Editorial

Bringing together perspectives from philosophy, artificial intelligence, botany, astronomy, Chinese medicine and anthropology, this special issue explores how agency—and its absence—is conceptualized across different fields of inquiry. Rather than imposing a fixed definition of agency, the contributions examine situations in which mechanisms, environments, lifeforms, technologies and other-than-human entities appear to act, interact or resist straightforward distinctions between action and non-action. Particular attention is given to temporality: speed, change, persistence and scale shape how agency is perceived, attributed and questioned across scientific, philosophical and cultural contexts. The contributions also foreground forms of non-agency, including passivity, silence, responsiveness and care, challenging human-centred distinctions between action and non-action. Against the background of contemporary developments in science and technology, the issue asks whether encounters with other-than-human forms of activity may revive or transform sensibilities conventionally associated with animism. The special issue addresses artificial intelligence as both an object of inquiry and a participant, e.g. in academic knowledge production, including an experimental AI-assisted peer-review process. Taken together, the contributions approach agency not as a settled category but as an open comparative problem through which changing relations among humans, technologies, lifeforms and environments can be examined across times, cultures and disciplines.