Abstract
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.
Highlights
The field of social studies of childhood problematizes and transforms the ‘natural’ category of the child into a ‘social-cultural’ category
One of the key ideas in the social studies of childhood is the recognition that children are social actors; they have agency
These practices connected to childhood exemplify how children are defined in relation to members of family and community, and this cultural conceptualization of children/childhood may not resonate with the ‘universal’ definition of the child
Summary
The field of social studies of childhood problematizes and transforms the ‘natural’ category of the child into a ‘social-cultural’ category. Studies have drawn attention to children’s engagement in popular culture, rights, activism, online participation, participation in research, and inter-generational relationships (for recent analyses on the agency of children in different realms of power and experience see (Esser et al 2016; Oswell 2013; Spyrou 2018)). These scholars take a critical look at the notion of agency that has tended to valorise the discursive, agentful, and competent subject. The last section provides reflections on moving beyond binaries in researching agency/dependency in children’s life worlds
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