Vulnerability and autonomy: theoretical considerations based on children’s narrations about sport in adult-dominated contexts

When aiming to create spaces for dialogue between social studies of childhood in the Global North and South, there are many aspects to consider. One of them is the complexities of bringing together different histories and languages as they shape differentiated understandings of the field. In this article, we focus on agency, one of the main concepts that has shaped the New Social Studies of Childhood (NSSC). We discuss how childhood studies in the Global South have contributed to the development of agency in NSSC within English-speaking dialogues. We introduce the notion of agencia, the Spanish equivalent of agency, exploring its connotations in childhood studies and advocacy groups in Latin America. Finally, we bring together the different aspects of agency and agencia as they have been discussed throughout the paper, exploring how from these perspectives we can approach one specific event: secondary school students vaulting over the turnstiles at the metro stations in Santiago, Chile. This event initiated what has been known as the Chilean outbreak of October 2019, and the origin of the current constitutional process from which children have been ambiguously included/excluded.

The past two decades have seen rapid changes in the ways in which sociologists think about children, and a growing cross-fertilisation of ideas between researchers in a variety of social science disciplines. This paper builds upon these developments by exploring what three inter-related ways of thinking about spatiality might contribute to the new social studies of childhood. Specifically, we identify the importance of progressive understandings of place in overcoming the split between global and local approaches to childhood; we discuss the ways in which children's identities are constituted in and through particular spaces; and we examine the ways in which our understandings of childhood can shape the meaning of spaces and places. These ideas are illustrated by reference to our current research on children's use of the internet as well as a range of wider studies.

This chapter provides an overview of childhood studies’ development as a field by highlighting its underlying ontological and epistemological foundations. Starting with the paradigmatic shift brought about by ‘the new social studies of childhood’ in the 1980s, the chapter proceeds to elaborate on the emerging critiques of the field and especially of its social constructionist orientation. Turning to poststructuralist and posthumanist critiques, the chapter discusses relational ontologies and their potential for rethinking knowledge production in childhood studies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of interdisciplinarity and a call for a certain kind of ‘undisciplining’ as means towards expanding childhood studies’ current conceptual reach.

In this ground-breaking book, Alan Prout discusses the place of children and childhood in modern society. He critically examines 'the new social studies of childhood', reconsidering some of its key assumptions and positions and arguing that childhood is heterogeneous and complex. The study of childhood requires a broad set of intellectual resources and an interdisciplinary approach. Chapters include: the changing social and cultural character of contemporary childhood and the weakening boundary between adulthood and childhood a look back at the emergence of childhood studies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the nature/culture dichotomy the role of material artefacts and technologies in the construction of contemporary childhood. This book is essential reading for students and academics in the field of childhood studies, sociology and education.

By Susie Weller London : Routledge , 2007 ISBN 9780415404648 , 194 pp, £22.99 (pb) Teenagers’ Citizenship is a valuable and timely contribution to the existing literature on both citizenship and ‘childhood’. Whilst much has been written on these topics, this book effectively combines these literatures to provide an informative analysis of the barriers to and the opportunities for positioning teenagers as citizens. After examining teenagers’ problematic relationship with traditional notions of citizenship, Weller explores teenagers’ attitudes towards citizenship education. Concluding that the school curriculum ‘fails to recognise both alternative and more holistic understandings of citizenship, which in many ways are more inclusive, and perhaps more relevant to many teenagers’ lives’ (p. 70) she moves on to explore how teenagers practise citizenship in their everyday lives—at school and in the community—and some of the barriers which prevent children from being seen as citizens in society. Weller's theoretical approach is grounded within the ‘New Social Studies of Childhood’ (NSSC)—a theoretical perspective which upholds the value of studying ‘children’ in their own right and which asserts that children should be seen to be competent social actors (Prout and James, 1997). This is an appropriate backdrop for exploring teenagers’ participation in society. Indeed, her empirical research reflects this theoretical standpoint. Adopting a child-centred approach, she employs a range of participatory methods to give voice to the young people's viewpoints and experiences. More attention could have been given towards exploring how children perform citizenship through the actual research process — for instance, through discussing their ideas in group discussions and acting as advisors to the researcher. Citing extracts from the young people she studied helps to breathe life into her analysis. For instance, in chapter 3, Weller focuses on the introduction of compulsory citizenship education in schools. Importantly, her analysis moves beyond a theoretical discussion of the ‘problems with implementation’ towards a grounded discussion of the real-life difficulties that teenagers themselves identify with the subject. By exploring how children actually practise citizenship across and within different spatial contexts Weller effectively draws attention to how children ‘do’ citizenship in the ‘being’ of childhood (encouraging us to critically engage with dominant understandings of ‘children as citizens-in-the-making’). In line with the NSSC children are therefore positioned as worthy of study in their own right — as children, rather than as future ‘becomings’. From this analysis, Weller argues for an ‘alternative’ (‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘cumulative’) approach to citizenship which more effectively includes teenagers’ everyday experiences and understandings of what citizenship is. Her argument is accessible, clearly structured and supported through her empirical research findings. Overall, this book simultaneously provides us with an introduction to debates about citizenship and the social construction of ‘childhood’. This book would therefore be of interest to students of sociology, politics, human geography, social policy and childhood studies.

