Rematerialising Children's Agency

Everyday Practices in a Post-Socialist Estate

Blazek, Matej

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781447334620
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études des enfants en sociologie

This book is a detailed study of children's everyday practices in a small, deprived neighbourhood of post-socialist Bratislava, called Kop?any. It provides a novel empirical insight on what it is like to be growing up after 25 years of post-socialist transformations and questions the formation of children's agency and the multitude of resources it comes from. What happens if we accept children's practices as cornerstones of communities? What is uncovered if we examine adults' co-presence with children in everyday community spaces? With a background in youth work, the author writes from the unique position of being able to develop in-depth insights into both children's life-worlds, and practitioners' priorities and needs.

Part One

ONE

Introduction

This book asks four questions: What do children do? Where do their actions come from? What can they do? And what does this imply for adults? It explores everyday practices of children (aged 5–14) from Kopčany, at the time of the fieldwork a deprived and isolated neighbourhood on the outskirts of the Slovak capital Bratislava, where I spent one year in a dual role of ethnographer and youth worker. By investigating the circumstances in which these practices are embedded and from which they emerge, the book builds an account of the formation of children’s agency and of this agency as constituting the place where children live.

The question of children’s agency has come under the spotlight in a range of recent debates, including the scholarly interest in children’s capacities to act and ‘make a difference’ (Oswell, 2013, p.6), the policy-driven focus on children’s wellbeing (van Nijnatten, 2013), or on children as social agents with distinctive rights in the context of global development (Lieten, 2008). I seek to address some gaps in these debates and contribute to the existing understandings of children’s agency in three ways. The main contribution comes from the material on which the book is based. This is first and foremost an ethnographic story of children’s practices, a thick empirical account generated in the role of a youth worker in Kopčany. The book employs a strongly empiricist approach to theorising children’s agency; the theory is grounded in, and built from, the field experience. I offer a justification for this approach in three chapters of Part Two on the grounds of the links between the social and spatial positionality of the children in Kopčany and the marginalisation they experience. But the ethnography is also a reflexive account of my encounters with children and adults (neighbourhood residents, youth workers and others) in the neighbourhood. Adults–children is thus only one axis of difference reflected in this book. Another one is established between my roles as a researcher and a youth worker, and I unpick how different preconceptions of who we make ourselves as adults are important for how we can engage with children. I refer to my stay in Kopčany by various terms in the book – as research, project, practice or fieldwork – underlining the complex and yet heterogeneous nature of the work.

The researcher–practitioner couplet also opens up space for problematising two especially important facets of children’s agency – ideas of children’s participation and of politics. In the first venture, the book exceeds the framework of children’s participation (Percy-Smith and Thomas, 2010) by disrupting adult-centred geometries of what participation means. Rather than exploring children’s involvement in adult-driven agendas, regardless of how well intended, the book positions children themselves at the heart of processes that shape communities. What if we ask about adults’ rather than children’s participation? As an answer I offer an expansion of theories of (children’s) agency into a theory of action – a relational account of adults’ capacity to acquiesce in the fact that children are able to make a difference in the world and to conceive of a way to act upon it. Additionally, unlike a range of recent authors who theorise children’s agency in terms of political agency (Kallio, 2008; Kallio and Häkli, 2011; Mitchell and Elwood, 2012), I am cautious of scrutinising children as political actors, given the adult-based definitions of politics, whether as referring to institutional participation, civic actions or ongoing practices in everyday environments. Instead, I seek to reconsider adults themselves as political agents, building on an empirically grounded account of children’s practices, and making the aforementioned theory of action explicitly a theory of political action.

