Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood

Florian Esser is a lecturer in the Department of Social Pedagogy and Organisation Studies at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. Meike S. Baader is Professor for General Educational Science at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. Tanja Betz is Professor for Childhood Studies and Elementary and Primary Education in the Department of Educational Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Beatrice Hungerland is Professor of Childhood Studies at the Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences, Germany.

• Reconceptualising agency and childhood: an introduction. Section I: Theoretical Perspectives 1. Re-aligning children's agency and re-socialising children in Childhood Studies. 2. Children as participants in practices: the challenges which practice theories pose to an actor-centred sociology of childhood. 3. Neither "thick" nor "thin": reconceptualising agency and childhood relationally. 4. Children's agency: contributions from feminist and ethic of care theories to Sociology of Childhood. 5. Meanings of children's agency: when and where does agency begin and end? 6. Extending agency: the merit of relational approaches for Childhood Studies. Section II: Children as Actors in Research 7. Troubling children's voices in research. 8. Playing with socially constructed identity positions: accessing and reconstructing children's perspectives and positions through ethnographic fieldwork and creative workshops. Section III: Agency in Historical Perspective 9. Tracing and contextualising childhood agency and generational order from historical and systematic perspectives. 10. Martha Muchow's research on children's life space: a classic study on childhood in the light of the present. 11. "Children need boundaries": concepts of children's agency in German parents' guidebooks since 1950. Section IV: Transnational and Majority World Perspectives of Agency 12. Exploring children's agency across majority and minority world contexts. 13. Do the 'mollycoddled' act?: children, agency and disciplinary entanglements in India. 14. Context matters! On non-working children's citizenship in South Indian children's rights initiatives as a practice. Section V: Agency in Institutions of Childhood 15. Agency: educators' imaginations as triggered by photographs of pre-school children. 16. Agency and the conceptualization of minors in child protection case files. 17. Children as social actors and addressees? Reflections on the constitution of actors and (student) subjects in elementary school peer cultures. 18. Accounting for children's agency in research on educational inequality: the influence of children's own practices on their academic habitus in elementary school. Conclusion 19. Potentials of a reconceptualised concept of agency.

"The volume provides a comprehensive and reliable overview of the international discussion on the concept of agency that has taken place over the past thirty years, focusing on childhood studies in the Global North."Prof. Dr. Manfred Liebel, Master of Arts Childhood Studies and Children‘s Rights (MACR) an der Fachhochschule