Commentary: How to have agency in a pandemic

The eight articles in this Research Topic touch upon the many disruptions to people's lives caused the COVID-19 pandemic, from the ways mandated lockdowns constrained their mobility and forced them to formulate new ways of interacting with friends and loved ones, to the new practices that they had to incorporate into their daily lives such as mask wearing and contract reporting, to the altered relations of power and (dis)trust that developed between citizens and their governments. They talk about how very space they inhabited changed around them-cities becoming silent, the spaces in which they operated shrinking, and the space between bodies suddenly becoming something to be measured and monitored. They also discuss they ways time became distorted as the routines that people had previously used to order their movements through life were suddenly interrupted, and their ability to plan for the future was curtailed.All of these social and material disruptions, as these articles illustrate, also involved disruptions in discourse: new terminology had to be learned, new conversational routines had to be mastered, new regulations had to be communicated and complied with, and new forms of storytelling had to be called upon to help people explain to themselves and to one another what they were going through. Closely related to these discursive disruptions, however, were more fundamental disruptions to agency. On the one hand, the new discursive regimes that developed around the pandemic, with their terminology and regulations and routines, played a major part in robbing people of their sense of agency. On the other hand, as their ability to control what was happening in their environments seemed to dwindle with each new media report and each new government policy-the words they used, the conversations they had, the ways they responded to official discourses, and the stories they told become even more central in helping them to maintain some sense of autonomy and authority over their affairs.The pandemic did not just transform the ways in which people affected and were affected by other people and things around them, but raised more fundamental questions about the very nature of action, autonomy and accountability, as well as questions about the role of discourse in making sense of and navigating a world of shifting power relations and shrinking possibilities. In this brief commentary I would like to explore the different perspectives on the relationship between discourse and agency reflected in these eight articles and what they can teach us as individuals and as societies about how to have (and not to have) agency during a pandemic. Some of these articles address issues of agency explicitly. Robinson and her colleagues (2023), for example, examine how agency the loss of agency was lexically and grammatically encoded in the way people talked about regulation; Wilding and her colleagues (2023) show how older adults in isolation negotiated their loss of agency through their use of metaphors, and Cowie and her colleagues (2023) describe the ways people coped with the disrupted relationship between structure and agency that came from forced immobility through the production of chronotopic discourse. In others, attention to the issue of agency is more implicit, though no less central, Tragel and Pikksaar (2023), for instance, focusing on how relationships of authority and solidarity were constructed in regulatory discourses about mask wearing, Bafor and her colleagues (2023) addressing mediatized debates about personal freedom and privacy associated with Covid-19 telephone contact tracing, Kania (2023) discussing how practices of naming COVID-19 in media discourse revealed underlying ideological projects to assign responsibility for the pandemic to racialised others, Giorgis and her colleagues (2023) documenting the ways metaphors of warfare used by the governments functioned both as calls to action and constraints on agency in different countries, and Bagna and Bellinzona (2023) exploring how municipal spaces became arenas in which negotiations among regulatory and transgressive discourses played out. In all of these treatments of the pandemic, discourse is presented as the primary means through which agency was claimed and constrained, power was exercised and resisted, and responsibility was assigned and denied. At the same time, across these different treatments of the pandemic, agency is not always conceptualised in exactly the same way. Sometimes the political dimensions of power and resistance are emphasised, sometimes psychological aspects of selfefficacy are the focus, and sometimes the ways agency emerged as an interactional accomplishment are highlighted.Agency, of course, is itself a highly contested concept within the social sciences, with scholars debating whether it is necessarily 'human, individual, collective, intentional, or conscious' (Ahern, 2001:130), about the that and it such as material to and other forms of or discursive regimes of and the to which it with other such as and I with not of the dimensions of agency in these is as the of that have some of control over their in the world other (and sometimes their and are the of in of their responsibility for a is about this is that it on agency as an to it to such as freedom and as a social individuals and are affected by other other and as the for the production of or what is for or of it is from such that to how to are and in the is also from these that to or a also a for the relationship between and agency. is related to agency in it is a for the of agency. by into the is also in the way use to the and relationships between people and in the way things and of course, as is also one of the have to things others to through and to to action through to through of as is role in agency. about and how agency can be assigned to different in the world is encoded in different with different for agency. is also the means by which and others by which and all of the other associated with however, as be a to these relationships between and agency as They in of into on and the action is through a that is in a of the in this from the way the of agency on people with the means to social relationships and or to the ways the of agency in people's talk can sometimes as a means of agency or to us Cowie on however, is not to the negotiations of agency by the of these of more with discourse in which agency is not just something that is encoded in and not just a of an to but is an interactional accomplishment that is as and in social practices and on relationships of which in and through discourse is by more of agency as to is this in things like government of and life that these are the same time, is also a way to the of these through more and new perspectives in which agency is not through the of and but through of and perspectives us to agency as among and as and in action and They also us to and such as and and with agency more as a of the for bodies to and be affected by one another what I on all of these perspectives on agency to explore what these have to teach us about to have agency in a In the I what these us about how agency is encoded and in and discourse for example, the and metaphors use to talk about and In the that I explore how these formulate the relationship between structure and agency though their of such as resistance and In the I the ways these more into the more and dimensions of agency. 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or for that have In other naming is always to some a political is the that Kania in her of the used to to COVID-19 and the that it in is is of the that the associated with that are by the they are to or though the way they or assign agency such as or agency to the and such as or that responsibility with a of more is the way practices of naming can themselves become of the use of as ways to political or of Kania for that were in as well as in is use of the and on called on agency is sometimes and is not in practices of naming but in discourse about naming the part of the and In this can be in the way some naming practices to others as a way of making them others naming practices as a way to these practices of or course, words not in is the way words are into relationships with other words the ways they are in of and discourses, that them such for and agency. is Robinson and her colleagues (2023) of to be such a way to the relationship between and agency in the of the pandemic. of a of 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