2018 Book DisclosingChildhoods

studies in childhood and youth
disclosing
childhoods
research and knowledge production
for a critical childhood studies
spyros spyrou
Studies in Childhood and Youth
Series Editors
Afua Twum-Danso Imoh
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Nigel Thomas
University of Central Lancashire
Preston, UK
Spyros Spyrou
European University Cyprus
Nicosia, Cyprus
Penny Curtis
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
This well-established series embraces global and multi-disciplinary
scholarship on childhood and youth as social, historical, cultural and
material phenomena. With the rapid expansion of childhood and youth
studies in recent decades, the series encourages diverse and emerging
theoretical and methodological approaches. We welcome proposals
which explore the diversities and complexities of children’s and young
people’s lives and which address gaps in the current literature relating to
childhoods and youth in space, place and time.
Studies in Childhood and Youth will be of interest to students and
scholars in a range of areas, including Childhood Studies, Youth
Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Politics, Psychology,
Education, Health, Social Work and Social Policy.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14474
Spyros Spyrou
Disclosing
Childhoods
Research and Knowledge Production
for a Critical Childhood Studies
Spyros Spyrou
Department of Social and Behavioral
Sciences
European University Cyprus
Nicosia, Cyprus
Studies in Childhood and Youth

ISBN 978-1-137-47903-7 ISBN 978-1-137-47904-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47904-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936586
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by
similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein
or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to
jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © ImageZoo/Alamy Stock Photo
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
part of Springer Nature
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom
To my parents, with love and appreciation!
Acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to my parents—for their unparalleled kindness

and love, and for their simplicity and humility which have been an end-
less source of inspiration for me—to my late father for always trusting
in me, and to my mom for holding us all together day in and day out!
I am grateful to my wife Sondra for her love, friendship, and faith
in me. Without her enthusiasm and encouragement, I would not have
pursued this project: she is my anchor!
I am also grateful to my two wonderful daughters—Sophia and
Simone—who make every day joyful and exciting and help me put
everything in perspective. They both know how to make me think…
deeply about children and childhood, and how to appreciate the small
things…that matter.
Special thanks to my sisters and their families who are always on our
side with their love and support, especially when things in life get com-
plicated. And, to my American family for their love and hospitality and
the much-needed summer break.
I also wish to thank my colleagues and friends with whom I have col-
laborated on various projects and shared my thoughts and ideas about
many of the issues discussed in this book. I am particularly indebted
vii
viii
Acknowledgements
to Alexia Panayiotou, Miranda Christou, Eleni Theodorou, and

Constantina Charalambous. My international colleagues and friends are
too many to list here, and most of them are referenced in this book. I
am particularly grateful to Madeleine Leonard, Anna Sparrman, Hanne
Warming, and Rita Nunes who invited me to share my work with their
colleagues and students, and to Dan Cook and Rachel Rosen for the
fruitful discussions we continue having on childhood.
Many thanks to Amelia Derkatsch, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan,
who has provided constant support and advice throughout this process.
And, last but not least, my heartfelt thanks to all the children who par-
ticipated with me in various projects over the years and helped me to
understand a bit better what it is to be a child.
Contents
1 Disclosing Childhoods 1
2 Towards a Decentering of ‘The Child’ 15
3 Knowledge Production in Childhood Studies 53
4 The Production of Children’s Voices 85
5 What Kind of Agency for Children? 117
6 Children’s Participation in Research

as a Knowledge Practice 157
7 The Ethics and Politics of Knowledge Production

in Childhood Studies 197
Index 231
ix
1
Disclosing Childhoods
Introduction
In 1906, Dudley Kidd published his Savage Childhood, an ethnographic
account of Kafir (black South African) children. The following two
excerpts come from the preface of the book:
We cannot fully understand the structure of an animal until we study the

development of the embryo; zoology and morphology are bound to start
with embryology; we cannot understand the mind of the adult until we
study the development of the mind of the child; psychology is bound to
start with child-study: we cannot understand the social or religious life of
civilised races until we study the development of the social and religious
life of savage tribes; sociology and theology are bound to start with eth-
nography; finally, we cannot understand the life of the savage until we
study the childhood of the savage. (vii)
It is safe to say that in a hundred years’ time people will be wondering

why we, with all our boasted love, for knowledge and with all our pro-
fessed sympathy for our subject races, allowed our priceless opportunity
© The Author(s) 2018 1