The second contribution of this book comes from its geographical lens. Throughout the book, I employ place as a central conceptual tool to understand children’s practices beyond their immediateness and confinement in individuals, tracing connections between different children and upscaling the prospects of children’s agency from individual children to wider society. In Chapter Five, I take an interest in how everyday public spaces, with their material and immaterial qualities, generate conditions that make children’s practices possible, and how they are in turn shaped by children’s agency. And throughout the book, again, I track the formation of children’s agency through the concept of scale, from the contiguity of children’s bodies and material things in mundane moments of everyday activities to the connections of these moments to structural forces impacting on the infrastructure of the neighbourhood. Writing as a geographer in dialogue with other fields of social sciences and humanities, I make an argument that ‘spatiality’, the inexorable interrelatedness of society and space (Merriman et al, 2012), is not just a different angle to approach children’s agency but also provides both epistemological devices to expand understandings of how children come to do what they do and a political compass to navigate how adults might come to terms with it.

The third main area of contribution of the book lies in its geographical scope. Some 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, many authors have firmly assigned post-socialism to history, and East and Central Europe (ECE) has nominally become part of the Global North. Yet life in post-socialist Europe (not to mention post-socialist Asia or Africa) differs from its Western counterpart in more than just a stage of institutional development, as researchers attentive to experiences of those who have been marginalised in the transformation processes have showed us (Stenning and Hörschelmann, 2008). Academic literature, however, still remains lacking in empirical investigation about what it is like to be growing up in ECE in the context of the social, economic, political and cultural changes that came with the transition from state socialism to liberal capitalism, particularly with the focus on younger children (Trell et al, 2012). This book brings a detailed empirical account of childhood in one of the more marginalised places in ECE, mapping the mundane everydayness of children’s lives and its connections to global changes, responding to the calls to consider the diversity of children’s experiences around the globe (for example Jeffrey and Dyson, 2008; Holt, 2011). It problematises the grand narratives of post-socialism, globalisation and neoliberalism but avoids romanticising the local and intimate by tracing the presence of the particular in children’s lives to wider conditions and possibilities. It does not reject post-socialism or globalisation as adequate frameworks for understanding children’s experiences in ECE but principally seeks to bring such terms down to earth, to ground the idea of historical, geographical and social difference in empirical understandings of everyday experiences of children born well after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

In sum, this book launches three interrelated intellectual projects, developed through a dual academic-practitioner interface. Chiefly, it looks at children’s capacities to act and make a difference in the context of their communities and beyond. It extends debates on children’s agency by reversing the views of community and society as defined by adults’ agendas. It adopts an empiricist approach to consider children as significant social actors in their own right, re-determining such a significance by attending to what ‘matters’ (Horton and Kraftl, 2006a) in children’s lives and tracking which elements contribute to the constitution of children’s practices and their very capacity to act, constructing an empirically grounded account of childhood. Then, within the frame of community, the book juxtaposes the ethical and institutional frameworks of adult–child relations with the intimate intersubjective experiences of such engagement, and it questions the prospects, horizons and limitations of how adults can coexist, connect and collaborate with children. While situated at a particular positionality of researcher-practitioner, this argument gives more than a methodological account of how to do research with children or be a youth worker. It speaks back to the prospects of social life and development across age and generational differences and distances (Hopkins and Pain, 2007). Finally, engaging with critical studies of the post-socialist change of ECE, the book approaches the macro-scale of global processes by addressing mundane embodied practices of individual children at a particular locality. Simultaneously, it stands out as a critical ethnography of post-socialist change and as an account of connectivity between global dynamics and embodied experiences of children in a marginalised area of ECE.

In the rest of Chapter One, I present a core theoretical framework that will guide my argument over the course of the book. This is based on four pillars: a theorisation of childhood within and beyond relations to adults as a process of incompleteness; a conceptualisation of social practices as an ongoing process of diverse relations; an understanding of place as a matrix of social connectivity in which children’s agency actualises to make a difference; and finally an idea of counter-topographies of children’s agency, a methodological approach to reassemble contexts, moments and effects of children’s practices. Finally, I give a synopsis of the rest of the book.

