities are

virtuous and must be encouraged. Our constructions of agency stand in contrast to what we view

as the problematic discourses of some interveners (Brayboy & Maughan, 2009). We seek to

recognize and give credence to how and why youth engage in their contexts, especially when

contending with violent realities, opening up possibilities in (re)imagining or (re)mediating these

inequitable spaces (Gutiérrez, 2016).

Common Problematic Discourse: Deficit-deviant positioning

Psycho/psychosocial pathology and post-traumatic growth (PTG) and resilience are two

discourses used in understanding individuals and their needs in war-affected settings. In war-

affected Sri Lanka for example, research establishes the prevalence of mental health and

psychosocial issues (Somasundaram & Sivayokan, 2013). We value these initiatives in

mitigating social and psychological problems in post-war Sri Lanka, especially since there is

concerted political pressure to eliminate much needed services for war-affected communities

(Samarasinghe, 2014).

However, we problematize how youth behavior, especially agentic activities, may be

misinterpreted as problematic if viewed solely through lenses of individual and societal

pathology or PTG/resilience. Despite the recent positive trajectory of both discourses in

providing holistic views, it is yet to trouble the idea of pathology itself. This allows unfettered,

often negative, assumptions about war-affected individuals, communities and, especially, youth

to circulate in problematic ways. Importantly, these discourses have the potential to obscure and

misrepresent youth agentic activities.


We advance the notion that when pathologizing labels are applied a priori to youth, they

may then be constructed as passive victims, helpless, deviant, disruptive, and dangerous

(Seymore, 2014). Despite the invaluable contribution made by psychosocial, PTG/resilience

discourses in transforming war-affected settings their praxis is premised on the assumption that

war-affected individuals are damaged by psychological and or social pathologies (Boothby,

Strang & Wessells, 2006). In Sri Lanka, the fields of psychiatry and psychology have become

integrated into socially sensitive psychosocial care discourse which neither strictly medical nor

social (Gallapatti, 2014). One serious omission however is that this integration does not

problematize the effect of naming and positioning an individual or community as damaged,

troubled or ‘scarred’ (Somasundaram, 2014).

Five years after the war in Sri Lanka, Tay, Jayasuriya, Jayasuriya, & Silove (2017) found

that “The Tamil minority group reported more extensive PTSD symptoms compared to the

Sinhalese and Moors, consistent with the greater exposure of the former to conflict in Sri

Lanka”(p. 52). When an entire community (regardless of heterogeneity) is positioned as showing

‘extensive’ symptoms2 of PTSD, their practices may be readily viewed as problematic

influencing how youth in these contexts maybe viewed. In a study conducted in Northern Sri

Lanka, Somasundaram and Sivayokan (2013) noted that “alarm was expressed about alcohol and

some drug use among youth and students…some participants and key informant’s felt that they

observed discontent among youth, increasing antisocial behavior and problems” (p. 24). Key

informants in this study did not include school age youth, nor did the informants refer to the

various intersections of war-affected youth 3. Yet, an over-deterministic interpretation of these

2 Symptoms include irritability, aggressiveness, and self-destructive, reckless behavior. Criterion E, American

Psychiatric Association. (2013) Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, (5th ed.) 3In a study the first author conducted with school age-youth, confirmed the findings of the Somasundaram &

Sivayokan (2013), however, only identified particular groups of youth engaging in problematic practices.


findings may position youth activities as problematic; particularly in the absence of their voices,

which would advance a more critical analysis. Here, youth who resist violence in school can be

positioned as anti-social, while youths’ non-resistance (i.e., silence) can be viewed as passivity

(Betancourt, Speelman, Onyango & Bolton, 2009). By leaving pathology itself unquestioned,

youth activities become deviant or deficient.

PTG/resilience discourses highlight positive psychological changes in those who have

experienced trauma (Calhoun & Tedeschi, 2014; Rutter, 1987). PTG/resilience discourses now

account for contextual complexities that mediate resilience, thus no longer exude ‘invincibility’,

‘invulnerability’, and ‘exceptionality’ (Masten, 2014). Despite this positive turn, the outcomes of

PTG/resilience are said to result in ‘positive outcomes in the face of war-related stressors’

(Betancourt & Khan, 2008, p. 319). Positive outcomes range from being well adjusted

academically and socially to exercising agency, hopefulness and empathy (Sapienza & Masten,

2011; Winders, 2014).

In the same conducted by Somasundaram and Sivayokan (2013) they found that “at the

same time, there were exceptional individuals, particularly youth, showing independence, mature

personalities, and adaptive coping mechanisms, flexibility, establishing and maintaining

relationships” (p.24). Positioning some youth as exceptional is problematic when considering

what it says (or does not say) about youth who may not display these specific traits and actions.

Naming some traits as exceptional suggests that other youth are deficient (lacking resilience) due

to academic or social incompetence, such as low-achievement or distant relationships with

school personnel, with little reference to the context of their violent school realities. Instead,

creating a dichotomy through exceptionalism creates the potential to obscure and misrepresent

youth agentic activities.


Psycho/psychosocial and PTG/resilience discourses renders youth deficient by

identifying them as deviant or deficient due to pathology and non-exceptionality. Youth

positioned in this way maybe assessed as requiring care, rehabilitation or correction through

clinical or community interventions, diminishing caregivers’ abilities to recognize, appreciate

and support their agentic activities (Betancourt, McBain, Newham, & Brennan, 2015). We frame

youth activities as agentic, thus offering the possibility of layered explanations for the ways in

which youth negotiate violent school spaces. These explanations acknowledge and support the

funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) that youth possess in negotiating violent

contexts, and re-positions the ways in which caregivers may intervene and interact with youth.

Transgress to Transform: How CHAT and Feminist Post-Colonial Theory Frame a

Contrapuntal Analysis of Agentic Youth Activities

Large scale violence takes place in complex and over-determined socio-

cultural contexts, which intertwine psychic, social political economic and

cultural dimensions…collective violence cannot be reduced to a single level of

analysis because violence targets the body, the psyche as well as socio-cultural

order (Suarez-Orosco & Robben 2000, p.1).

