ABSTRACT

Children’s agency within childhood studies has become a taken-for-granted feature and starting point for researching children and childhood. While children’s agency has achieved a level of recognition within the research community, there is some debate as to whether agency has legitimacy in a broader political context. To what extent is children’s social participation recognised by policymakers and professionals as making a significant difference. In this chapter, I explore the nature and possibilities of children’s agency from a UK political and policy perspective. In focusing on the recognition of children’s agency, issues in relation to identity and ontology become central. At the same time, there is an expectation that the heightening of children’s ‘presence’ and status would have implications for their material and social wellbeing. I draw on Fraser’s (2000) analysis of the relationship between ‘recognition’ and ‘distribution’ in arguing that the former can obscure questions around the distribution of children’s agency. The issue of distribution generates questions on the groups of children that are likely to benefit materially from the public recognition of agency. Moreover, if we explore the relationship between different groups of children and the deployment of agency, we can identify different conceptions of agency. In the second part of the chapter, we focus on the distribution of agency and discuss the way that middle-class and working-class children in the UK deploy their agency.