Children’s practices and place: towards counter-topographies of children’s agency

Childhood

One long-standing view on childhood revolves around an essential and inescapable difference between children and adults. Children have been considered as ‘human becomings rather than human beings, who through the process of socialisation [are] to be shaped into fully human adult beings’ (Holloway and Valentine, 2000); as ‘fundamentally different types of human’ (Lee, 2001, p.5); or as ‘adults in the making rather than children in the state of being’ (Brannen and O’Brien, 1995, p.730). This distinction between ‘human beings’ and ‘human becomings’ denotes the difference between adults as ‘stable, complete, self-possessed and self-controlling’ individuals (Lee, 2001, p.5), and children who are deemed ‘changeable and incomplete and [lacking] the self-possession and self-control that would allow [them] the independence of thought and action that merits respect’ (2001, p.5).

This question of children’s ‘in/completeness’ is central to this book. My research draws on the critiques of popular thinking about children as incomplete in comparison to adults (and thus incompetent), as fragile (and thus in the need of protection) and as non-socialised (and thus savage, harsh and in the need of surveillance). It extends the claims that childhood is at least partly a social construct (James et al, 1998) and, as such, it is contingent upon the particular societal mechanisms that frame it, so its production as a social consequence cannot be universal. It draws on the traditions that understand childhoods variously as simultaneously and relationally biological, legal, social and cultural constructs, situated in different times, places and cultures (Heywood, 2001; Mayall, 2002), but crucially as formations existing on their own. Although children can be dependent on adults (on adult individuals or on adult society), and such dependence would differ in various contexts, this does not take away from the rationale for studying children’s lives as unfolding on their own as there are additional factors in ‘being a child’.

Lee’s (2001) thoughts about children’s ‘incompleteness’ take the discussion even further. In line with the arguments of much of the late 20th-century work in philosophy and social theory that questions the idea of the fully constituted human subject of the Enlightenment (for example Bauman, 1991), Lee proposes destabilising the notion of the human subject entirely rather than just establishing a new sense of the child’s subjectivity. His key claim is that ‘even though [the being/becoming] distinction is still an important aspect of the regulation of childhoods, [it] is becoming “outdated” as a way of understanding childhoods’ (2001, p. 121). Lee’s primary aim is to break the being/becoming and completeness/incompleteness binaries. However, rather than establishing the term ‘childhood’ on its own in a parallel to the idea of fully constituted, complete and independent adult subjectivity, he seeks to understand children’s lives by destabilising the latter and asks ‘how we are to understand childhood when both our human categories are coming under question’ (Bauman, 1991, p.6, italics added). This call does not dismiss the existence of ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ as distinct categories in culture, policy or law, but it recognises them only as such, not as fundamental essences of being.

I approach childhood and children’s agency as incomplete, always in process of constitution. This approach – its theoretical and practical implications and the strategies I employ – is further developed in Chapters Three and Four, but here I wish to present three ideas from which it springs. The first is Lee’s understandings of agency through ‘extensions and supplements’ (2001, p.131) upon which a person depends in order to act. These ‘extensions’ or ‘supplements’ include a diverse and heterogeneous range of issues such as emotions, memories, knowledge, physical objects, spaces, people, social institutions, cultural patterns or bodies. Lee sees children neither as independent human subjects nor as mechanical machines (in contrast to fundamentally materialist readings of agency; see Lee, 2013), as their actions depend on the capacities of their bodies and minds, but also on the presence of and relations with other people, objects or environments. Ontologically, children’s agency does not differ from that of adults in principle; yet this difference needs to be examined by paying to attention to the character of all the kinds of elements already mentioned. The second idea is essentially a geographical parallel to Lee’s sociological conception of relational agency addressing the concept of scale. Current geographical debates on children’s agency have presented conflicted views over whether more attention needs to be paid to the mundane contexts of children’s lives, such as play, embodiment, emotions or popular culture (for example Harker, 2005), or whether celebrating the banal obscures children’s positioning in wider structures of power relations and inequality, effectively depoliticising the question of children’s agency (Mitchell and Elwood, 2012). In response, the book follows Ansell’s call for ‘descaled geographies of childhood’ as a careful examination of ‘the nature and limits of children’s spaces of perception and action’ (2009a, p.190) as a key determinant of the agenda for research with children. In other words, my interest begins in moments and sites of children’s practices, but analytically, I track them consistently to connections well beyond the immediate range of children’s everydayness.