Suarez-Orosco and Robben (2000) remind us to improve the ways in which we frame

and analyze research in war affected settings. Our conceptual framework aims to create a

“context-specific differentiated analysis” without losing its “analytical universality” in

understanding agentic activities (Mohanty, 2003. p. 63). In doing so we use constructs from

complimentary theories; cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) and post-colonial feminist

theories/ third world feminist theories, to engage a contrapuntal analysis in order to understand

how youth in war-affected contexts engage with the violent realities in their school settings.


In this framework these theories interact in ways that illuminate the complexities in

which youth engage in agentic activities. Feminist post-colonial theories transgresses normative

understanding of what happens in war-specific contexts without imposing a priori assumptions

(Mohanty, 2003), while CHAT offers a way to understand how agentic activities are mediated in

socio-cultural and historical contexts (Cole & Engeström, 1993). These theories are contrapuntal,

in that they both operate in response to one another rather than in unison, allowing for a nuanced

and situated analysis of agentic activities (Kozleski, Artiles, & Waitoller, 2014). We use

contrapuntal analysis because it highlights the tensions, gaps, and assumptions in the ways that

researchers organize, collect, interpret, and act on educational data (Kozleski, 2016).

Contrapuntal analysis examines the dynamic intersections between individual and institutional

histories and processes in schools. Exploring these intersections allows us to investigate the

taxonomies that structure how students are counted in school and for what purpose. As Bowker

and Star (1999) suggest “…each category valorizes some point of view and silences another (p.

5).” Here, we explore a contrapuntal discourses between the perspectives that inform

taxonomies, and the meaning making that ensues from mining our data.

The analysis is composed of four intersecting lenses: (a) Youth and their agentic

activities; (b) intersectionality; (c) strategic agentry; and (d) contradictory outcomes. In bringing

together CHAT and feminist post-colonial theories we offer an analysis of the complex moves of

transgression and transformation that are captured by youth’s agentic activities. We use a

contrapuntal readings of both theories to illuminate and fill gaps in our analysis in which one

theory or the other cannot adequately address. Based on our conceptual framework, two

questions frame our analysis: (a) what are agentic activities youth engage in, and (b) what are the

outcomes of these agentic activities? Each section of our findings starts by describing specific


agentic activities, and then explains the outcomes of those activities. The discussion addresses

how these agentic activities create possibilities for transforming violence in schools.

Methods

The data came from an exploratory qualitative study conducted in the post-war, Northern

Province of Sri Lanka between December of 2015 and February of 2016. During this time, five

boys and five girls, ages 14 to 17, who attended local public schools participated in ten in-depth

interviews and one focus group. The study identified factors that mediate learning in war-

affected contexts. Through focused questions about learning and teaching processes used in

school (i.e. teaching strategies), the participants provided detailed information on their

experience, giving witness to violence in schools, especially in the form of disciplinary practices.

Several papers have emerged from this study, each reporting on a different aspect of our

findings. In this section, we describe the methods used to (a) identity participants, (b) conduct

interviews and focus groups (including collecting the data in the language of origin of the

participants), (c) translate transcripts into English, and (d) code and theme the transcriptions.

Sample

Participants were sampled purposively (Patton, 2002). Participants had to (a) belong to

the Tamil ethnic minority, (b) attend a rural, under resourced school situated in post-war Sri

Lanka, and (c) self-identify as low achievers. The participants thus selected also came from

villages that were poorly regarded by school personnel and other students due to the inhabitants’

caste status, although that was not part of the sample criteria. Similarly, while household

socioeconomic level was not a criteria for selection, all participants indicated that poverty in

their homes significantly impacted their day to day experiences in school.


A community organization recruited the youth in this study. The organization has been

active in the Northern Province since the end of the war in 2009. The organization’s trustworthy

reputation helped to recruit the participants. The first author worked for this organization as a

consultant psychologist during the immediate aftermath of war. Her ongoing relationship with

the organization and youth in this region played an important role in recruiting youth for this

study. Past connections with the organization and the researcher helped the participants feel safe

both physically and emotionally as they shared their life experiences. The interviews were

conducted in a community center. Youth and their families had already established safe routes to

enter the premises. Because participants were regular participants at the community center,

attending the interviews did not increase their exposure to being questioned by authorities in this

highly surveilled community. Youth and their parents traveled about three to five miles by foot

and bicycles in order to participate in the interviews. Interviews lasted between one and one and

a half hours.

Data Collection

A loosely structured interview guide was utilized in this project (Seidman, 2006). The

interview protocol had questions that pertained to their school experiences in the past and

present. Some questions in the protocol specifically probed difficulties experienced in school.

For example, a probe asked participants to “describe some of the difficulties you face in your

current school”. The loose structure of the protocol proved useful in ensuring that youth could

talk about the experiences that were most meaningful to them providing many opportunities for

the participants to steer the content of the conversation (Taylor, Bogdan & DeVault, 2015). The

flexibility afforded to the students was intentional and designed to support the students as they

shared their experiences including descriptions of war time atrocities as well as current violence


experienced in school. The first author paced the interviews carefully allowing ample time and

flexibility for youth to share their often painful stories. At times they broke down in tears

struggling to articulate their thoughts and feelings. During these times she switched off the

recorder, and remained quietly until they were able to compose themselves. Relying on her

previous experiences and expertise in working with youth and children during the aftermath of

war, the first author determined when to resume interviews or discontinue them. Therefore, some

of the interview transcripts end abruptly, while others have multiple audio recordings that pertain

to one participant. It was also often the case that youth shared experiences that did not directly

relate to the purpose of the study. Youth shared the roles which their parents played during the

war as well as stories of detention and the disappearance of loved ones. What they shared

allowed for deeper and broader understanding of the contextual specificities of youth negotiating

tenuous spaces of violence in the after math of war.

