Making children’s ‘agency’ visible: Towards the localisation of a concept in theory and practice

Abstract

The concept of ‘agency’ is regularly put forward as an analytic tool to help understand, evaluate and act upon places around the world, through social development policies and programmes ostensibly designed to support or increase children’s agency. This article reflects on empirical research into children’s agency spanning a range of international contexts over two decades and offers new insights through critical engagement with a growing body of work on the ‘localisation’ of social development and humanitarian responses in international settings. It suggests that the largely normative ways in which the concept of agency is invoked as an analytic tool for understanding human experience universally effectively renders children’s agency invisible to us. This is because it is more a description of a particular discourse than something which actually helps us to understand and make visible children’s socio-culturally grounded ‘agentic practice’ from place to place. This article argues for new directions in research and practice to localise agency that are critical to the central commitments of interpretive social science. These new directions include (a) a new research agenda which can go beyond children’s ‘own perspectives’ to the discovery, description and analysis of agency in socio-cultural terms, to ensure it can function as an analytic tool for learning about socio-cultural phenomena which help animate local concepts of agency; and (b) the development of agency-related policies and programmes that are grounded in such locally situated concepts of agency developed through understanding local socio-cultural systems rather than externally derived socio-cultural assumptions about childhood and children’s agency.

Agency, autonomy and self-determination: Questioning key concepts of childhood studies

“…As laid out by Tisdall and Punch (2012), and others, those writing in the childhood studies field have tended to assume that children's agency is innately and inevitably positive, thus making it problematic if in the particular circumstances children's agency seemed questionable. For example, what does the academic or practitioner do with the 'ambiguous agency' of children and young people (Bordonaro and Payne, 2012;Edmonds, 2019) or with children's agency that goes against the social norms (e.g. 'child soldiers', 'child prostitutes' or 'working children')?…”

The principle of child autonomy: A rationale for the normative agenda of childhood studies

“…Contrary to liberal concepts of autonomy, we propose a pluralization of the yardstick used to measure which life orientations, forms of dependence, and modes of social embeddedness can be regarded as equally fostering autonomous choices. At the same time, this understanding of freedom rules out the possibility of universalizing specifically Western ideas about what it means to be autonomous (see also Edmonds, 2019). Such a pluralistic concept of autonomy advocates for the recognition of differences between children and adults, between children from different cultural backgrounds, social classes, and so forth.…”

Aportes reflexivos para la investigación con las infancias. Corresponsabilidad en el avance de su participación

“…Sokol et al (2015) especifican que se trata del control autónomo y responsable que las personas ejercen sobre sus propias acciones. El concepto de agencia vinculado a las infancias emergió gracias al reconocimiento de su derecho a la participación, y es que, tal como pone de manifiesto Edmonds (2019), la agencia no se posee, sino que se ejerce y sólo puede ser ejercida cuando las circunstancias lo permiten, esto es, cuando se reconoce al sujeto como agente posibilitando, así, que desarrolle un sentido de autoconciencia y de autocontrol durante la vida (Sokol et al, 2015).…”