Contributions and Limits of the ‘Childhood Studies’ for the research of the children’s agency in Latin America

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-149
Author(s):  
Rocío Fatyass
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Children’S Agency

scholarly journals Agency operating within structures: a qualitative exploration of agency amongst children living in Palestine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federica Cavazzoni ◽  
Cindy Sousa ◽  
Alec Fiorini ◽  
Guido Veronese
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Gaza Strip ◽  
Childhood Development ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Children’S Agency ◽  
Military Violence ◽  
Children And Childhood ◽  
The Gaza Strip ◽  
Qualitative Exploration

<p>Over the last two decades the concept of agency has played a pivotal role in childhood studies, bringing a radical shift into the old views of children and childhood development. However, little agreement has been reached on what exactly agency means, how it should be measured, especially amongst children affected by military violence and oppression. Based on drawings and walk-along interviews with 70 children from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the present study provides an analysis of children’s agency across the multiple settings in which they live. Our findings highlight the dynamic interconnections between the children’s agentic practices (<i>the employment of social capital</i>; <i>challenging movement restrictions</i>; <i>receiving an education; personal strategies; reclaiming play-areas; meaning-making process and political agency</i>) and the multiple ecologies implied in promoting - or suppressing - their opportunity to act and cope with their surroundings. Our research challenges the dominant picture of children exposed to political violence as helpless victim, portraying them as active agents who mobilize resources both within themselves and throughout their social, physical, and political world. The study suggests implications for practices when designing intervention for children in contexts of chronic political violence.</p>

scholarly journals Agency operating within structures: a qualitative exploration of agency amongst children living in Palestine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federica Cavazzoni ◽  
Cindy Sousa ◽  
Alec Fiorini ◽  
Guido Veronese
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Gaza Strip ◽  
Childhood Development ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Political World ◽  
Children’S Agency ◽  
Children And Childhood ◽  
The Gaza Strip ◽  
Qualitative Exploration ◽  
Radical Shift

<p>Over the last two decades the concept of agency has played a pivotal role in childhood studies, bringing a radical shift into the old views of children and childhood development. Based on drawings and walk-along interviews with 70 children from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the present study provides an analysis of children’s agency across the multiple settings in which they live. Our findings highlight the dynamic interconnections between the children’s agentic practices and the multiple ecologies implied in promoting - or suppressing - their opportunity to act and cope with their surroundings. Our research challenges the dominant picture of children exposed to political violence as helpless victim, portraying them as active agents who mobilize resources both within themselves and throughout their social, physical, and political world. The study suggests implications for practices when designing intervention for children in contexts of chronic political violence.</p>

scholarly journals Considering medical assistance in dying for minors: the complexities of children’s voices

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 399-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harprit Kaur Singh ◽  
Mary Ellen Macdonald ◽  
Franco A Carnevale
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Medical Assistance ◽  
Medical Assistance In Dying ◽  
Children’S Agency ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Children’S Voices

Medical assistance in dying (MAID) legislation in Canada followed much deliberation after the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling in Carter v. Canada. Included in this deliberation was the Special Joint Committee on Physician Assisted Dying’s recommendation to extend MAID legislation beyond the inclusion of adults to mature minors. Children's agency is a construct advanced within childhood studies literature which entails eliciting children’s voices in order to recognise children as active participants in constructing their own childhoods. Using this framework, we consider the possible extension of MAID legislation to most minors. We highlight important questions regarding how insights from children’s voices could be mobilised in the life or death context of MAID. We conclude that children’s voices have the potential to help determine their eligibility for MAID; however, incorporating children's voices in the context of MAID requires careful consideration due to the complexity of voice.

scholarly journals Reconceptualising Children’s Agency as Continuum and Interdependence

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatek Abebe
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Relational Processes ◽  
Child Agency ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Children’S Agency ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Societal Expectations

Although the idea that children are social actors is well-recognised within childhood studies, the structural contexts shaping child agency and the everyday practices that manifest in children’s social relationships with other generations are not fully elucidated. This article identifies and discusses multiple and often contradictory concepts of agency as well as a framework for re-conceptualizing it as a continuum, and as interdependent. The central argument I make is that there is a need to go beyond the recognition that children are social actors to reveal the contexts and relational processes within which their everyday agency unfolds. It is also vital to ask what kind of agency children have, how they come by and exercise it, and how their agency relates them to their families, communities, and others. The article draws on research and ongoing debates on the life worlds of children in diverse African contexts in order to critically demonstrate how their agency is intersected by experience, societal expectations, gender, geography, stage of childhood, and social maturity. In so doing, the contextualized discussions and reflections have implications to rethink childhood and child agency elsewhere.

