September 4th, 2025-- The University of Colorado-Denver's Philosophy Department has invited Dr. Emily Lee from California State University, Fullerton to present to our community. She will be discussing her research in a presentation titled, "Unsuccessful Agency And the Community Recognizing Laughter of Cunning Tricksters" in Plaza Building, Suite M108 in the Haber Library.
Abstract:
Folktales of trickster figures most often encourage laughter, admiration and perhaps a secret desire to emulate the tactics of these tricksters. Their actions defy complete understanding, but gesture toward questioning dominant values and imagining a different moral lifeworld.
Recognizing the role of narratives for promoting agency, this paper examines the folktales of animal figures such as the Latin American trickster coyote, Chinese, Tripmaster Monkey, or African spider, Annanse, to consider agency under oppression. Sarah Hoagland points out that unless acts of resistance successfully overthrow and reverse the positions of the oppressor and the oppressed, acts of resistance go unnoticed. Under such circumstances, Hoagland ponders acts of sabotage as means through which women self-affirm their existence, in defiance of the confines of expected roles and actions. Highlighting the social dimension of agency, Alyssa Bierria argues for understanding agency beyond the framework of success and failure, but under a heterogenous framework, to consider agency that “temporarily destabilizes, circumnavigates, or manipulates those conditions in order to reach specific ends.
This paper argues that far from the question of whether the oppressed can exercise agency, folktales about cunning tricksters suggest the oppressed have always been exercising agency—in stealth, with humor, and in affirmation of one’s existence.
Refreshments and conversation will follow the event.