Vulnerable agents: what we can learn from a child-centred perspective on transnational families

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Research on children in transnational families benefits from a conceptual input as provided by the studies presented in this special issue. The input aims to overcome the usual juxtaposition of agency and vulnerability dominating the research field, a juxtaposition resulting from disciplinary preconceptions and not from empirical insights. In contrast, the results of the studies in this special issue clearly show that both agency and vulnerability exist, and in such a way that vulnerability may even be the result of the children’s actions. Therefore, a pragmatic theory of vulnerability is developed, based on the relational action concept of Emirbayer and Mische (1998). This theory understands vulnerability both as an accompanying phenomenon and as a consequence of agency, and links various forms of agency with the associated risks of vulnerability. Such an approach may be useful in research on children in various family constellations.