Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Blaming For Columbine: Conceptions Of Agency In The Contemporary United States, Claudia Strauss

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Modern Westerners are supposed to embrace a notion of unfettered personal agency. An analysis of public commentary (interviews, editorials, and online message boards) in the United States about the Columbine school shootings shows that the voluntarist cultural model of persons as autonomous agents, while certainly very important, is just one of a number of cultural models Americans use to explain human action and has particular political and interpersonal uses. We might think that conceptions as basic as those of personhood and agency would be hegemonic: both singular and internalized as unexamined, taken for‐granted assumptions. In some contexts, voluntarist ideas about …