S. Spyrou, Disclosing Childhoods, Studies in Childhood and Youth,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47904-4_1
2
S. Spyrou
to slip by unheeded. I have, therefore, been more anxious to record the

facts than to indicate their bearing on current anthropological theory.
(ix–x)
In the book’s first chapter, Kidd proceeds to describe Kafir children as

animal-like:
No one can look at a number of little naked Kafir children sprawling on

the ground, playing games, setting bird-traps, tumbling over one another
like so many little puppies, without laughing and saying beneath his
breath, “What delightful little animals.”
Yet, these animal-like children, as he continues to tell us, appear to be

cunning: “The children do not “show off ” before Europeans, and so it
is as necessary to stalk them at play as it is to stalk wild animals in order
to discover their habits.” When he asks the children if they know how
to play the string game ‘Cat’s Cradle’, they deny ever hearing about it.
But, after showing them the first move in the game and walking away,
Kidd is surprised to find out from his hiding place that the children
knew, after all, how to play the game all too well.
In the following two pages of the book, Kidd goes on to paint the
picture of the Kafir adult—what these children will eventually come to
be: ‘full of animal spirits’; ‘unpleasant’; ‘unreflective’; ‘without the least
forethought’. The gulf between the Kafir world that he comes to see and
understand and his own—as a civilized European—appears to be vast
and Kidd is not shy about letting his readers know.
If this brief description from Savage Childhood sounds prejudiced,
racist, and imperialist it is because it is. Of course, we see Kidd’s writ-
ing as biased and racist from our contemporary vantage point and the
luxury of historical distance afforded to us by more than a century of
social change. At the time of the book’s publication, Kidd’s intended
audience would not, very likely, see his words as anything but an ethno-
graphic account—and an objective one for that matter—which aimed
to depict the life and worlds of ‘savage children’. Kidd’s account would
make sense in the larger ideological context of colonization, imperialism
and the prevailing racial ideologies. But, there is much more to untangle
1 Disclosing Childhoods
3
in these brief passages than simply recognizing their underlying racist

character.
In the first excerpt, Kidd is putting forth a clear exposition of the
overall theoretical framework which guides his work as an ethnographer:
to understand adults, we need to study children; to understand adult savages
we need to study savage children; and to understand the civilized we need
to study the savages. Kidd’s theoretical assumptions are so common sense
for his time that he sees his whole effort as simply one of recording facts.
Yet, Savage Childhood is clearly guided, as his opening words indicate,
by the prevailing social/cultural evolutionist understanding of anthro-
pology about human developmental which posited that societies go
through different stages of development; studying Kafir children, then,
was a means to unravelling these processes, from savage child, to savage
adult, to civilized man. Recapitulation theory (borrowed from biology
and applied to the study of cultures), provided Kidd and his contempo-
rary anthropologists with answers to their ontological questions which
could then be used to inform and justify a racist, colonial worldview.
In that sense, it was certainly not a concern with children themselves
that guided Kidd’s ethnographic study but rather an interest in figur-
ing out human social development at large. And, though he goes on to
acknowledge that Kafir children were well-aware of his positionality and
the influence his presence had on them, he proceeds to describe Kafir
adults as ‘unpleasant’ and ‘unreflective’, characteristics which juxtapose
those which any civilized European of his time was expected to have.
His decision to observe the children in hiding might also raise objec-
tions today about the ethics of doing research, a concern however which
would not have raised any eyebrows among ethnographers at the time.
Granted, these brief excerpts are only glimpses into the representa-
tion about Kafir children that Kidd produces through his writing. A
reading of the entire ethnography would reveal much more about his
role in producing this particular representation; it would also reveal
much more about what he says (and what he does not) about these chil-
dren and how the particular representation he offers us is highly selec-
tive and ideological.
Nevertheless, these short passages offer us a good starting point
for reflecting on the role of research in producing knowledge about
4
S. Spyrou
children and childhood. The ease with which we can identify Kidd’s rac-
ist representations of Kafir children is unremarkable. Much has changed
since then including the way we study and write about children. It is
easy to spot Kidd’s situatedness in the ethnography as a white man
whose account of Kafir children is clearly framed by the theoretical,
epistemological and ethical parameters of his time not to mention the
historical, cultural and social context in which he carried out research
and the racial dynamics which played out in the particular context at
the time.
Kidd’s expert and authoritative ethnographic gaze at the beginning
of the twentieth century when he published Savage Childhood is from
today’s vantage point easily deconstructed. We are able to see through the
representations of these children, to identify exclusions and biases, and
to situate them in the realm of ideology rather than ‘fact’ as Kidd him-
self hoped his account would be. The larger problematic—knowledge
production—to which this brief analysis of Savage Childhood points to, is
of course always current and consequential.
For contemporary scholarship in childhood studies, the challenge
is to develop an ongoing reflexive outlook towards its own knowledge
practices, an attitude which will allow it to produce knowledge which
recognizes its own situatedness and limits but is, at the same time, com-
mitted to a critical and ethical understanding of children and child-
hood. To the extent that this is possible for the field as a whole, it can
lead, I argue, to a more mindful, critical, and responsible childhood
studies. This book hopes to contribute towards this direction.
Disclosing Childhoods
Disclosing Childhoods is a critical reflection on knowledge production in
childhood studies. It has grown out of my own emerging understand-
ings of childhood studies as a field with its own agendas, frustrations, and
promises. What came out of the 1980s as a result of the discomfort with
the earlier paradigms has been highly productive, stimulating a significant
amount of research which has contributed a great deal to our understand-
ings of children and childhood. More than three decades of scholarly
5
production has helped us rethink children and childhood by bringing