scholarly journals CHILDREN’S RIGHTS AND CHILDHOOD STUDIES AS A CHALLENGE AND A DRIVER OF SOCIAL CHANGE

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
URSZULA MARKOWSKA-MANISTA ◽  
ANNA ODROWĄŻ-COATES
Keyword(s):  
Children's Rights ◽  
Children’S Rights ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Parental Roles ◽  
Life Chances ◽  
Children’S Agency ◽  
The Family ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Selection Of

This paper contains an introduction to a selection of papers across social sciences and humanities, based on empirical explorations and theoretical conceptualizations. Authors highlight the issues of parental roles, parental styles, child and family positioning in the family and society. The lens of children’s rights and participatory approaches is also discussed. Authors focus on diverse practices in parenting, different approaches to children’s agency and freedom of choice, family as a negotiated space mediated by culture, children’s position in family and society, life chances and wellbeing, critical approaches to children’s rights perspectives, early intervention, socio-political context, finally Freire’s and Korczak’s pedagogies.

scholarly journals Children’s Agency as a Theoretical Problem and a Practical Concern (an Anthropological Remark)

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (45) ◽  
pp. 11-25
Author(s):  
Angelina Kozlovskaya ◽  
Anna Kozlova
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Theoretical Problem ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Childhood Experiences ◽  
Present Collection ◽  
Practical Concern ◽  
Children’S Agency ◽  
Adult Model ◽  
The Public Sphere

The introduction opens the proceedings for the conference on childhood studies “‘Through Children’s Eyes’: The Child’s Subjectivity in Social Studies and in the Public Sphere” (December 21–22, 2018, EUSPb, St Petersburg). The paper traces the history of the New Social Studies of Childhood, a research paradigm which has put forward the notion of children as competent social actors and has made claims for its universality as a conceptual framework for studying children. A close examination of the discipline formation shows that—in an attempt to draw attention to the worthiness of childhood as a research subject—proponents of the new paradigm have used politically informed arguments and have drawn on the “adult” model of rational subjects for the conceptualization of children’s practices. These, in turn, have led to the loss of specificity in the accounts of childhood experiences. Several theoretical efforts made both within and outside the “new sociology of childhood” to overcome the conceptual crisis are considered. The present collection consists of four ethnographic studies related to the issue of children’s agency. Two of these examine the soviet pedagogical disputes on the meaning of children’s independency (which in many ways are congruent to the theoretical discussion of children’s agency) and the two others explore the different forms and formats agency takes in natural settings within peer interaction.

The Agency of Children and the Study of Religion

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-47
Author(s):  
Anna Strhan
Keyword(s):  
Fluid Dynamic ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Capacity To Act ◽  
Children’S Agency ◽  
The Social

What does it mean to take children’s agency seriously in the sociology of religion? This chapter reviews dominant approaches to the study of childhood and religion and assesses the underlying assumptions about the meanings of childhood, agency, society, and religion they index. It situates these approaches in relation to two different strands taken to children’s agency in wider childhood studies. It then examines how we can see two different understandings of children’s agency in play in conservative and charismatic evangelicalism through discussing two different national evangelical events focused on childhood. It argues that these events empirically demonstrate the importance of attending to childhood in the study of religion and suggests a way of understanding children’s agency in relation to religion as a fluid, dynamic convergence of different elements, which affords children more or less capacity to act as agents and shape the social and religious worlds they inhabit.

Childhoods from postcolonial perspectives

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-32
Author(s):  
Manfred Liebel
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Data ◽  
Global South ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Children’S Agency

This chapter follows some of the debates conducted in social childhood studies, such as the question of whether a ‘global childhood’ has developed during the processes of globalization and discusses the scope and limitations of Eurocentric childhood patterns. It explains what postcolonial constellations and postcolonial childhoods mean and illustrates these concepts with some empirical data. Finally, the chapter looks at the manifestations of children’s agency in the Global South and how agency can be conceptualized.

Enacting the overweight body in residential child care: Eating and agency beyond the nature–culture divide

Childhood ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florian Eßer
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Relational Understanding ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Residential Child Care ◽  
Children’S Agency ◽  
Field Notes ◽  
Food Produce

This article reconstructs multiple enactments of overweight bodies in residential child care by analysing ethnographic field notes. The account links in with current tendencies in childhood studies to reach a more material and relational understanding of children’s agency. Examining concepts of embodiment as discussed in science and technology studies and phenomenology, the article offers an approach to childhood studies which connects the corporeal and agency. It shows how different enactments of children’s bodies and food produce different forms of agency.

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