Exploring Agency in Children and Youth: Expressions and Constraints

In this critical study, readers are asked to consider the ways in which children and youth are constrained by social, cultural, political, and economic forces and how they overcome the false adult-child dichotomy to exercise their own agency. Among the issues raised in the chapters of this volume is the place of institutional and residential care and a child’s right to determine where they live; children as the subjects of academic research; and the voice of children and youth in the justice system, particularly that of Indigenous youth. Each chapter explores and challenges the notion that only adults can understand and determine the needs of young people by providing examples of children and youth who already participate in complex systems and environments and by arguing for an acknowledgement of their rights and agency in each circumstance. By dismantling the Western world’s romantic notion of childhood innocence, the authors critically explore understandings of young people as agents in their own worlds.