Language Considerations

The lead author conducted these interviews in Tamil. This manuscript switches from

third person to first in this section in order to explain specific language fluencies which the

second author does not have. Tamil is one of two National languages of Sri Lanka. Tamil is

spoken predominantly by the Tamil and Muslim ethnic minorities. I speak Tamil fluently

because I completed my primary and secondary education in Tamil. My fluency in the language

proved extremely useful in decoding some of the verbal and non-verbal nuances in their

narratives. For instance, Divya noted how a teacher once threatened her saying “So when we go

late, they intercept us and make us clean garbage…. They (teachers) make us do that (clean

garbage) and threaten us saying, if you come late again we will…” Leaving the end of this

sentence unspecified might make it seem incomplete, rather than a threat. The threat is detectable


by fluent Tamil speakers who are familiar with the rhetorical move understood in the utterance

“we will”. The non-specific, open ended nature of the utterance is intended to encourage fear for

personal safety by imagining the worst thing a teacher would do as a consequence. And, because

the students had already experienced dire physical violence from their teachers, such open-ended

threats elicited memories of their prior experiences.

Despite my fluency in Tamil, there were times when I was unfamiliar with location-

specific language practices, such as the use of specific words, references to places and common

metaphors. During the interviews, I asked students to clarify what they meant when they shared

localized knowledge that was unfamiliar to me as a Tamil speaker from the urban city of

Colombo. For instance, Divya mentioned that her hair style which she called a Mangi often got

her in trouble. I was unfamiliar with this term and asked her explicitly what a Mangi was. She

explained that it was an evenly cut fringe. In Colombo, we call this hair style a monkey cut (in

English). I realized that Mangi was a localized way of saying Monkey. In making the connection,

I was able to understand why her haircut was problematic in school. Most Sri Lankan public

schools do not allow students to have hair styles like fringes or bangs in which hair falls onto

foreheads and obstructs the eyes. The custom is to tie hair back neatly so that the face is clearly

seen. Divya’s hairstyle violated this convention. Both these examples highlight how my

knowledge of syntax and grammar in Tamil as well as local morays, customs, and conventions

helped make sense of the interviews and focus group.

Transcriptions and Translations

I took precautions to ensure the accuracy and validity of the transcripts during the

translation and analysis phases. I was solely responsible for translating and transcribing the audio

recordings into English. On average each interview transcript had about 40 to 45 pages. Since I


conducted the interviews and maintained extensive field notes before, during and after each

interview, I consistently referred to my notes while translating to determine the accuracy of my

translations and take into account pragmatics such as respect, sarcasm, humor and fear. For

instance, participants’ code switched when they talked to one another, often referring to their

teachers non-deferentially, using terms such as athu, which translates as it or that which is

particularly disrespectful when referring to adults. However, when they talked to me about their

teachers, they used more respectful terms such as antha teacher or sir, carefully curating the

nature of the conversations and positioning me as an adult by constantly using respectful

salutations in reference to me and the other adults they singled out for more deferential

treatment.

Furthermore, to ensure the internal validity of my translations I conducted blind forward

and backward translations with native Tamil speakers from the area in which this study was

conducted (Santos, Black & Sandelowoki, 2015). During these discussions we deliberated on

word choices, clarified main ideas and ambiguous interpretations. For example, there were times

when direct translations did not capture the full meaning of what had been shared. The

participants often made subtle distinctions in their phrasing to insinuate meanings that were not

captured directly when I made direct translations. For example, the phrase teacher aakal (people)

translates simply as teachers, however, in the context of this study, youth used this particular

phrase to signify teachers as outsiders. Thus this phrase can also be translated as those people or

those teachers. My colleagues and I discussed this particularity extensively and came to a

consensus that we should leave the translation as just teachers and not those people for the sake

of clarity.


I continued to solicit help from my Tamil speaking colleagues who worked in the area

during multiple phases of analysis. Being in frequent conversation with them helped me make

decisions about sections of the transcripts that I felt required careful attention in order to

accurately situate the discourse within the context of the study. We deliberated on word choices

taking into context current local realities. Although we decided on the word choices during the

translation process, during analysis I came across instances where I needed to clarify situation

specific words used by youth. For instance, the youth in this study used metaphors to explain the

temperament of teachers like vedi velli an “explosive star.” The term vidi vedi velli is a common

phrase that means morning star, but youth changed the first word from vidi (morning) to vedi

(explosive) giving it a negative connotation to mean that the teacher was unpredictable and

dangerous.

Coding

Conducting research in a language other than English, in a non-Western country and

culture, required constant refining and adapting of existing analytic tools. I used Nvivo, a

software program to organize and sort data in meaningful ways, and engaged in constantly

deconstructing and reconstructing categories, codes and subcodes (Bazeley and Jackson, 2013).

The first round of analysis was inductive and constituted open coding (Rodwell, 1998). I coded

the main ideas that emerged from the data. I read each transcript separately, often two or three

times, coding for main such as agency and resistance. While coding and categorizing, I wrote

detailed memos creating a careful trail of the decisions I made as I coded phrases and sentences

connecting references using direct quotes from the excerpts including important citations from

existing research (Charmaz, 2004; Taylor, Bogdan & DeVault, 2015).


I documented discussions with my co-authors so that we could carefully track the trail of

decisions we made, verify our analysis and check for meaning as ways to hold ourselves

accountable for the ways in which we interpreted data. For instance, in my first round of analysis

I created a node called agency and resistance (a main idea) which had over 360 references.

Through the subsequent rounds of analysis, I reconstructed agency as a theme and included

resistance as a sub theme, deciding that resistance was only one form of agency. Then I used sub

codes such as overt resistance (34 references) and passivity (66 references) to deconstruct

resistance. Later, through conversations with my supervisors we decided to rename passivity as

endurance (Rao, 2015), based on similar research conducted with marginalized populations in

India. Endurance was further broken down into silence, non-interference and so on where I kept

adding and deleting until I was satisfied that the code captured distinct ideas.

