Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen, and In Between ed. by Ingrid E. Castro and Jessica Clark (review)

The United Nations 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child acknowledged a new understanding of what a "child" is and how it should be treated in our world. Coming after decades of research in children's literature and coinciding with the rise of childhood studies, the Convention understood children as people with rights, including the right to life and their own name and identity. Since then, scholars studying children have attempted to define the new paradigm around children. Ingrid E. Castro and Jessica Clark's edited collection, Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen, and In Between, enters the conversation about the construction of the child by focusing on how childhood agency is represented in popular texts. Castro and Clark argue that this collection "highlights the ways in which analyses of agency as it is represented in popular culture can support the development of theorizing about agency across disciplines and in the lives of children and young people … allow[ing] for questioning dominant neoliberal models of agency and facilitat[ing] intersectional and intergenerational analyses through understanding child and youth agency as it is both experienced and remembered" (xxvi). Adding to sociological studies of children and agency, this book reexamines concepts of children's agency through thorough investigations of a wide array of primary texts, from books to film to social media posts. Based firmly in many disciplines within the humanities, Representing Agency in Popular Culture represents the many virtues of interdisciplinary work around texts for and about children.

The book is broken into three sections. The first section explores political agency, specifically children's agency during times of conflict because, as Castro and Clark argue, during these times of strife, "children's positionalities are nearly always forgotten, except when their childhoods are used as a call to arms, shocking evidence of lost lives, or to seek out new recruits" (xviii). In the three chapters in this section, Catherine Hartung explores politicians and children responding to the Trump presidency, Lucy Newby and Fearghus Roulston examine films about the Northern Ireland conflicts, and John C. Nelson focuses on films about war in Afghanistan and along the Iraqi-Turkish border. Each chapter examines how these texts represent a grim reality for children, one that children learn to navigate with differing forms of agency, some of which (especially for girls forced into marriages during wartime) challenge definitions of agency that rely on independence, autonomy, and resistance. These chapters echo some of the conversations that have been occurring in and around the children's literature field. Hartung's chapter on the reaction to Trump's presidency, which demonstrates that politicians often use the supposed innocence and naivety of children for their own purposes while children adroitly play with Trump's own words and name, fits well with, for example, several papers at the 2019 Children's Literature Association Conference, where Trump and his effect on children's literature and culture featured in many presentations, including a panel focused on that topic. This section thus furthers conversations by examining how children's agency fits into the political themes already under discussion.

The second section explores social agency, which covers many different topics and is thus the longest section. Castro and Clark call this form of agency "interpersonal agency" (xx), and the chapters in this section focus on how children find agency and power in relation to others. The one exception to the general consensus of power through relationships comes in Terri Suico's chapter about how teen girls find agency in breaking from relationships with other girls their age. I especially appreciate the chapters in this section dealing with marginalized identities and how that affects social bonds and agency, such as Clark's discussion of disability in young adult fiction and Tabitha Parry Collins, Mary L. Fahrenbruck, and Leanna Lucero's exploration of trans*gender and gender...