We compare two analyses of
the same ‘draw-and-write’ exercises in which 128 Zimbabwean children
represented their HIV-affected peers. The first, informed by the ‘New Social
Studies of Childhood’, easily identified examples of independent reflection and
action by children. The second, informed by Sen’s understandings of agency,
drew attention to the negative consequences of many of the choices available to
children, and the contextual limits on outcomes children themselves would
value: the support of caring adults, adequate food, and opportunities to
advance their health and safety. Conceptualisations of agency need to take
greater account of children’s own accounts of outcomes they value, rather than
identifying agency in any form of independent reflection and action per se.
…In line with the New Social Studies of Childhood, our first
analysis dutifully sought out and documented instances of independent reflection
and action by children. To what extent might we regard these as evidence for
agency? Children were depicted as exercising agency in the sense of reflecting
and acting, but because they often had so little access to significant power,
resources or support, the actions they performed did not bring them closer to
the outcomes they would value. We argue for the need for renewed debate about
how best to conceptualise children’s actions in contexts that (i) provide them
with a highly constrained set of options for exercising initiative, (ii) where
the exercise of choice in one arena of their lives might be associated with
negative long term outcomes in another; and/or (iii) where the outcomes of
their actions may not take them any closer to their own perceptions of a good
life. In conceptualising agency, instead of positing independent action as an end in itself, we prefer to regard
independent action as the means to
end that actors themselves would value.
In a tangentially related debate in the field of
gender studies, critical researchers of women in the global south are
increasingly concerned by a tendency to exaggerate the agency of women in
situations of extreme subordination and coercion. Attempts by well-meaning
academics, activists and policy makers to avoid depicting marginalised women as
victims have led to a situation where “the search for agency in the least
favourable situations has reached almost epidemic proportions” (Madhok et al., 2013: loc 554). In the process,
they argue that feminist scholars – motivated by the desire to avoid
potentially offensive depictions of ‘third world women’ as passive victims –
have sometimes unwittingly aligned themselves with individualistic neoliberal
understandings of agency and personhood. They have done this through advancing
understandings of agency as any form of decontextualised individual choice and
through celebrating actions by women that lead to nothing more than their basic
survival. In the process they “neglect the oppressive structures of material
and discursive power”, generating understandings of agency that undermine
attention to, and analysis of, gendered oppression (Wilson 2012): loc 2253)…
There is no doubt that, as the NSCC has now firmly
established, children are able to act, show resourcefulness and survive, often
with little help or input from adults. To that extent they are ‘competent
social actors’. This was a vitally important point to make in the 1990s.
However in the light of the strong body of research generated by the NSCC
tradition, we believe this can now be taken as a given. We argue that the next
step for researchers is to pay greater attention to the factors that mediate
between so-called agency and its outcomes, and, most important, pay particular
attention to children’s own accounts of their hopes for the future, and
children’s own visions of what would constitute a ‘good life’ from one social
setting to another.
Below: Draw-and-write of a child suffering with HIV/AIDS
Below: Draw-and-write about a child carer
aDepartment of Social Psychology, The
London School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AE, United
Kingdom
bBiomedical Research and Training
Institute, Harare, Zimbabwe
cSchool of Applied Human Sciences,
University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban, South Africa
dDepartment of Public Health, University of
Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
eDepartment of Infectious Disease
Epidemiology, Imperial College School of Public Health, London SW7 2AZ, United
Kingdom
*Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 207 955 7701.