During the second and third round of coding I used axial and selective coding, looking

for specific examples and counter examples for codes that I had created (Saldana, 2015). For

example, although most of the youth in this study did not physically retaliate toward the teachers,

they provided ample examples of how their peers did so. As I reviewed codes, I looked for

specific relationships among the main categories and themes that emerged (Rodwell, 1998,

Saldana, 2015). For each code, I created a sub-code and labeled it “counter examples” so that I

could easily locate references that pertained to the idea that I was trying to interpret. An

additional level of coding was undertaken when a few excerpts in the data were re-coded based

on the theoretical framework. For instance, when youth mentioned members of their school

community like parents or teachers, I coded them under the community category of CHAT.

Simultaneously, I re-coded sections that pertained to intersectionality based on feminist post-

colonial theory, where they made explicit references to their village of origin or gender. While


re-coding separately (and simultaneously) using CHAT and Post-colonial feminist theories (i.e.

a-priori), I created nodes within each section if the quote aligned well with CHAT and Post-

colonial feminist theories. For example, when youth talked about the outcome of enacting

silence, I coded it as a culturally mediated activity. At the same time I coded this quote, under

post-colonial feminist theory which indicated strategic gentry. The nodes created in Nvivo

provided away to trace where else this quote was coded allowing me to read the same quote from

both perspectives, although I coded them separately.

By paying meticulous attention to translations and analysis, and providing a detailed

description of how we engaged with our data helps with the needed transparency about the

limitations and possibilities in conducting research work in locations outside the West. Localized

ways of how youth engage in making meaning of the chaos of war and its aftermath and our

ability to interpret their experiences with reason and sensitivity is both incomplete and rigorous.

Incomplete because we cannot capture all the complexity. Rigorous because we adhered to the

conventions of qualitative research in our methods and used a conceptual framework to situate

our analysis. The quotes used in the results section reflect the dominant themes in the entire data

set.

Framing Youth Agentic Activities in Sri Lanka

The participants’ experiences in this study illustrate how activity systems are situated in

sociocultural, historical specificities, where individual and collective activities form complex

social organizations (Cole & Wertsch, 1996). In this project, we interviewed students in the

Northern Province in Sri Lanka to understand how they conducted their everyday school lives in

the aftermath of war. Violence in school appeared frequently in study transcripts. The

participants explicitly refer to their teachers’ aggressive tactics, such as hitting and verbal abuse,


enacted to control student behavior. Drawing on data from the same study, Handy and

Annamma (in review), established how violence enacted by school personnel had little

connection with student misbehavior. Instead, because authority figures in school positioned

students based on their marginalized intersections of caste, gender and dis/ability, minoritized

students became targets of violence (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013). For instance, youth

from lower castes were identified, a priori, as badly behaved and unintelligent. This, in turn,

meant that teachers used harsh intervention, regardless of how trivial their behavior might be.

Furthermore, even when minoritized youth did not engage in problematic behavior, they risked

being beaten or scolded.

The results section focuses on this context of violence from the point of view of the

students. We analyze the agentic moves made by students in the first theme, avoidance and

escape. Additional agentic themes that reveal the culturally mediated aspects of agentry follow

including (a) goodness as a performance, (b) silence and endurance, (c) seeking out adult

intervention, and (d) overt resistance.

Avoidance and Escape

All of the participants in this study described their involvement in agentic activities that

constituted avoidance and escape. They described running away and hiding hoping to evade

getting beaten or scolded. Kala and Arini provide an example.

Kala: Soon as children see these teachers they run into their classrooms and hide

TH (Tami Handy, first author): Why is that?

Arini: Because if they catch us walking around or just standing outside our classrooms

they hit us very badly (Focus group interview, p.28)


In this exchange, Arini and Kala explain their need to escape from or avoid some teachers who

react violently when they see specific students. When being visible is the trigger for a violent

encounter, then escape and avoidance becomes agentic. It is neither cowardice nor the absence of

agency, because silence here is intentional and repeatedly enacted because it is deemed the best

way to mitigate exposure to violence (Carillo Rowe & Malhotra, 2013). The students are active

agents because they are able to predict the behavior of specific teachers, have a plan for avoiding

it, and are able to carry it out even when in danger of being hit. They maintain this behavior

because the community of students use this strategy, reinforcing its utility for multiple

individuals, and, by acknowledging their flight strategy, increase their collective skills in

detection and flight. In this next quote, notice that there is a shared catalog of violence-prone

teachers.

Divya: There are some sirs we all avoid

Kala: yes, Suppaiah sir (name of teacher)

Arini: and Mano sir

Kavita: Yes Miss Subramaniam

Divya: We call her vidi vedi welli (explosive morning star)

(Focus group interview, p.35)

By being able to ear-mark specific teachers, they are able to protect themselves individually and

collectively. Their capacity for engaging in this agentic activity is predicated upon their context

specific insider knowledge, knowledge not easily identifiable by outsiders. Naming their teacher

‘vidi vedi velli’ is instructive, for this term conveys that her violent proclivities are consistent

like the morning star and dangerous as an explosive, thus she must be avoided at all costs.


These first examples of escape and avoidance activities are response to the immediate

context. However, students also reported more strategic forms of avoidance and escape. Truancy

was one such agentic activity. Puvi said:

Sometimes the bus drivers let us into the bus.... when the bus does not let us in,

so we go back home, because of the bus we miss school...about three to four

times (a month). When teachers ask us why we missed school, if [we] say it

was because of the bus they hit us...so we say that we got a fever or something.

There is no point going late to school either, if we don't make it on time they

send us to the principal then we go to the principal, they tell us to bring our

mothers as punishment (line 688)

Although accepting truancy as an agentic activity may conflict with conventional definitions of

agency, youth describe the strategic importance of engaging in this practice. Puvi weighed his

options when deciding between being truant or tardy, and decided that truancy was the better

option. Nonetheless, he and his peers realized that avoidance and escape afforded by truancy was

only temporary. Kala said “We have to be in his class every day, if we don't come, if we miss

even one day of school even, he (the teacher) hits us for missing school (Focus group interview,

p. 29)”. Although, they chose the option of being truant instead of tardy, Kala points out how

truancy in return would expose them to further violence when they return to school. Truancy, in

this case was an intentional agentic activity, regardless exposing youth to further violence.

