Questioning, Debating, and Problematizing Agency in Childhood Studies Research

Since the implementation of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), childhood studies scholars have defined children's agency as the ability to participate in—rather than be protected from—the social world. However, the editors of Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood claim that, in most childhood studies research, this definition of "agency" is conceptualized as an inherently positive, individualized trait of modernity, a quality that naturally exists within children and simply needs to be "uncovered" by researchers (7). This anthology, which includes chapters by experts in the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, is the first book to systematically propose a deconstructed and post-structural concept of children's agency that explores how actions are promoted or restricted throughout social relationships and environments. By problematizing agency, the editors also call into question past research that has overemphasized "classic dualisms of personality and society, child and adult, action and structure, and so on" (48). Instead, this book argues that childhood and agency are fluid, performative, socially constructed, and relational. Thus, this anthology begins an ongoing and rich discussion among childhood studies theorists in which new theoretical, historical, and transnational perspectives about agency and childhood are explored.

Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood is organized in five sections. It begins with a comprehensive introduction by editors Florian Esser (sociology and education), Meike S. Baader (education), Tanja Betz (childhood studies and education), and Beatrice Hungerland (childhood studies) that critiques the continued exclusion of young people from childhood studies research. The introduction identifies a "new" era in the field of childhood studies, one that followed the implementation of the UNCRC and ran from the late 1980s into the early 2000s (although the writers acknowledge that many of these research paradigms existed years earlier). This period was characterized by a normative use of the term "agency." However, the editors argue that recent work in childhood studies has constructed "[a] substantialist concept of the actor and the child [that] is based on a de-historicized, de-socialised, individual-centred idea of action" (6). Therefore, this book makes the case for a "reconceptualised agency" that comprises "social relations and interdependency instead of independence and autonomy" (9).

The essays in Section I, "Theoretical Perspectives," propose a range of theories that complicate agency by treating it as produced socially rather than individually, through relationships among children, adults, and their environments. Childhood sociologist David Oswell opens this discussion while also exploring how disciplines such as developmental psychology can be renegotiated as "sites for the invention of methods and as resources for making children and childhood observable" (29). He argues that the methods are not the problem, but rather that the researcher's ontologies essentialize children and their actions (30). In chapter 2, childhood studies scholars Sabine Bollig and Helga Kelle argue that practice theory—which implies that children do not produce practices or their subject positions but "become actors as the practices are being performed" (39, emphasis added)—can be effectively applied to research with and about children. In this way, both agency (the child's actions) and the actor's subject positions (the "child") combine to (re)produce children as children through a multitude of heterogeneous and unpredictable social practices. Bollig and Kelle also argue that children can challenge or sustain these performances over time, both of which are demonstrations of agency (45).

In chapter 3, editor Florian Esser argues—by incorporating relational social theories—that agency can be reconceptualised as a social relationship that includes both humans and non-humans. Relational social theories explore how children's potential or ability to act is enabled or constrained by their intersections of identity and thus how children interact with their social worlds. In this way, childhood, agency, and their social worlds are theorized interdependently. In chapter 4, sociologist Anne Wihstutz agrees with Esser that relational social theories can further nuance agency as a social relationship in childhood studies research. Thus, Wihstutz argues for a...