forth new ways of seeing. Yet, at the same time, the field as a whole has
failed to engage fully with theoretical and methodological developments
beyond its own territory and risks becoming marginalized and self-
contained (see Moran-Ellis 2010: 197). The tendency to produce more
of the same, reflected in the emblematic socially-constructed and agentic
child, is one indication of the field’s reproductive inclinations.
I am not suggesting that there is no work which seeks to push the
field in new, challenging and productive directions. On the contrary,
there are several such ‘instigators’ whose contributions are extremely val-
uable in this respect and their work is highlighted throughout this book.
Yet, I think that childhood studies needs, at this particular juncture of
its development, to become both more self-critical and innovative. The
sense of discomfort with the field’s reproductive inclinations should not
result in paralysis but serve as an invitation for creative and imaginative
experimentation which can lead to new, uncharted but potentially pro-
ductive territory for childhood studies.
Disclosing Childhoods seeks to contribute towards a more critical dis-
cussion of research and knowledge production in childhood studies.
My key argument is that research plays a significant role in the produc-
tion of knowledge about children and childhood and therefore a crit-
ical childhood studies needs to reflect systematically on its knowledge
practices. That research produces diverse representations of childhood
should come as no surprise.1 However, my argument—that research
produces childhoods—does not constitute a radical constructivist
position which would deny the corporeal and material dimensions of
childhood and equate it with its discursive constructions (e.g., Stainton-
Rogers and Stainton Rogers 1992). Childhood, in other words, is not
simply constituted by discourse—it is not, that is, a story that we, adult
researchers, tell about children. Such a claim would simply be reduc-
tionist. What I argue instead, drawing mainly on the ontological turn
and new materialist thinking, is that childhood is a fundamentally
complex, material-semiotic phenomenon constituted through assem-
blages of heterogeneous materials which include human, non-human
and technological forces; it is both real in its materiality and discursively
constituted, at one and the same time.
6
S. Spyrou
It is this move away from the purely discursive to the material-