Students sometimes escaped by changing schools. They explained that, whenever

possible, they changed schools to escape persistent and targeted violence. Puvi described why he

switched schools:


In that school, I was, the madam principal would always be scolding me, she

constantly tells me, I should go to another school that is why, I asked my

mother, then she, I changed schools and came to this school in Pattinapur (line

339)

Due to being persistently harassed by his former principal, Puvi engages in the agentic activity of

asking his mother to help him escape violence. In turn, his mother works toward assisting Puvi

escape violence by transferring him to a school that would typically not take him in until he was

in a higher grade. It is possible that his mother expended social capital to make sure Puvi got

transferred into a town school. What is important is how he initiated the move by setting into

motion an adult who could help him escape.

Unfortunately, Puvi’s escape from violence was short lived. He described that in his

current school how “one day the teacher hit me in the bathroom, everyone, and everyone gets

beaten up by him here in this school, even the Advanced Level boys get beaten up (line 435)”.

Puvi’s experience shows how although agentic activities of avoidance and escape were strategic

activities, the outcomes are not always favorable and can be unanticipated. At this point the

outcome transforms him as a subject, and he adjusts his objective stating “What can I do?, even

if I tell my mother, there is no other school I can go to (line 440)” He acknowledges that even

older boys are subject to violence, and seems to signal resignation that his violent realities will

continue up until he graduates.

Goodness as a Performance

We frame youth agentic activities in this section as performing goodness. How students

talk about goodness or being good does not necessarily mean a values driven construct of

goodness. Rather, students use the term “good” to capture the complex maneuvers they employ


to appear or be perceived in ways that help mitigate their exposure to violence. In performing

goodness they engaged in activities that constituted absolute compliance while not necessarily

embracing the behavior or activity. Nesan explained

After I went to school… in the first term…when I was new to the school, and I

used to get beaten up a lot… then I decided that I must do whatever the

teachers asked me to do for them (line 285)

Nishan decided to become extremely compliant in complying with whatever the teacher

wanted him to do in order to mitigate his exposure to violence. At times, compliance was not

absolute. Sometimes, students engaged in activities in which they cautiously broke the rules.

Yet, they broke these rules in ways that maintained the facade of absolute compliance while

preserving their own sense of identity and explicit ideas about agency.

TH: What if you break dress code rules, do they hit you?

Arini: Yes, if we get caught, they will hit us. Sometimes we don’t get caught.

On day [I] cut my hair like a monkey cut with a forward fringe, but I clipped it

back, so no one can see it, there is no way they can catch me because my hair

looks fine to them, like a good girl (laughs) (line 252)

Arini describes the ways in which she broke the rules which would have made her susceptible to

violence, if she did not overtly act as if she was absolutely compliant in order to be perceived as

a good girl. Maintaining the appearance of goodness was a strategic agentic activity that

preserved identity.

Some of the students build strategic alliances with peers who were generally perceived as

good by the faculty. Puvi said:


There is a boy named Sindu. He…he is a good boy. He and I go for tuition

together. So I purposely just get together with him, sit with him and study with

him.... there are some boys who copy and get good marks...there are some who

don’t study, some who don’t study, but copy and get good marks...I don't talk

to them (line 554)

Puvi describes how he intentionally befriended a ‘good’ student in order to be perceived as good.

Goodness here was predicated on academic achievement. Associating with those who are

perceived as good students was another form of agency because the students saw a direct cause

and effect relationship between studying and the avoidance of being beaten up. In this instance

Puvi performs the acts of sitting by him, going for tuition classes and studying with him, while

avoiding others. This is a new kind of mediated activity. It required observing the community

and the relationship between teachers and other students. Without reporting that he did this, Puvi

observed that some students were not being beaten up. Their behavior seemed to be preferred by

the teachers. He concluded that achieving his goal of avoiding punishment would require

modeling the activities of other students who seemed to be effectively avoiding punishment

without having to run away, hide, or be truant. He seems to hope that by building alliances with

Sindu, he too maybe perceived as good and as a result be protected from violence. This alliance

building strategy makes sense when significant protections are attached to being perceived as

good. Nishan said “The teachers hit us because we don’t study well, because we are not good

students” (line, 246). Further when youth were asked to describe good students they said

Arini: they are good because they are well behaved and proper in their ways, their

performance in school is good, like their rank is high, and they come to school

on time, they are teachers’ children,


Nishan: Not that they are really good because they drink and stuff, but teachers hide

those things and ignore them.

Divya: They don't scold their own children, but immediately find fault with us and

blame us.

Nishan: They have their own cliques but we hang out with them sometimes, in school

you know, just so that, you know so that the teachers will calm down (laughs)

(Focus group interview, p. 44)

These excerpts reveal increasingly sophisticated understanding of the social order that schools

use to sort and manage students. Arini identifies three ways that schools sort. Doing well on

school work brings status. Having a preferred rank when students enter school also helps. As

well, students must adhere to the customs and morays of the school. On time behavior connotes

responsibility and pliability. Then, Arini makes a very interesting pivot, she calls such children

“teachers’ children.” This suggests that even the good students are either academically high

achievers or students who are perceived to be so because of certain privileges such as

membership in the group of students who are the children of teachers in the school. In this case,

the opposite of good is not being bad, in the sense of engaging in problematic behaviors, rather

being good is about performing academic activities that increase individual student status and the

perception that a student is “good.” Given these conditions, building alliances with “good”

students is an intentional, strategic agentic activity.

Silence and Endurance

Youth link their silence with being perceived as good. In the following excerpts silence

stands as a proxy for being good.


Kala: Girls just wait without saying anything, Girls just shut their months and wait

(Laughs), we stayed silently, like good children, we are good children so we don't

say anything.

TH: Do the students just keep quiet? don't they say anything to the teachers when they

say things like this (insult students)

Puvi: No

TH: They just wait quietly?

