Agency and Childhood

by

Florian Eßer, Lisa Kremer

• LAST MODIFIED: 23 September 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791231-0290

Introduction

Agency is unquestionably one of the key concepts of childhood studies. When these studies first arose in the 1980s and 1990s, the idea of regarding children as agents and valuing their contribution to social life was one of the main drivers of the new research field. The notion of children’s agency has proven extremely fruitful for empirical research and has given rise to a great number of publications on children’s active involvement in institutions of childhood and peer cultures since the 1990s. However, criticism has also been ongoing of the theoretical foundations on which the prevailing understanding of agency in childhood studies is based. In particular, objections have grown with regard to a certain tendency to regard agency as an individual, pre-social property of children and thus to neglect children’s dependence upon social structures and their embeddedness in social relations in favor of conceiving them as independent social actors. To overcome these theoretical shortcomings, scholars in the field of childhood studies have attempted to draw on discussions in social theory more generally. Among other approaches, relational approaches to the social seem to offer particular promise for addressing questions of agency in a way that goes beyond the common assumption of a dichotomy between structure and agency. In the course of these theoretical debates, concepts of agentic actorhood have been criticized for being Western-centered. Extending the analysis of agency beyond the so-called Western world has served to modify and further develop theoretical concepts. More recent studies also refer to the materiality of children’s agency by analyzing how material objects and bodies are involved in the production of agency. So when we can identify a “second wave” of childhood studies today, which take contemporary developments in social sciences into account, agency—as in the early days of childhood studies—again plays a crucial role as a key concept. Given the huge amount of theoretical and empirical literature that exists within the field of childhood studies and children’s geographies, this article can cite only selected contributions.

General Overview of Agency and Childhood

A number of survey articles, monographs, and edited volumes give a general overview of the field and can also serve as an introduction. Oswell 2013 gives a detailed and critical book-length overview of the state of research in 2013, while Holloway, et al. 2019 focus, in an extensive review article, on current developments in childhood studies and children’s geographies. Esser, et al. 2016 is a comprehensive edited volume with a total of eighteen contributions. An editorial in the special issue of Global Studies of Childhood, Sutterlüty and Tisdall 2019 discusses agency in relation to autonomy and self-determination as competing key concepts in childhood studies.

• Esser, Florian, Meike S. Baader, Tanja Betz, and Beatrice Hungerland, eds. Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood: New Perspectives in Childhood Studies. London: Routledge, 2016.

  This edited volume comprises a systematic collection of current contributions by relevant authors on agency and childhood from theoretical, transnational, and historical perspectives, as well as on childhood research and institutions.

• Holloway, Sarah L., Louise Holt, and Sarah Mills. “Questions of Agency: Capacity, Subjectivity, Spatiality and Temporality.” Progress in Human Geography 43.3 (2019): 458–477.

  DOI: 10.1177/0309132518757654

  Taking children’s geographies as their starting point, the authors provide an overview of the current state of research in this contribution, which, in particular, unpacks the most recent developments tending toward a relational concept of agency.

• Oswell, David. The Agency of Children: From Family to Global Human Rights. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

  Oswell’s foundational monograph provides a systematic review of the current state of research on agency in childhood studies and elaborates an ambitious theoretical program that has been repeatedly drawn upon.

• Sutterlüty, Ferdinand, and E Kay M. Tisdall. “Agency, Autonomy and Self-Determination: Questioning Key Concepts of Childhood Studies.” Global Studies of Childhood 9.3 (2019): 183–187.

  DOI: 10.1177/2043610619860992

  This article addresses the concept of agency in childhood research in conjunction with the equally common concepts of autonomy and self-determination and gives the concept greater precision in light of them.