Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood

New perspectives in Childhood Studies

Florian Esser, Meike S. Baader, Tanja Betz, Beatrice Hungerland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317524403
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

By regarding children as actors and conducting empirical research on children's agency, Childhood Studies have gained significant influence on a wide range of different academic disciplines. This has made agency one of the key concepts of Childhood Studies, with articles on the subject featured in handbooks and encyclopaedias.

Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood

is the first collection devoted to the central concept of agency in Childhood Studies. With contributions from experts in the field, the chapters cover theoretical, practical, historical, transnational and institutional dimensions of agency, rekindling discussion and introducing fundamental and contemporary sociological perspectives to the field of research. Particular attention is paid to connecting agency in the social sciences with Childhood Studies, considering both the theoretical foundations and the practice of research into agency. Empirical case studies are also explored, which focus upon child protection, schools and childcare at a variety of institutions worldwide.

This book is an essential reference for students and scholars of Childhood Studies, and is also relevant to Sociology, Social Work, Education, Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) and Geography.

Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Section I

Theoretical perspectives

Chapter 1

Re-aligning children’s agency and re-socialising children in Childhood Studies

David Oswell

In Childhood Studies, in contrast to strands of thinking that have foregrounded a political emphasis on “child-centredness” (e.g. reference to standpoint theory [Alanen, 1994]) and a theoretical emphasis on the reflexive agency of children in the context of social structure (James and Prout, 1990; James et al., 1998), there has been a line of thinking that has stressed the distributed, ontologically heterogeneous, and dependent capacities of children (Lee, 2001; Oswell, 2013; Prout, 2005). In the first line of thinking, children’s agency is often discussed in the context of a sociological problematic concerning agency and structure, often resting on the theoretical premises of Anthony Giddens’ social theory; in the second, agency is often understood as distributed across “actor-networks” or “assemblages” in the context of “post-social” theories derived from Bruno Latour or Gilles Deleuze. In much of the literature in the field, the distinctions between these two lines of thinking are often not made evident. However, where the differences are made evident, discussion often centres on the distinction between human-centred and post-humanist epistemologies of children’s agency. This chapter will frame these two lines of thinking about children and childhood in the context of broader shifts in sociological understanding concerning the ontology of agency, the questioning of the scalar attributions of structure (macro) and agency (micro), and a methodological shift of focus from ethnography and discourse analysis (James and Prout, 1990) to what is often seen as a more “object-centred” focus on devices, descriptions, liveness and invention (Marres, 2012; Back and Puwar, 2012; Lury and Wakeford, 2013). In doing so, the intention is to refocus discussion on the question of children as a complex social collectivity and to offer a line of thinking fit for understanding the place of children within an ontologically complex, interconnected, multi-mediated social world.

If there was ever a singular form of children’s agency, it is clear now that agency as a topic of social theory and empirical investigation is plural. Across the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies, social psychology, media, cultural studies and others that might be seen to comprise Childhood Studies, there are different and differently accented models of accounting for the activeness and interactions of children. Sometimes “agency” is foregrounded as a particular conceptual idea, sometimes it is not. I make no attempt to capture this diversity. Rather, in this chapter I want to consider two major strands of thinking within Childhood Studies that are often merged and muddied, yet provide two very distinct ways of considering the agency of children. These two strands can be broadly considered in terms of, on the one hand, a notion of agency that adopts a child-centred epistemological and political standpoint (Alanen, 1994) aligned with a theory of the child as a reflexive self in the context of social structure that is made and remade (James & Prout, 1990; James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998) and, on the other, an understanding of the distributed, ontologically heterogeneous and dependent capacities of children (Lee, 2001; Oswell, 2013; Prout, 2005). In the first line of thinking, children’s agency is often discussed in the context of a sociological problematic concerning agency and structure, often resting on the theoretical premises of Anthony Giddens’ social theory (see also Raithelhuber in this volume); in the second, agency is often understood as distributed across “actor-networks” or across “assemblages” in the context of “post social” theories derived from Bruno Latour or Gilles Deleuze (see also Esser in this volume). This chapter will frame these two lines of thinking about children and childhood in the context of broader shifts in sociological understanding concerning the political ontology of agency, the questioning of the scalar attributions of structure (macro) and agency (micro), and a methodological shift of focus from ethnography and discourse analysis (see James & Prout, 1990) to what is often seen as a more “object-centred” focus on devices, descriptions, liveness and invention (see Marres, 2012; Back & Puwar, 2012; Lury & Wakeford, 2013). In doing so, the intention is to refocus discussion on the question of children as a complex social collectivity and to offer a line of thinking fit for understanding the place of children within an ontologically complex, interconnected, multi-mediated social world.