Puvi:. They just keep quiet and wait...but the boys from there are terrible... the Patinapur

boys. They frown at the teachers and they talk back and stuff… No way...we don't

get involved with any of that...” (Focus group interview, p. 8)

Kala points out how girls in particular choose to both wait in silence and be silent. While Kala

points out the gendered nature of engaging in agentic activities of silence, Puvi shows how the

gendered nature of this activity is not evenly applied. He notes that only some boys from better

regarded villages typically speak up. Both Kala and Puvi’s experiences represent facets of

silence. The results merge to position them and others who choose the path of silence as good.

Silence was commonly positioned as a preemptive strategy to mitigate their exposure to

violence. Arini said:

Our teacher says no matter how harshly the other teachers treat you, “just be

silent, be very quiet, and don’t say anything to them” that's how she advises us.

So when sir comes we stay quiet, we just let him explain and say whatever he

wants to and wait silently for him to leave (line, 103)

Arini, explains how silence is used strategically when a teacher who is prone to violence comes

into their class. The action of being quiet and waiting silently was a preemptive strategy.


Similarly, silence is also used as a way of mitigating further violence. Divya said “when we get

punished we remain silent and cry, that's all we can do. So we just do that, we get our beating

and then we wait silently (for him to leave), if not he can strike again (line 297)”. Divya shows

how in the face of violence, mitigating further violence requires that they remain silent and

endure their distress until the threat passes. Silence according to Divya alludes to temporality,

highlighting the agentic activity of endurance (Reader, 2007). Engaging in the agentic activity of

silence did not ensure protection to everyone equally. Kavita explains “When others in our class

get beaten up, it makes us very sad, but we remain silent, because if we say something about it,

Aiyo!! (oh my goodness) we will be beaten up as well (Focus group interview, p. 30)” Here,

silence as agentic activities includes not speaking up, and how the object of engaging in these

activities differed based on the subjects’ position at the time (Roth, 2014).

Seeking out Adult Intervention

Students participated in activities that solicited support from their families. They

provided many examples of situations in which families intervened on their behalf. Nesan said:

The teacher hit…. she chased me out of class…. one day, saying that I don’t

come for classes. Then we went to the principal and told him that it was

difficult for us to come (for the morning class). Then….the principal knows

about that teacher so he said bring your mother and come to school, we’ll have

a meeting with everyone with all the students who do health studies…she will

have to change the class he said (line 145)

Here, Nesan and his peers take their grievances up to the principal who actively encourages them

to solicit parent intervention.


While school authorities summoning parents to school cannot be considered activities in

which students exercise agency, it is important to pay attention to how families and authorities

interact. This helps to explain why youth do not engage in this agentic activity more often. The

agentic activity of soliciting adult intervention at times turns awry. Kavita explained how school

personnel “scold our mothers saying, don’t you know how to bring up your children in the

proper way? and attack them with terrible insults, yelling at them” (Focus group interview, p.

21). Divya adds “our parents have to come to school and be put to shame because of us”. Divya

and Kavita show how ineffective parent intervention becomes and how it distresses youth whose

parents are treated poorly. When families are treated this way, students recognize how these

agentic activities may not be conducive to their objective particularly when it results in further

violence. Puvi explained:

What can we do...even if we tell our parents...or even if we take our mothers or

others...he (the principal) hits us in front of our as well. He hits us then too.

(TH: Does he hit in front of your mothers too?)

Yes...he hits us in front of our mothers...in his office, Yeah that's why getting

parents involved is something I hate. I hate when they tell me to bring my

parents, I feel so sorry for them,… that's why I try to solve the problem on my

own, it’s just, we feel so sad and sorry for them and they have to come here(to

school) and then they have to struggle here because of us (line 440)

In Puvi’s example he shows how bringing his mother to school caused further emotional distress

and caused further violence due to the authoritarian role that school personnel assume with

families. Typically, agentic activities such as soliciting family support may be considered a

prudent strategy and maybe even encouraged over activities like silence especially by outsiders


whose intentions are to break vicious cycles (Engeström, 2015). Yet youth experience in this

study demonstrates the importance of understanding the context in determining the efficacy of

various agentic activities.

Overt Resistance

Overt resistance was rarely practiced because of the students’ marginalized identities

within the school system (Yuval-Davis, 2006). By taking up a nuanced reading of overt

resistance we hope to show how overt resistance is applied unequally within the school setting.

For example, none of the youth in our study reported that they retaliated verbally or physically,

but pointed out how their peers in relatively privileged positions engaged in these practices.

One form of overt resistance youth discussed was talking back to authority.

Kala: Some do (talk back), in some of the other classes in our classes, we don’t

talk back, but in other classes they do.

Divya: The boys sometimes talk back and don’t respect teachers… The big

ones (boys) they only, they are the ones who don’t respect the teachers.”

TH: They talk back to the teachers?

Kala: Yes mostly boys but girls do too

TH: Why do the boys talk back?

Kala: If they (teachers) just hit for no reason or something they scold back

Puvi: We don’t do any such thing… the Pattinapur boys are terrible, they talk

back to teachers and frown and do things like that (Focus group interview, p.

8)

In this discussion, the participants established how the agentic activity of talking back was

mediated by the multiple intersections in which they are positioned. They note that those who


talk bad are mostly boys who belong to relatively privileged groups. Interestingly, even though

the participants recognized how those from mostly privileged positions were justified in talking

back, they positioned this activity as disrespectful, unacceptable and by extension bad.

Only some of their classmates engaged in threatening teachers. Throughout the

interviews, the study participants referred to students in higher tracked groups as the “other”.

Divya said “They (the other students) are so bad, they threaten teachers saying if you keep

hitting us like this then we are going to tell the principal or we will tell our parents” (Focus group

interview, p. 46). Puvi added, “or when they say, we will report you to the principal, the teachers

get a bit afraid of that”. Divya and Puvi point out how it was not them but “they” that

participated in agentic activities of threatening. Youth seem to agree that teachers do become

afraid and therefore the threats have the potential to mitigate violence, yet they are quick to point

out that this agentic activity only mitigates violence for those that are privileged. Arini

explained:

They (the teachers) become afraid and say “oh so are you going to report me to

the principal is it? are you going to go to the principal huh? Teachers tell them

to say shut up and wait. Although teachers say that, they are afraid of the ones

who threaten. For example) when teachers ask questions, they ask small easy

questions from the ones who threaten them, but the difficult ones from us”

TH: What if you’ll did that?

