The Agency of Children: From Family to Global Human Rights

by David Oswell

• ISBN13: 9780521604703
• ISBN10: 0521604702
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-02-25
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Introduction

Agency after Ariès: sentiments, natures and spaces

Social Theories of Children and Childhood

Modern social theories: agency and structure

Partial and situated agency

Subjectivity, experience and post-social assemblages

Spaces of Experience, Experimentation and Power

Family and household

School and education

Crime and criminality

Health and medicine

Play and consumer culture

Political economies of labour

Rights and political participation

Conclusions

Conclusions

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