This study explores how religious women become legitimate actors in the public sphere and analyzes their agency—its meanings, capacities, and transformative aims. It presents a novel case study of Israeli Modern-Orthodox Agunah activists who engage in highly politicized collective feminist resistance as religious actors working for religious ends. Embedded in and activated by Orthodoxy, they advocate women’s rights to divorce, voicing a moral critique of tradition and its agents precisely because they are devoutly devoted to them. Such political agency is (...) innovatively conceptualized as “devoted resistance”: critique within relationship, enabled by cultural schema, and comprising both interpretive skills and “relational-autonomy” capacities. This study contends that understanding agency within religious grammars reveals its underlying logics, highlighting how structures shape the meanings and realization of women’s varied “agentive capacities.” It challenges current dichotomies like feminism/religion, resistance/submission, and autonomy/dependence. Overall, the author argues for a nuanced, culturally specific, capacity-based, relational approach to analyzing religious women’s agency. (shrink)

In the last decade, Family Group Conferences have increasingly been used to help people and their networks deal with their problems. The FGC fits well with the call for equal rights and self-management coming from clients and client movements, as well as the economy-driven pressure towards more informal and less professional care coming from governments. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the underlying theory to explain how the FGC works. In this article, we aim to provide such a (...) theoretical basis by examining how the concept of empowerment can be linked with the basic assumptions underlying the FGC. Can making a plan of their own indeed help to empower people and if so, how does the process of empowerment proceed? Empowerment is often mentioned as a goal of the FGC, but authors are not unanimous when it comes to the operationalisation of empowerment, especially on the relational level of the person in his or her social context. In the article, we use the concepts of relational autonomy and resilience to conceptualize empowerment on the relational and individual level. (shrink)