Arini: Oh if we acted like this, we will get beaten up, that’s all (Laughs)

(Focus group interview, p.48.)

Arini points out that verbally threatening teachers only works to avoid further violence for a

privileged few. She also recognized that if youth in our study engaged in these practices they


would experience further abuse from their teachers. Teachers seem to take these threats seriously

nonetheless. Nesan explained:

There was a fight...among big boys the A/L students.... grade 13s the repeats.

The new batch was fighting and a sir... his name is Siva the science teacher

went and asked them why they are fighting.…when he asked then that...the big

match cricket captain an older guy named Vithush…he hit sir (line 575)

In this incident Vithush is an older boy in the school and the captain of a sports team. These two

factors, age and sports status, gave him considerable leverage in the school. In contrast, engaging

in overt resistance has very different outcomes for marginalized students. Arini described an

incident that took place when a teacher wrongfully accused a boy in her class4 of stealing.

He was writing an exam, that boy had a compass, but the teacher falsely

accused him and said that the compass he had was another boy’s instrument

box. Then madam came and scolded him and hit him very badly. Because

madam hit him, he took the compass and threw it at madam, and yelled at her.

He left the classroom, left everything and ran away, he took the compass box

and threw it at the teacher and ran home and never came back

TH: So he doesn't go to school anymore is it?-

Arini: No he doesn’t come to school anymore

TH: So what is he doing now?

Arini: Just roaming about the village (Focus group interview, p.31).

4 All youth in are study were from low academic tracks and from poorly regarded villages in the area due to

their caste status.


In this incident the boy was provoked by being falsely accused, and consequently beaten up and

scolded. Unfortunately, consequence was grave. He no longer attends school which alters his

future trajectory in profound ways.

Culture in Action: Reframing Notions of Agentic Practice

In this study describe the agentic activity of youth in the post-war province of Northern

Sri Lanka, we build upon what is already known about youth who are subject to violence, such

as their high propensity for dropping out, truancy and poor achievement (Haines, 2014; Seymore,

2014). Our primary purpose, and perhaps contribution to the ongoing discourse around violence,

is to provide an in-depth analysis of how marginalized youth enact agency through activity. In

particular, we analyze how youth participate in a context where violence significantly influences

their lives. In many ways, we challenge the persistent deficit positioning of youth who, in the

aftermath of war, face a social network of formal and informal caregivers in schools, NGOs,

families and elsewhere who question the students’ abilities to function as competent members of

society. The caregivers seem to assume that the hardships that consistently pervade the youths’

lives sap them of the ability to make reasoned and thoughtful choices about life after war.

Undoubtedly, students’ social positions in hierarchically structured intersections based on

caste, ethnicity, ability and poverty shape the specific ways that they navigate violence. Their

agentic activity is does not ensure their well-being. Nonetheless, in recognizing their agency we

hope to make visible ways in which their realties can be transformed. While recognizing that the

culturally mediated nature of human activities are important in understanding youth agentic

activities, we believe that over-determinist explanations of the role of cultural mediation can be

counterproductive (Roth & Lee, 2007).


Culture is a fluid construct; it changes, adapts, and transforms based on contingencies

within specific contexts without abandoning the sediments of prior practices, beliefs, and

transactions. In order to expand CHAT’s potential in illuminating how youth participate in

specific school contexts, we use contrapuntal analyses of post-colonial feminist theories

alongside CHAT. The culture of war and its aftermath may invokes assumptions that others

make about war-affected youth and the cultural and psychological tools they draw on to

participate in their contexts. Although this tendency to homogenize is understandable, based on

legacies of struggle and institutional minoritization (Kozleski, Thorius, & Smith, 2014), our data

suggest that assumptions about the psychological, social, and transactional of individuals and

groups are inadequate to predict activity solely based upon collective experiences of being

exposed to war (Mills, 1998; Mohanty, 2003).

This small study exposes how students exposed to similar experiences in the same place

achieve very different agentic outcomes due to privilege bestowed by family standing, gender,

and proficiencies within a community of practice. To seat illness and deviancy within specific

individuals without accounting for the needs and behaviors of teachers and other authority

figures who shape and constrain the rules and mediating activities within schools, is inadequate

at best and certainly dangerous for the students who are pathologized. Spivak (1993) warns that

essentialism renders groups as having a particular essence (uncritical essentialism) that continues

to marginalize their ways of being. Rather, she argues for strategic essentialism that takes into

consideration how individuals within groups take on certain roles based on their intersectional

positions in relation to their context. This understanding is pivotal to our construction of agentic

activities. We can see the intersectional nature of the participants’ identities and their mediation

of agentic activities in the data. For instance, youth in our study who were low-achievers from


poorly regarded villages (i.e., caste), did not engage in overt resistance and were acutely aware

that engaging in this agentic practice would be harmful to them, unlike for their privileged peers.

In explaining the false assumptions that permeate the construct of “third-world women”

as a homogenously victimized group, Mohanty (2003) implores us to recognize how such

constructions often render women in the third world as helpless and victimized, rejecting the

ingenious ways in which they negotiate their often problematic contexts. Post-colonial feminist

theories reject homogenizing a group of individuals based on unidimensional subjective and

structural markers (Sandoval, 1991; Spivak, 1993). We empirically examined students’ culturally

mediated agentic activities using CHAT, and found that youth actively engage in protecting

themselves and each other within abusive school settings.