One “new paradigm”, two problematics

At a moment when Childhood Studies was forming as a field of study – at least, that is, as a field of study as we currently know it, although the empirically informed understandings of children and childhood were rich and textured – two clear but related problematics are visible. The first problematic was articulated in Allison James and Allan Prout’s opening chapters in the edited collection on Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, which was originally published in 1990. In many ways this was a founding statement for the “new paradigm” of Childhood Studies. The main contours of this intervention will be familiar to many: childhood is a social construction; childhood is a variable of social analysis and is always articulated with other social variables, such as class, gender, sexuality, disability, “race” and ethnicity; children should be studied in their own right, not as dependent on a framing relationship with and by adults; children are active in the construction of their social lives; ethnography is a privileged method for the social investigation of children; and childhood is a social phenomenon that is both constructed and reconstructed, such that children are actively engaged in the double hermeneutic of this construction and reconstruction (Prout & James, 1990, pp. 8−9). The emphasis is on social construction, on the particularity of that social construction inasmuch as any childhood is formed through particular articulations with other social variables and contexts, and on children as reflexively active and having capacity in the construction and reconstruction of their social lives. As such, it provides (a) a theoretical understanding of the ontology of the child, which it offers (in one form at least) through Giddens’ structuration theory; (b) a clear direction regarding the politics of children, inasmuch as children’s agency is seen to be an articulation from the perspective and position of their experience, through their voice, and in the context of a structural inequality (and any politics of Childhood Studies was seen to need to align itself with and support that positionality); and (c) a broad-reaching methodological orientation, insofar as the construction of children and childhood is understood through interpretative, qualitative and ethnographic sociology and anthropology. The writings associated with this problematic are paradigmatic and programmatic with regard to the theoretical, the political and the methodological.

Giddens’ social theory provided Childhood Studies with a means for analysing the double (re)construction of childhood, such that children were themselves seen to be reflexive and agentic subjects, who could both interpret social settings and act in relation to those settings with a view to the achievement of their intentions: “Every act which contributes to the reproduction of a structure is also an act of production, and as such may initiate change by altering the structure at the same time as it reproduces it” (Giddens, 1979, p. 69, quoted in Prout & James, 1990, p. 28). Prout and James provide a Giddensian inflection to what Jens Qvortrup earlier referred to in terms of the need to emphasise children as social beings, rather than social becomings (Qvortrup, 1985; see also Jenks, 1996). The focus on this double hermeneutic draws attention to the process of construction as a process instantiated in the present. A critique of a model of childhood predicated on the notions of “growth”, “development” and “socialisation” (Alanen, 1988; Jenks, 1982) was argued on the basis that children’s lives actually have a “degree of autonomy” from any conditions of linearity (Alanen, 1988, p. 60). The determination of social structure, but also the power of agency to change that structure, are instantiated in the present time. A theory of the beingness of children, of their ontology, is understood as a form of political ontology, inasmuch as a statement about what children are is also a statement about their capacity to change the organisation of the social world in which they live. This strong ontological claim is articulated with a strong methodological claim regarding not only how we might, but how we should investigate the beingness of children: namely, the agentic presentness of children is understood in terms of children’s lived experience, which can be empirically investigated through ethnographic and qualitative methods (Alanen, 1988, p. 60).

Moreover, even when empirical investigations favour an understanding of the constitution of competence in relations of social interaction (in contrast to the residual individualism of Giddens’ model), there is still an emphasis on these interactions in conditions of co-presence (Hutchby & Moran-Ellis, 1998). Even in research that draws on different theoretical resources to consider the agentic subjectivity of children in their everyday lives, such as in Berry Mayall’s (2002) or Leena Alanen’s (2000) research, there is still an engagement with the problematic of the self-presence of children as a social group. A standpoint epistemology that draws from Sandra Harding and Dorothy Smith frames the relationality of generational difference, child (and childhood) and adult (and adulthood), within a singular perspective that is both political and ontological. Moreover, even when there is a concern to factor the history of children’s lives, such history is often considered only inasmuch as “the past influences the present” (Mayall, 2002, p. 39) and, in doing so, the self-present subjectivity of children is left unquestioned.

