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WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch Neoliberal agency, relational agency, and the representation of the agentic child in the Sociology of Childhood Clark, J. This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © Miss Jessica Clark, 2021. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Neoliberal agency, relational agency, and the representation of the agentic child in the Sociology of Childhood Jessica Clark April 2021 A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Westminster for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Sociology, Criminology and Politics University of Westminster Supervisors Dr Francis R. White Professor Val Gillies 1 Contents Abstract 3 List of Publications 4 Introduction 6 The Context of Childhood Studies 6 Agency in Childhood Studies 9 Relational Agency 11 Relational Agency and Popular Culture 14 Caring for People and Caring for Things 17 Agency and Participatory Research with Children 24 Children’s Agency and the Construction of Knowledge 28 Agency as Responsibility 34 Conclusion 36 References Appendices Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C Appendix D Appendix E Appendix F Appendix G Appendix H Appendix I 2 Abstract This critical commentary fulfils the regulations laid out by the University of Westminster as part of the submission for the award of PhD by Published Works. It accompanies nine published works that form the body of this submission and outlines their coherence, originality and contribution to knowledge. This body of work were published over a period of 6 years (2013-2019) and collectively is situated within, and at the intersection of the fields of sociology and childhood studies. In these works I interrogate the canonical concept of agency and I argue that the inherent contradictions of how agency is conceptualised, has more to do with the neoliberal model of agency being applied than whether children can and do exercise agency. The spaces of popular culture and of research with children are both contexts within which, dominant images of the child are reified and indeed produced. They offer both serious and playful spaces to critique and to reimagine the concept of agency and the potential that it offers. By considering explicitly how agency intersects with related concepts of vulnerability, care, participation, relationships and voice this body of work demonstrates there is significant analytical value in the concept of agency as applied to children and childhood. However, neoliberal models, which prize self-interested, individualistic, independent autonomy fail to acknowledge the lived realities of children’s lives or their situated and embedded nature in families, peer networks and assemblages of people and things. Like adults, children are not wholly agentic, nor are they utterly powerless. Rather, as I argue in this commentary, the agency of children is situated, contextual, contingent, and most importantly, relational; emerging in interesting and unexpected ways. 3 List of Publications Clark, J. (2019) Biker Gangs and Boyhood Agency in Akira, in Castro, I.E. and Clark, J. (eds.) Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction: Travel, Technology, Time, Langham, MA: Lexington, pp. 109-130 Clark, J. (2018) Speddies with Spraypaints: intersections of agency, childhood and disability in award winning young adult fiction, in Castro, I. and Clark, J. (eds.) (2018) Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen and In Between, New York: Lexington Clark, J. and Duschinksy, R. (2018) Young Masculinities, Purity and Danger: framings of boys and girls in policy discourses of sexualisation, Sexualities, Vol. 22: Issue 7 https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460717736718 Clark, J. (2018) There’s plenty more clunge in the sea: young masculinities and sexual talk, Jnl Media, Sexualisation and Society, Sage Open, https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244018769756 Clark, J. (2018) Embodiment and Representation, in Boggis, A. (ed.) Dis/Abled Childhoods? A Transdisciplinary Introduction. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, Clark, J. and Richards, S. (2018) Research with Disabled Children: Past, Present and Future, in Boggis, A., (ed.) Dis/Abled Childhoods? A Transdisciplinary Introduction. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan 4 Clark, J. and Richards, S. (2017) The Cherished Conceits of Research with Children: Do participatory methods that seek the voice of the agentic child deliver what they promise? In Castro, I. Harger, B. and Swauger, M. (eds.) Researching Children and Youth: Methodological issues, strategies and innovations, Sociological Studies in Childhood and Youth, Vol. 22, Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Richards, S., Clark, J. and Boggis, A. (2015) Ethical Research with Children: Untold Narratives and Taboos, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan Clark, J. (2013) Passive, heterosexual and female: Constructing appropriate childhoods in the ‘sexualisation of childhood’ debate, Sociological Research Online, 18(2) DOI; 10.5153/sro.3079 5 Commentary Introduction This critical commentary fulfils the regulations laid out by the University of Westminster as part of the submission for the award of PhD by Published Works. It accompanies nine published works that form the body of this submission and outlines their coherence, originality and contribution to knowledge. This body of work were published over a period of 6 years (2013-2019) during my tenure as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at the University of Suffolk and latterly the University of Essex. They do not represent all of the publications from this period but are the pivotal pieces which best document the ‘narrative’ of my theoretical work and contribution to the sociological study of childhood. Collectively the body of work submitted is situated within, and at the intersection of the fields of sociology and childhood studies. The Context of Childhood Studies Attention to childhood and children’s experiences as a distinct field of study in its own right emerged from the 1970s onwards, sweeping through the academy and institutions of welfare and childhood. It signaled a seismic shift in the exploration of childhood and children’s lives in the social sciences. Traditionally children within academic study were positioned not as persons with voice but as objects of concern (Prout and Hallet 2003). In the previous sub-disciplinary silos where childhood was located, such as psychological understandings of intelligence (Thorndike 1916), adult perspectives reigned (Clark 2018a). Linear models of development that charted performance, behaviour or growth were the measures of children’s successes or failures. Children often relegated to the role of adult in waiting with limited ability to contribute to their own worlds or wider cultures (Kehily 2012). In contrast, the 6 discourse of children as agentic, rights bearers encapsulated in the ‘new’ sociology of childhood positioned children not as limited to their potential as future investments but as active beings in their present ‘child’ state. In their seminal work, James, Jenks, and Prout’s (1998) presented children’s abilities to actively contribute to their social worlds as a central tenet, an organizing feature of their manifesto for a new way of understanding children and childhood. This was a paradigmatic challenge to previous dominant ideas of dependence, maturation, and unknowingness. The ‘new’ sociology of childhood and its advocates including for example, Alanen (1988), Corsaro (1997), and James, Jenks, and Prout (1998), positioned children as agentic beings and experts in their social worlds. Simultaneously, attention to children as rights bearers rose, including notably the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989. Outside of the academy provisions surrounding the family, school and welfare approaches were adapted too (see Children Act 1989) to better reflect this new rights status of the ‘being’ child with voice (Clark and Richards 2017). Childhood Studies as an academic field in its own right reached critical mass in the 1990s with the formation of specific journals such as Childhood in 1993, the development of higher education programmes of study and the first UK professors in childhood studies, early years and play. The idea that children have agency or can act agentically has achieved normative status, constructed almost as commonsense in Childhood Studies (Clark and Richards 2017). The recognition of agency and voice as attributes of childhood paved the way for creative and progressive accounts of children’s lives, often in their own words and 7 on their own terms. These approaches to agency and participation were transformative and in the academy and elsewhere there was a rush to ensure children’s voices were heard and rights upheld (Clark 2019:5). Such scholarship should be celebrated, it paved the way for insightful theoretical and methodological approaches to seek understanding of children’s worlds outside of adult constructions. However, childhood studies, just like all disciplines, adopted particular foundational ideas to explain and understand children and childhood. I argue in the works presented here that these conceptual frameworks require critical, reflexive interrogation. Some thirty years on from its emergence childhood studies is certainly strong enough to withstand