The Agency Research Group emerged from the convergence of work by staff and researchers in and around the subject of architectural practice and education that was critical of normative values and processes, wanting to propose alternatives and to explore how architectural practice and education might evolve. The name Agency, potentially provocative, was chosen to give an immediate sense of the research in the group being active, engaged, and outward looking. It implies change, with a hint of subversive irony. Agency’s strap line ‘Transformative Research into Architectural Practice and Education’, expands this notion of being active and `transformative´ and suggests a research activity that both creates and responds to shifting conditions.
‘Instead of remaining passively (and safely) contained within our academic environments, the group members see themselves as ‘agents’ acting both within and between the fields of research, practice, education, and civic life’

Doina Petrescu, Prue Chiles and ‘The Agency’. Agency: alternative practices
and alternative worlds. Architectural Research Quarterly, 13, pp.109-111.

The majority of essays in this issue of field: Agency and the Praxis of Activism were initially presented at the AGENCY conference, held in Sheffield in November 2008. This event was conceived and produced
by the agency a then recently formed research center at the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield.

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