As the previous chapter has already argued, people do have agency and they can and do make choices – for better or indeed for worse. How far do people make such choices freely, however, rather than having their ‘choices’ effectively determined by structural constraints? And how might individuals’ rights to choose need to take account of wider social interests and needs? These have constituted questions for philosophers over past centuries, as well as providing questions for social scientists to debate in more contemporary contexts.

Having summarised these wider debates, this chapter moves on to focus on the implications. How might these debates apply to the particular experiences and choices available – or not available – to migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers more specifically? How might they relate to the experiences of those migrating in response to market forces, moving in search of livelihoods elsewhere? And what might these debates imply for policy-making processes within structures of governance?

The chapter concludes by focusing on some of the ways in which people and communities can be supported, to enable them to exercise their agency to the maximum effect. Community education can contribute here, facilitating learning, including learning from people's experiences of collective engagement. As the previous chapter has already pointed out, people can and do learn from each other. And this learning can be enhanced by those with particular areas of expertise, including those with expertise in using community arts as tools to facilitate collective learning, the arts being particularly effective when it comes to addressing people's emotions (Boal, 1979, 1995; Clover and Sandford, 2013; Rooke, 2013; Tiller, 2013).

Free will or determinism?

As the Cambridge dictionary of philosophy explains, ‘For those who contrast “free” with “determined”, a central question is whether humans are free in what they do or determined by external events beyond their control’ (Kapitan, 1995, p 280). Philosophers continue to debate this question, together with its potential implications. Might there be limits to the desirability of unbridled freedom, even if this were actually possible in practice?

As John Gray's enquiry into human freedom points out, there are ethical dilemmas to be addressed when humans attempt to master total control (Gray, 2015). Such attempts at mastery can lead to violence, in Gray's view, including blood-letting against minorities – ‘Jews, gay people, immigrants and others who may seem different’ (Gray, 2015, p 81).