The third idea underpinning my approach to childhood is about epistemology and politics. Jones (2008) is among authors arguing that childhood is constructed as an inferior reflection of the adult order. This justifies the process of what he terms as the ‘colonisation’ of children’s lives, the regulation of children’s ‘opportunities to control his or her own relationship with time and space’ (Jones, 2008, p.196). Jones argues that childhood is constructed in relation to adults through uneven power relations and, because of its otherness to adulthood, the authenticity of children’s experiences and agency can be never fully approached by adults. He then turns this epistemological question into a political one and suggests that, as a way ‘to resist colonising’ childhood (Jones, 2013, p.7), adults need to ‘“give” children space in literal, metaphorical and political terms’ (2013, p.6). Translating this idea to my work means that I also need to approach my own engagements with children and my capacities to capture, understand and (re)present an account of their agency as incomplete.

Practices

This book maps children’s everyday practices in Kopčany and the circumstances in which these practices are constituted. The notion of mapping does not refer to simply plotting the spatial range of children’s experiences into a cartographical representation. It stands for an investigation of what the children do and which factors matter for their practices, for example, enable, instigate, constrain or disable them. Building on the reading of Lee and Ansell explained in the previous section, I am inspired by Latour’s (2005) idea of ‘tracing associations’ in children’s lives, by Pile and Thrift’s (1995) notion of ‘mapping the subject’, and especially by Mathy’s metaphor of ‘visiting in turn all, or most, of the positions one takes to constitute the field… [covering] descriptively as much of the terrain as possible, exploring it on foot rather than looking down at it from an airplane’ (1993, p.15). Instead of observing only certain types of practices and categorising or comparing them (that is, defining prior to the fieldwork what themes are relevant), my objective was to undertake an open-ended experiential procedure of recording the fieldwork encounters that reveal something about children’s practices, a procedure that would be ‘open… and connectable in all of its dimensions’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p.13).

Practices themselves, in this context, can be understood simply as ‘the act of doing something’ (Setten, 2009, p.1), as the ‘ongoing mix of human activities that make up the richness of everyday social life’ (Painter, 2000, p.242) or, more profoundly, as ‘a series of actions that are governed by practical intelligibility and performed in interconnected, local settings’ (Schatzki, 1988, p.244), highlighting their incomplete logic and interrelatedness. This conceptualisation is also sufficient as it embraces broadly the contents of children’s everyday actions and helps in keeping the epistemological openness and flexibility in relation to a range of experiences, an implicit requirement of approaching agency as incomplete.

My argument for focusing on practices is based on the conceptual interconnectedness between children’s activities and their everyday surroundings. On the one hand, practices are embodied, that is, located and entwined within individual human bodies. On the other hand, how they evolve depends on the presence of a range of other circumstances, including material objects, other people, discursive practices, or institutional functioning. My empirical interest is located at the connections between these two dimensions – children’s individual bodies through which their practices are located and a range of issues that matter for how children’s practices take place. Throughout the book, I use Lee’s (2001) term ‘extensions to agency’, as it emphasises how children’s capacity to act is dependent on a range of circumstances that ‘extend’ children’s simple presence in the world and create the possibility of action.

Not all practices and not all their necessary pre-conditions were always intelligibly mediated by the children in this book. Their actions were often driven by tacit knowledge, customary routine, or unarticulated affective states. While there exist ways th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables, figures and maps
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• References