Rethinking children’s agency: Power, assemblages, freedom and materiality

Abstract

This article attempts to rethink agency for childhood studies, drawing on Foucault’s theorisations of power, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage, Bennett’s vital materialism and Grosz’s account of Bergson’s conception of freedom. I argue that (1) agency is ambivalent, that is, it has no intrinsic ethical value; (2) agency is not a property of individual children but happens within assemblages; (3) it is analytically useful to distinguish between more routine and more inventive tendencies of agency; and (4) agency arises in the relations between the organic and the inorganic, as life actualises the virtual potential of matter for indeterminacy. These ideas contribute to ongoing debates about agency within the field, and connect these debates with wider questions about children’s relations with materials and nonhumans.

Agency, autonomy and self-determination: Questioning key concepts of childhood studies

“…Theoretically, this has led to a range of writings (e.g. see Esser et al, 2016;Spyrou, 2018), which suggest that children's agency needs to be considered relationally: bringing in materiality and nonhuman resources or affordances (Gallacher, 2015;Gallagher, 2019;Prout, 2005;Sultan and Andresen, 2019); perceiving children in context and in relationships with other people (Punch, 2016); and recognising the structures of intergenerational orders (Leonard, 2015). Wyness (2015) captures several of these ideas in his description of agency:…”

Sweets are ‘my best friend’: belonging, bargains and body-shaming in working class girls’ food and health relationships

“…Assemblages cohere through certain rhythmic regularities, as a specific 'range of gestures, materials, rules, spaces and other machinic and expressive elements' (Kullman 2015, 265), as seen for example, as our participants move between home meals, school meals, café/fast food franchises, and shop/supermarket visits. Agency is understood here as not located in the child or elements of the obesogenic environment: rather inasmuch as individual agency can be identified, it is premised in capacities for bodies/elements of the assemblage to affect and be affected by others, including through the introduction of new elements and rhythms, which create new assemblages (Gallagher 2019;Kitching 2020).…”

Towards geographies of child protection

“…Child protection systems are then a dispositif (see Gallagher, 2019); a complex network of actors, non‐humans, discourses, and legal and administrative processes. These systems have emerged from complex moral and philanthropic propositions but with significant elements of control embedded within them.…”

“…We adopt a Foucauldian approach to child protection systems and practices, specifically conceptualising these as a dispositif (see Gallagher, 2019); a constellation of web‐like institutional, forms of knowledge, laws and discourse. Positioning child protection as a dispositif , we then discuss four themes to illustrate the ways in which geographical approaches might yield important insights.…”