ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a substantialist understanding of agency, which predominates in Childhood Studies. In the recent past, this key concept has come up against its limits within empirical research, and alternatives have thus been developed, which claim that children have a “thin” agency. Continuing in this vein but also challenging this view, this chapter aims to create a definition, based on relational social theories, of what childhood is and what agency thus means for children in different social contexts. Systematically and empirically, it will be shown that first, the social world is made up of both human and non-human actors; second, identities are produced situationally, in relation to these different actors; and third, children, like all other social actors, have different identities in different social networks. A relational understanding of this kind can reconstruct agency outside of the classic dualisms of personality and society, child and adult, action and structure, and so on.