Recognizing Intersectionality

CHAT is useful in its analytical conceptualization of subjects, as it instantiates the

distributive nature of human activities (Luria, 1978; Vygotsky, 1987). Meaning activities such as

agency are not strictly located within individuals, but in a collective consciousness of those

participating in collective activities toward a collective object (Cole & Wertsch, 1996;

Engeström, 2015). Another important aspect in understanding subjects and their activities, is to

interrogate who constitutes subjects. Although CHAT is analytically useful clearly identifying

who the subjects are within an activity system, it must draw on other theories to explore how the

intersectional identities of the subjects shape the nature of the activities and the related power

differentials based on whom they interact with (Langemeyer & Roth, 2006). For instance, we

show how marginalized youth in our study strategically engaged in the agentic activity of

silence, or what Reader (2007) would call a patiential activity in order to mitigate their exposure


to violence. Not only did youth engage in silence, they also framed this activity to position

themselves as more competent than their privileged peers who challenge their teachers.

Perhaps more importantly, we acknowledge youth’ agentic activities as mediated by how

they are positioned (based on their identities) in their sociocultural contexts. Here

intersectionality takes into account the perspectives of marginalized students and exposes how

particular standpoints shape agentic activities within the institution of school that formally and

informally sanctions violence (Crenshaw, 2001; Choo & Ferree, 2010). For instance, overt

resistance was not a prudent option for youth in our study. Arini explained that if she engaged in

threatening teachers she would be exposed to more violence than her more privileged peers who

took a similar stance. By recognizing his own particular marginalized position, Nesan befriended

students like Vithush from privileged groups enacting performing goodness as the most prudent

agentic activity. Undoubtedly, their social positions in hierarchically structured communities

leave youth that participated in this study in the multiple marginalizing intersections (Yuval

Davis, 2006), yet we argue that this reality does not take away their participation in agentic

activities

Strategic Intentionality of Agentic Activities

In CHAT, individuals and collectives are agents who work intentionally toward particular

goals, even though the confluence of affordances and constraints within the activity arena may

not be ideally constructed to meet particular objects (Cole, 1996; Cole & Engeström, 1993).

This reminds us that activity systems have intended objects or outcomes that are not necessarily

the intended outcomes of the people who operate within that activity arena. In the Northern

Province, students demonstrated that, while they have specific outcomes, it does not mean that

they are always conscious of their intentionality each time they perform an agentic activity.


CHAT is useful in recognizing youth capacity for intentional, object oriented agentic

activities. However, the subject-object relationship CHAT draws may be problematic when it

loses its dialectic edge (Roth, 2014). To mitigate this reductionist stance, we understand

activities as having multiple differing objects and theorize these different objects contrapuntally

using feminist post-colonial theories. In recognizing that objects are multiple and susceptible to

change, we attribute this change to heterogeneous nature of subjects and their attendant realities

in a particular historical moment (Rao, 2015; Roth & Lee, 2007). Mostly youth in this study

engaged in agentic practices to mitigate exposure to violence, such as when Puvi asked his

mother to change his school. Yet there were times when youth engaged in ways that exposed

them to more violence, as in the case where the young man threw the compass box at the

principal, which resulted in him leaving the school harmfully shaping his future life trajectory. In

this case it is difficult to assume that the outcome is stable, and geared only toward mitigating

violence. Here we see that activities have differing objects, outcomes and consequences. Their

objectives change as they actively adopt, adapt, manipulate and shift their agentry by assessing

opportunities and constraints given their circumstances. Objects or outcomes change in relation

to subjects and their ability to prioritize the kind of outcomes they desire (Wenger, 1998).

Limitations

This results of this study are suggestive of a new way to think about the development of

communities of practice, like schools, that have historical meaning but need to address the needs

of the learners that they serve. The tendency to assume pathology on the part of children and

youth who have experienced war and violence may over emphasize individual experience at the

expense of looking at how the community itself, teachers, administrators, students, and families

might work together to alleviate the historical intrusions of old cultural practices. CHAT


reminds us of that we have to understand how a community functions in order to re-form its

practices and objects. The mediating tools for doing this work must be designed to respond to

the local contexts. Interviews with 10 students are only a beginning to understanding the

context. More complete ethnographic information could potentially change how the schooling

practices and experiences are understood in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka. An

enthographic study over time that explores the same context from multiple perspectives would

give a fuller picture of the context.

Moving forward (So what?)

We conclude this paper by providing a few insights gained by describing and interpreting

youth agentic activities contrapuntally. Contrary to pervasive discourses we talked about in the

introduction, our study demonstrates how war-affected youth are not pathological subjects

unable to exercise agency in negotiating their violent circumstances. Rather, they are astute

strategic thinkers and actors, negotiating their culturally mediated violent school settings. How

we view youth in war-affected settings, particularly those who are marginalized will determine

how we interpret their ways of being. When agency is viewed through pathological lenses, it

leaves youth agency unrecognized, or worse obscured or misinterpreted as troubled and anti-

social. These views systematically devalue war-affected youth and their capacity to transform

their lived realties. Instead if youth are viewed as agents it allows youth to lead the agenda in

transforming their violent realities.

Viewing youth as agents also creates spaced to transform the ways in which care-givers

interact with youth affected by war. Care-givers such as teachers, psycho-social workers and

clinicians often approach violent-school settings from an interventionist stance. These stances

often seek to fix, correct or remedy by locating deficits within individuals and their communities


(Somasundaram, 2014). Furthermore, this interventionist stance is often predicated on

disciplinary and professional expertise of the care-giver, expertise that is often based on

universal principals of remedy and cure. While this expertise is valuable, it often holds

asymmetrical power in determining the direction and process of transformation (Skrtic, 2013).

This type of care-giver expertise rarely recognizes youths’ expertise or insider knowledge that is

equally, or perhaps more valuable in transforming violent realties. When viewed this way, the

role of care-givers must be evaluated critically. We recommend that while outside experts can

facilitate transformational processes, youth who live these realities should determine and lead the

process and direction of transforming their school settings (Langemeyer & Roth, 2006). In fact,

we believe that outside evaluative stances of how change should occur constricts ways in which

to support youth who are capable of transforming their violent realities (Roth, 2014; Vygotsky,

1987werne). We believe that our work as educators is to support transformative changes from

within socio-cultural historical specificities, led by youth as the re-mediate their activity systems

(Fine & Wise, 2003; Gutiérrez, 2016).


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