The importance of engaging student agency is often mentioned as a key feature of feedback practices. Commonly, the concept of agency is used to refer to students’ active role in the process of offering, receiving and acting upon feedback information. However, the notion of what student agency means is often taken-for-granted and rarely elaborated. Furthermore, earlier literature has mainly focussed on individualised and psychological conceptualisations of the term. What could feedback design learn from the idea of ‘agency’ – that dates back to writings of authors such as Aristotle and Kant? In this presentation we briefly introduce three conceptualisations for ‘student agency’ (sociomaterial, authorial and discursive) as proposed in earlier sociological and philosophical literature to understand the sociocultural aspects of feedback processes and students’ feedback literacy. Most importantly, we introduce what these three theoretical frameworks can offer us to further understand and develop feedback design in higher education. For instance, we highlight the importance to consider how agency is shared between humans and non-humans such as computers (sociomaterial agency), how feedback could be framed as a way of community-building (authorial agency), and how effective feedback practices could aim at disrupting student positioning as ‘performers’ rather than as lifelong learners (discursive agency). Overall, these three conceptualisations highlight the importance of structural changes for the contexts of feedback as a part of feedback interventions aiming to promote ‘student agency’.