This book makes a distinctive contribution to the growing discussion of autonomy. As the ability to determine one’s life in both thought and action, autonomy is foundational among our many and varied values. Other philosophical treatments tend to emphasize the significance of autonomy for moral theory or institutional arrangements such as legal, political, or economic power structures. Kupfer, however, focuses on the context of social relations and interactions in which autonomous living occurs. He handles autonomy and social interaction reciprocally, so that the significance of each for the other is drawn out. In addition, key themes are threaded throughout, such as the nature of dependency, self-concept and self-knowledge, and authority.

This book examines how autonomy in language learning is fostered and constrained in social settings through interaction with others and various contextual features. With theoretical grounding, the authors discuss the implications for practice in classrooms, distance education, self-access centres, as well as virtual and social learning spaces.

Negotiating Personal Autonomy offers a detailed ethnographic examination of personal autonomy and social life in East Greenland. Examining verbal and non-verbal communication in interpersonal encounters, Elixhauser argues that social life in the region is characterized by relationships based upon a particular care to respect other people’s personal autonomy. Exploring this high valuation of personal autonomy, she asserts that a person in East Greenland is a highly permeable entity that is neither bounded by the body nor even necessarily human. In so doing, she also puts forward a new approach to the anthropological study of communication. An important addition to the corpus of ethnographic literature about the people of East Greenland, Elixhauser‘s work will be of interest to scholars of the Arctic and the North, Greenland, social and cultural anthropology, and human geography. Her conclusion that, in East Greenland, the ‘inner’ self cannot be separated from the ‘public’ persona will also be of interest to scholars working on the self across the humanities and social sciences.

People are socially situated amid complex relations with other people and are bound by interpersonal frameworks having significant influence upon their lives. These facts have implications for their autonomy. Challenging many of the currently accepted conceptions of autonomy and of how autonomy is valued, Oshana develops a 'social-relational' account of autonomy, or self-governance, as a condition of persons that is largely constituted by a person’s relations with other people and by the absence of certain social relations. She denies that command over one's motives and the freedom to realize one's will are sufficient to secure the kind of command over one's life that autonomy requires, and argues against psychological, procedural, and content neutral accounts of autonomy. Oshana embraces the idea that her account is 'perfectionist' in a sense, and argues that ultimately our commitment to autonomy is defeasible, but she maintains that a social-relational account best captures what we value about autonomy and best serves the various ends for which the concept of autonomy is employed.

This book presents current research on self-regulation and autonomy, which have emerged as key predictors of health and well-being in several areas of psychology.

It is both an ideal and an assumption of traditional conceptions of justice for liberal democracies that citizens are autonomous, self-governing persons. Yet standard accounts of the self and of self-government at work in such theories are hotly disputed and often roundly criticized in most of their guises. John Christman offers a sustained critical analysis of both the idea of the 'self' and of autonomy as these ideas function in political theory, offering interpretations of these ideas which avoid such disputes and withstand such criticisms. Christman's model of individual autonomy takes into account the socially constructed nature of persons and their complex cultural and social identities, and he shows how this model can provide a foundation for principles of justice for complex democracies marked by radical difference among citizens. His book will interest a wide range of readers in philosophy, politics, and the social sciences.

"Building on a feminist conception of individual autonomy, explores the obligation of the state to foster autonomy in its citizens, particularly the most vulnerable, through social service delivery. Draws on both successful and less successful examples of service delivery to generate a theoretical account of the autonomy-fostering state"--Provided by publisher.