by Harry Hendrick ( ed .) Bristol : Policy Press , 2005 ISBN 1861345666 , 558 pp , £25.00 (pb) This reader seeks to provide a broad framework within which to observe some of the complexities and ambiguities regarding children's well-being and to think about and analyse policy and practice. Aimed at students, it is intended to make them aware of different concepts and approaches used by researchers and policy makers and to stimulate their critical reflection on social policy for children. The 26 chapters were selected to provide a state-of-the-art picture of child welfare and social policy, so that together they show the variety of ways of thinking about children's well-being. Most were originally published in the period 1997–2003 and are drawn from a mixture of monographs, edited collections and journals. The book is in four parts. Part One highlights the historical antecedents of current debates, drawing out themes such as the perennial tension between family and state and the contrasting images of children as victims or threats. Part Two discusses concepts such as rights and social capital, describing the different ways in which children have been perceived and categorised in relation to welfare and how these play out in New Labour policy. Part Three sharpens the focus on policy and practice in 21st-Century Britain, with chapters on anti-social behaviour, health, disability, housing, education, young carers and day care. Part Four turns to the future and what it perceives as the growth of the ‘social investment state’ in which children are viewed as human capital. It would be easy to get lost amidst such disparate contributions, so Hendrick's overview chapters provide a useful map and give the book coherence. There are at least two recurring themes – one relating to research, the other to policy. First is the need for a more child-centred approach to social policy analysis, much work to date having considered policy and practice from the perspective of families, households, professional outputs or economics. Ridge (2005; Chapter 5) illustrates the value of this approach in her elaboration of children's real-life experience of poverty and social exclusion and elsewhere has done the same in relation to child support policy, with interesting results. The authors are particularly concerned to stress the importance of considering children's experience in the present, criticising the recurring portrayal in policy of children as ‘becomings’ not ‘beings’. This is exemplified in Nigel Thomas's discussion of the Children Act 1989 (Chapter 9) and Ruth Lister's powerful argument that policy in liberal welfare states such as the UK conceives of children as ‘citizen-workers of the future’ (Chapter 25). There has been a marked shift in recent years in this direction, informed by the body of work known collectively as childhood sociology or ‘the new social studies of childhood’. Second, the book neatly crystallises the underlying tension in much social policy for children between a needs-led or ‘welfare’ approach and a more rights-driven agenda. Jeremy Roche's analysis of recent legislation captures well the growing influence of rights but also the sense that its impact has been somewhat less than many advocates would wish (Chapter 12). Lansdown, meanwhile, defends the rights perspective from its critics, pointing to the way that adults abuse their power over children (Chapter 6), although one might of course ask if the decline in aspects of children's well-being in a supposed golden age for children's rights does not call the agenda into question. Significantly, John Davis and his colleagues (Chapter 18) contend that the shift from a medical or needs-led model of disability towards a more social or rights-based approach has been detrimental because the latter tends to view disabled children as an homogenous group and ignores differences and complexities. Most of the chapters acknowledge benefits that have accrued to children since Labour took office in 1997 while also expressing unease about the direction of some policies and calling for more progress. In the latter case, most of the authors are less forthcoming, which lends weight to Michael King's argument (Chapter 3) that there is a need to move beyond moral indignation to formulate practical measures aimed at changing behaviour towards children (p. 66). If it is short on solutions, however, this reader is rich in fascinating and thought-provoking accounts and cannot fail in its aim to encourage thinking theoretically and politically about child welfare – which Hendrick rightly identifies as being ‘in a rather elementary stage of development’ (p. 478).

Since the 1990s, research with children has witnessed epistemological changes which have challenged traditional research methods and have attempted to deconstruct notions of children as passive and incompetent. Such changes, epitomized by children‐centred research methods, aim to redress power imbalances by encouraging participants to select their own forms of communication. Participation and innovation are central to this approach. Simultaneously, but quite distinct from research methodology, community radio has become an important mechanism in promoting social inclusion. Globally, this means of community participation has been advocated by organizations that have utilized radio as an educational tool for promoting children’s rights. This paper suggests that the synthesis of radio phone‐in discussions with the ‘New Social Studies of Childhood’ forms a constructive basis for developing a participatory research method. Methodological issues arising from a teenage‐centred radio phone‐in will be explored. The paper concludes by discussing the viability of the radio phone‐in as a meaningful method for promoting teenagers’, often unheard, voices.

In recent years, much has been made of the value of participatory approaches for research withchildren, both within geography and beyond. I begin by providing an overview of participatorytechniques and the ways in which they have been received, modified and put to use by geogra-phers and researchers working in the ‘new social studies of childhood’. I suggest that the ration-ale for the use of these methods depends on claims about (i) their epistemological validity and(ii) their ethical merits.

