scholarly journals Agência das Crianças / Children’s Agency

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-35
Author(s):  
David Oswell
Keyword(s):  
Children’S Agency

scholarly journals Ethical complexities in child co-research

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merle Spriggs ◽  
Lynn Gillam
Keyword(s):  
Research Ethics ◽  
Research Methodology ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Ethics Committees ◽  
Research Ethics Committees ◽  
Human Research Ethics ◽  
Children’S Agency ◽  
New Findings ◽  
Need For Support ◽  
And Training

Child co-research has become popular in social research involving children. This is attributed to the emphasis on children’s rights and is seen as a way to promote children’s agency and voice. It is a way of putting into practice the philosophy, common amongst childhood researchers, that children are experts on childhood. In this article, we discuss ethical complexities of involving children as co-researchers, beginning with an analysis of the literature, then drawing on data from interviews with researchers who conduct child co-research. We identify six ethical complexities, some of which are new findings which have not been mentioned before in this context. In light of these possible ethical complexities, a key finding is for researchers to be reflexive – to reflect on how the research may affect child co-researchers and participants before the research starts. A separate overriding message that came out in responses from the researchers we interviewed was the need for support and training for child co-researchers. We conclude by providing a list of questions for reflexive researchers to ask of themselves when they use child co-research methodology. We also provide important questions for human research ethics committees to ask when they review projects using child co-research.

Rethinking Children's Independent Mobility

Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesley Murray
Keyword(s):  
Independent Mobility ◽  
Children’S Agency ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Fictional Story

The concept of “children's independent mobility,” which originates in a study carried out between 1971 and 1990, underpins much of the research on children's mobilities. The study used particular criteria, based on parental determination of children's abilities and freedoms, to construct a notion of independence. This article contributes to previous work challenging the assumptions underlying this conceptualization of independence and suggests a rethinking of children's mobilities to more firmly incorporate children's agency and imagination. It does so first by critically reviewing existing scholarship and second by engaging with an example of a fictional story, Emil and the Detectives, which itself sets out to privilege both of these key aspects of children's mobilities.

scholarly journals Containment: Exploring the concept of agency in children’s statutory encounters with social workers

Childhood ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Morrison ◽  
Viviene Cree ◽  
Gillian Ruch ◽  
Karen Michelle Winter ◽  
Mark Hadfield ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Children’S Agency

This article examines children’s agency in their interactions with social workers during statutory encounters in a child protection context. It draws from a UK-wide ethnographic study. It finds that much of social workers’ responses to children’s agency in this context are best understood as a form of ‘containment’. In doing so, it offers an original and significant contribution to the theoretical understanding of children’s agency, as well as its application in social work practice.

Making children’s ‘agency’ visible: Towards the localisation of a concept in theory and practice

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 200-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Edmonds
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
Analytic Tool ◽  
Cultural Systems ◽  
Children’S Agency ◽  
Development Policies ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
New Directions ◽  
New Research

The concept of ‘agency’ is regularly put forward as an analytic tool to help understand, evaluate and act upon places around the world, through social development policies and programmes ostensibly designed to support or increase children’s agency. This article reflects on empirical research into children’s agency spanning a range of international contexts over two decades and offers new insights through critical engagement with a growing body of work on the ‘localisation’ of social development and humanitarian responses in international settings. It suggests that the largely normative ways in which the concept of agency is invoked as an analytic tool for understanding human experience universally effectively renders children’s agency invisible to us. This is because it is more a description of a particular discourse than something which actually helps us to understand and make visible children’s socio-culturally grounded ‘agentic practice’ from place to place. This article argues for new directions in research and practice to localise agency that are critical to the central commitments of interpretive social science. These new directions include (a) a new research agenda which can go beyond children’s ‘own perspectives’ to the discovery, description and analysis of agency in socio-cultural terms, to ensure it can function as an analytic tool for learning about socio-cultural phenomena which help animate local concepts of agency; and (b) the development of agency-related policies and programmes that are grounded in such locally situated concepts of agency developed through understanding local socio-cultural systems rather than externally derived socio-cultural assumptions about childhood and children’s agency.

Young children in Kyrgyzstan: Agency in tight hierarchical structures

Childhood ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 502-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doris Bühler-Niederberger ◽  
Jessica Schwittek
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Mixed Method ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Poor Country ◽  
Hierarchical Structures ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Children’S Agency ◽  
Age Appropriate ◽  
Children’S Views ◽  
Relational Order

This article focuses on preschool children in Kyrgyzstan, a poor country of the former Soviet union. What are children’s views on the relational order in this transition society, and what is their contribution to the reproduction or challenging of this order? The authors use and elaborate the theoretical concepts of ‘agency’ and ‘collectivism-individualism’ to develop age-appropriate research instruments and to interpret children’s views. Data were collected in a mixed-method field study. The presented results show children’s agency in a tight hierarchical structure, revealing both complicity and self-assertion, occasionally resulting in opposition.

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