Amidst the emergence of this “new paradigm” are research and writings that methodologically sit happily with it, but in fact come from a very different and antithetical theoretical heritage, one that would question the political alignment of experience, authenticity and voice. This second problematic appears in its more theoretical guise not only in Prout’s single-authored book, The Future of Childhood (2005), but also in different forms in the work of Nicholas Lee (2001), André Turmel (2008), and Claudia Castañeda (2002). In its more theoretical guise, it is influenced by Foucauldian ideas of power and knowledge, actor-network theory’s approach to materiality and semiosis, Deleuzian ideas of becoming and connection, and post-structuralist understandings of subjectivity. But inasmuch as this problematic never discloses itself fully as a new paradigm, at least in any programmatic form, it is better to refer to this as an “infra-paradigm”, one that ghosts and has a phantasmatic presence. That this infra-paradigm could sit so happily with, and not thoroughly problematise, the politics of voice, authenticity and experience perhaps suggests either that the theoretical labour of post-Foucauldian and actor-network analysis was not taken seriously or that the politics of voice, authenticity and experience was itself gestural and not aligned with a systematically formed theoretical architecture. Suffice it to say that methodologically there was a confluence with the “new paradigm” because much of the second problematic was empirical in focus, in the first instance not explicitly theoretical, and largely emerged from an interest with science, technology, medicine and the body (see Mayall, 2013). To a large extent, this infra-paradigm is never foregrounded as antithetical to the “new paradigm”, and writers, such as and most notably Alan Prout, are seen to sit in both paradigms, not least because the infra-paradigm is never presented as a paradigm. Prout’s research into children in medical settings draws on theoretical ideas from post-Foucauldian and actor-network theory, but is also positioned alongside the very differently theoretically positioned research of Pia Christensen (1998, 2000). We might typify this infra-paradigm less through its theoretical or political formation than through its methodological orientation. There is a methodological emphasis on the axiom of “no a priori” inasmuch as the patterns of social association, which are often presumed to be social structure, cannot be presumed before empirical investigation. The axiom of “no a priori” means that no assumptions can be made beforehand either but also about who or what acts as an actor (human or non-human). Thus Prout, sympathetic to Alanen’s notion of “generational ordering” or “generationing” as a performative, is insistent that this is a process, not a finished product; it is open-ended and emergent, not closed, and it is heterogeneous with regard to its materiality (Prout, 2005, p. 78). Turmel, in his history of the devices and technologies through which children have been measured, assessed and judged in the context of “normal development”, also explicitly frames his historical sociology in a way that downplays the theoretical as a point of differentiation from other sociologies of childhood. He frames the central sociological question as follows: “What is childhood from a sociological standpoint if it is no longer either a residue of social theory or a peripheral phenomenon of adult society?” (Turmel, 2008, p. 306). The point, then, is not to mark out an actor-network approach to children and childhood from a Giddensian approach in terms of the different and competing theories, but rather to contest a theoretical approach per se. This move (which is resonant with an ethnomethodological orientation) is central to the longstanding antipathy between science and technology studies and the history and philosophy of science (see Lynch, 1997). But it is more broadly a form of empirical (rather than empiricist) sociology that, for example, allows Turmel to focus on the particular “inscription devices” through which children, as a collectivity, become visible as a social phenomenon. Turmel explicitly draws on actor-network methodologies and more broadly on science and technology studies to consider this (e.g. Latour & Woolgar, 1986). He is not interested in the “idea of childhood” as “the Hegelian pure idea − produced by philosophers” (Turmel, 2008, p. 3).

Inasmuch as the infra-paradigm does not emphasise any theoretical antagonism toward the “new paradigm” (due to its deflation of “the philosophical” within the horizon of empirical devices, statements, technologies and socio-historical settings), nor any political antagonism (due to its understanding of children and childhood not as a perspective to be championed but as a field of empirical enquiry), it is able often to sit happily side-by-side and below them. There has been no “bust-up” along the fault lines of humanism against anti-humanism, or theoretical (and political) posturing with regard to the veridicality of philosophical positions. Given the prevalence of such battles across the social and cultural sciences over the last 25 years, it is certainly strange that Childhood Studies has not similarly been poisoned. That is to its good, but the question now is whether such a confluence can be maintained in the sociological conditions of the contemporary or whether the cracks will begin to show. I consider this question in the context of three sociological trends, or at least major questions, regarding ontology, scale and methodology.

From strong to weak ontology

As argued above, against the philosophical mode of the time, Childhood Studies founded itself very deliberately on a “metaphysics of presence” (see Derrida, 1982). The alignment of the centred child subject (as both agentic and reflexive) with experience and authenticity of experience, and with clarity of voice (as organised political speech), rests on a notion that the agency of the child and children centres on their being and acting in the present. James and Prout (1990), in the conclusion to their edited collection, are critical, as are many other writers in the field, of constructions of children and childhood in terms of a nostalgic past, a vision of the future society, and as being locked outside of time. The past, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Reconceptualising agency and childhood: an introduction
• SECTION I Theoretical perspectives
• SECTION II Children as actors in research
• SECTION III Agency in historical perspective
• SECTION IV Transnational and majority world perspectives of agency
• SECTION V Agency in institutions of childhood
• Conclusion: potentials of a reconceptualised concept of agency
• Index