Usually research on social inequality uses social characteristics like class, gender and ethnicity to characterize similar social positions within a hierarchical distribution system of societal resources. For example, categorizing children as dependent members of family households has enjoyed widespread consensus. In contrast, it is less common to take age or generation as a constituting characteristic of social inequality. This means that social-characteristic-based research conceives of children as part of a collective unit which comprises adults (parents) and children, and not as autonomous claims makers themselves with respect to societal resources (e.g., income). Consequently, research which analyses the position of children in the system of unequal distribution of resources from a generational perspective is still quite rare. Over the past few decades, under the label of ‘new social studies of childhood’ (Qvortrup et al., 1994), a macrosociological approach has been developed in the field of childhood research. According to this approach all children in a given society are part of the generational unit of childhood, and thus related to other generational units, like adulthood and old age, from which they can be systematically differentiated. As members of the generational unit of childhood they have something in common with all other children besides the fact that different groups of children — for example, boys and girls, children from rural and urban regions, children with different social backgrounds, and so on — may be exposed to different living conditions.

Children's understandings of place have been researched from the differing perspectives of ‘new social studies of childhood’, developmental psychology and geography education. However, the processes by which children construct their understandings of distant places have received relatively little attention. This paper summarises insights from the existing literature and outlines the findings from empirical research which employed a range of interpretive methods within a class of 14-year-olds studying Japan. Representations of Japan and the richly diverse material and relational contexts of their construction are summarised and illustrated by an in depth case study.

Despite a huge flow of international labor migration, sub-Saharan Africa has not been given due consideration in the transnational families literature. There is a considerable flow of international labor migration from Ethiopia to economically prosperous countries. This study aims to explore and understand the lived experiences and life tapestry of children left-behind by one or both parents in Addis Ababa and Adama City, Ethiopia. The study was informed by the "new social studies of childhood" theory, which considers children as active in constructing their lives and those around them. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 25 children who experienced parental migration. The findings revealed that parental migration has many significant effects in shaping and permeating children's lives and identities—their emotions, education, and living arrangements. Despite children's spatio-temporal separation, smartphones were found to play a prominent role in fostering parent-child relationships. Parental migration affected children's aspirations, specifically to be reunited with their migrant parent(s). This study contributes by expanding our understanding of children left-behind in Ethiopia and identifies social work services that need attention. In the existing policies related to children in Ethiopia, children left-behind must be considered as a segment of the population that requires earnest attention. Current and previous volumes are available at: https://ajsw.africasocialwork.net HOW TO REFERENCE USING ASWDNET STYLEEliyas T. Faye M. & Ashenafi H. (2024). Transnational families in urban areas of Ethiopia: understanding the lived experiences of children left behind. African Journal of Social Work, 14(6), 303-310. https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajsw.v14i6.1

We compare two analyses of the same ‘draw-and-write’ exercises in which 128 Zimbabwean children represented their HIV-affected peers. The first, informed by the ‘New Social Studies of Childhood’, easily identified examples of independent reflection and action by children. The second, informed by Sen׳s understandings of agency, drew attention to the negative consequences of many of the choices available to children, and the contextual limits on outcomes children themselves would value: the support of caring adults, adequate food, and opportunities to advance their health and safety. Conceptualisations of agency need to take greater account of children׳s own accounts of outcomes they value, rather than identifying agency in any form of independent reflection and action per se.

Steve Woolgar has argued that science and technology studies is a prime place for studying the relationship between children and consumption [2012 “Ontological Child Consumption.” In Situating Child Consumption: Rethinking Values and Notions of Children, Childhood and Consumption, edited by B. Sandin, A. Sparrman, and J. Sjöberg, 33–51. Lund: Nordic Academic Press]. Yet this project remains largely unfulfilled, mirroring the broader absence of children as a serious object of study in the discipline. This extends to the analysis of childhood eating. So-called ‘picky’ eating, which I refer to as ‘avoidant’ eating, involves varying degrees of food refusal, often experienced by carers as highly distressing. In response, many parents are turning to digital platforms for support. This paper analyses how parents’ encounters with avoidant eating become entangled with digital platforms, centring on a digital autoethnography of the author’s own information seeking practices via Google search. Not only does the paper respond to the neglect of parent–child relations as a site for research within STS, it also demonstrates that the so-called ‘new social studies of childhood’ could benefit from further analysing the way in which parent–child relations are entangled with relations between people and things, including digital platforms.

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.

In this article, I contend that the sociology of leisure in particular and leisure studies in general has been shaped by adult-centric assumptions which have marginalized children’s perspectives on and experiences of leisure within theory building exercises. Consequently, leisure researchers who do empirical work on children’s leisure have largely eschewed critical debates about children’s agency, social positioning and lived citizenship among others that have been developed by the ‘new’ sociology of childhood. Failure to build bridges with other areas of scholarship such as sociological childhood studies, has intensified the intellectual isolation of leisure research. Here, I propose a sustained dialogue between leisure studies and childhood studies which will not only widen the intellectual breadth of leisure theory and make it more inclusive, but also enable leisure studies to have an impact on the new social studies of childhood. In illustrating what such a collaboration might entail, I outline a conceptual schema of three interlocking genres of children’s leisure – namely organized, family and casual leisure – based on existing studies conducted by researchers in leisure, childhood and family studies that offer a roadmap for the development of a new critical sociology of children’s leisure.