The Agency of Children : From Family to Global Human Rights

The idea of children's agency is central to the growing field of childhood studies. In this book David Oswell argues for new understandings of children's agency. He traces the transformation of children and childhood across the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and explores the dramatic changes in recent years to children's everyday lives as a consequence of new networked, mobile technologies and new forms of globalisation. The author reviews existing theories of children's agency as well as providing the theoretical tools for thinking of children's agency as spatially, temporally and materially complex. With this in mind, he surveys the main issues in childhood studies, with chapters covering family, schooling, crime, health, consumer culture, work and human rights. This is a comprehensive text intended for students and academic researchers across the humanities and social sciences interested in the study of children and childhood (source : site de l'éditeur) Contents 7 Figures 9 Acknowledgements 10 Part I Introduction 11 1: Introduction 13 2 Agency after Ariès: sentiments, natures and spaces 19 Sentiments and descriptions 20 Iconographies and the accumulation of description 20 Concept, conception or sentiment&e_x003F; 22 Collective subjectivity and categorical thinking 24 Natures 27 Either society or biology&e_x003F; 27 Biopower and writing on the life of the child 31 The lives of children and literary culture 34 Spaces 38 Conclusion 42 Part II Social theories of children and childhood 45 3 Modern social theories: agency and structure 47 Social being and becoming 48 The duality of structure and agency 52 Parsons, systems and roles 52 The turn to Giddens 54 Elaborations on Giddens: structural dichotomies 58 Conclusion 59 4 Partial and situated agency 61 Peer cultures 61 Social competence 63 Hegemonic negotiation 65 Tactical agency 68 Conclusion 70 5 Subjectivity, experience and post-social assemblages 72 Subjectivity and experience 72 Material, heterogeneous and distributed agency 79 Post-social assemblages and collectivities 82 Foucault's apparatus 83 People as infrastructure 85 Children as a collectivity 87 A return to generation 89 Conclusion 93 Part III Spaces of experience, experimentation and power 95 6 Family and household 99 Socialisation and social system 101 Socialisation as the government of the 'social' 103 Transforming intimacy and democratising the family 109 Family talk and modernisation 114 Mediations of family in late modernity 118 Conclusion 121 7 School and education 123 The emergence and standardisation of a common childhood 123 Discipline and power 129 Social interaction in educational contexts 134 Cultural politics of the classroom and popular culture 140 Conclusion 147 8 Crime and criminality 149 Origin stories: degeneration, neglect and delinquency 150 Hygiene and delinquency 151 Blaming mothers ..... and fathers 155 Delinquency as an ambivalent sign 156 Hooligans, ghettoes and gangs 159 Hooligans and moral panics 160 Hegemony and offensiveness 162 Media typologies 164 Racialised ghettoes 165 Representation and governmentality 169 Conclusion 170 9 Health and medicine 172 Experimental observations 173 Charting physical and psychological growth 179 Interiority and development 183 A biomedicalisation of children's everyday lives? 187 Realigning children's agency 197 Conclusion 201 10 Play and consumer culture 203 Toward a sociological account of play 204 Social and cultural histories of childhood play 207 The dedifferentiation of childhood and adulthood? 210 The marketisation of children's culture 215 Conclusion 223 11 Political economies of labour 225 From preindustrial to industrial labour 225 Fordism, post-Fordism and postindustrial labour 231 Children's labour and the global economy 238 Conclusion 243 12 Rights and political participation 244 The capacities of children: genealogies of the family and.the.political 244 Universalism and humanitarian NGOs 257 Sovereignty and humanity 263 Conclusion 268 Part IV Conclusions 271 13 Conclusions 273 Five myths of childhood studies 273 The myth of the individual child 273 The myth of identity and difference 274 The myth of divided, separated and homogeneous space 276 The myth of scale 278 The myth of the social agent 279 Descriptive assemblages, social observation and biopower 280 Post-childhood studies? 285 What lines are to be drawn? 287 Bibliography 291 Index 311 The idea of children's agency is central to the growing field of childhood studies. In this book David Oswell argues for new understandings of children's agency. He traces the transformation of children and childhood across the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and explores the dramatic changes in recent years to children's everyday lives as a consequence of new networked, mobile technologies and new forms of globalisation. The author reviews existing theories of children's agency as well as providing the theoretical tools for thinking of children's agency as spatially, temporally and materially complex. With this in mind, he surveys the main issues in childhood studies, with chapters covering family, schooling, crime, health, consumer culture, work and human rights. This is a comprehensive text intended for students and academic researchers across the humanities and social sciences interested in the study of children and childhood (source : site de l'éditeur) David Oswell uses the idea of children's agency to survey the main issues in childhood studies, including family, schooling, crime, health, consumer culture, work and human rights. He traces the transformation of children and childhood across two centuries and places children's agency in the context of leading theoretical approaches.