semiotic which justifies the book’s title, Disclosing Childhoods. I borrow
my use of the term ‘disclosure’ from Susan Heckman (2008: 109–112)2
to suggest that as childhood researchers we disclose (rather than mirror
which would imply getting reality right or construct which would mean
projecting the discursive onto the material world) particular childhoods
through our knowledge practices (Hekman 2010: 91).3 This position
assumes that there is a world out there which impacts our knowledge
of it but this knowledge is always mediated through our concepts and
theories. At any particular time we disclose/depict/enact a particular
version of this world because as childhood researchers we participate in
the very phenomena we seek to understand; as Barad points out “our
knowledge-making practices are social-material enactments that con-
tribute to, and are a part of, the phenomena we describe” (2007: 26).
Reality is, in this sense, produced multiply—the world is character-
ized by ontological multiplicity rather than singularity. And because we
are part of the worlds we seek to describe, we are also partly responsible
for the realities we help enact through our entangled activity with all
that is taking place in these worlds. In this formulation, epistemology
and ontology are brought together to illuminate a particular reality—
not the only reality or the only true reality but one which results from
specific entangled relations with consequent political and ethical impli-
cations (Hekman 2008: 110–111). Putting those rare cases of complete
fabrication aside, the knowledge practices we engage in as researchers
(including the ontological and epistemological assumptions under-
pinning them) disclose or ‘bring to light’ particular versions of reality
which reflect both the material and discursive conditions of their being.
By being part of the phenomena we seek to describe, as researchers we
exercise a certain degree of power. Informed by our concepts, our theo-
ries, our ethics and politics, we make decisions about what to disclose,
when and how to disclose it, and to whom to disclose it. These are all
decisions which influence the affect flows in any research assemblage
but not ones made in a vacuum. The materiality of life, its history and
the multiple constraints (both material and discursive) imposed upon
it, also shape any disclosure ‘constraining’ or shaping the knowledge
practices at work and the researcher’s own capacity to affect a disclosure.
7
The world does not stand still; it is agentic and impacts our knowl-
edge of it (Hekman 2010: 92). By bringing the actual events which
take place together with the researchers, their tools and the theories
they use to study them (by attending to, in other words, the research
assemblages at work) all within a relational ontological framework we
are able to have a more critical understanding of knowledge production
as practice (Fox and Alldred 2017: 152–153). Relationality then—as
the larger, overall framework from which material and discursive forces
become entangled and come to affect one another—becomes the prin-
cipal means through which we seek to understand the worlds which
unfold in front of us and the sense we make of them.
This kind of new materialist understanding makes no claims to ulti-
mate truths but is also not relativist. It recognizes that ontology and
epistemology are entangled and therefore disclosing one ontology of
the child (as opposed to another) can result in different material con-
sequences on children’s lives which can be compared and contrasted.
Disclosure allows us to argue about the material benefits of one reality
versus another without claiming that we are presenting ‘absolute truth’
or ‘yet another story’: “we can make arguments grounded in the mate-
rial consequences of the disclosure we practice” (Hekman 2010: 93).
Our knowledge practices, in this sense, are not tools enlisted to simply
describe what is out there but means through which we shape the very
realities we seek to describe. As Law and Singleton explain:
Academic work is performative. It is always an intervention. It’s just that

often the intervention may be invisible, denied or unacknowledged. And,
the difference it makes will always be unknowable in its entirety. (2013: 486)
Though this could be argued in relation to any social category, ‘the

child’ as a category is particularly amenable to reformulations. In
Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds, Castaneda (2002: 2–3) offers a crit-
ical argument about the child as a transformative and mutable poten-
tial whose incompleteness and instability open it up to re-formation:
“The child is not only in the making, but is also malleable—and so can
be made” (2002: 3). The childhoods we enact through our knowledge
practices reflect our particular understandings of ‘the child as a project’
8
S. Spyrou
which in turn reflect our commitments to, and preoccupations with,

these enactments. These varied commitments and preoccupations—
whether disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, political or ethical—
disclose a variety of childhoods which may resonate to a greater or lesser
degree with real children’s lives.
At one level, it is important to acknowledge the tension which
exists between conceptions of childhood as a singularity and of child-
hood(s) as a plurality. But though it might be useful to retain a notion
of childhood as a singular and universal phenomenon based on chil-
dren’s structural position in the generational order, it is also important
to acknowledge the variety of childhoods which emerge in local, par-
ticular contexts as these are variously constrained by structural forces
and as variously experienced by children themselves depending on their
social characteristics and biographical circumstances. Acknowledging
the diversity of enactments that research makes possible is an important
starting point towards the development of a critical and reflexive child-
hood studies. In one of the earliest texts in the sociology of childhood,
Jenks (1982: 24) reminded us that the researcher “also is responsible for
constituting the child, and that different images of the child are occa-
sioned by the different theoretic social worlds we inhabit.” Attending to
both theory and method and more generally to issues of ontology and
epistemology as necessary frameworks for situating knowledge produc-
tion in the field is a move which, I argue, may contribute towards child-
hood studies becoming more critical.
Turning to poststructuralist and posthumanist approaches, I attempt
to highlight more nuanced accounts of children’s worlds which reflect
both the messiness and complexity of their lives in general and their
participation in research in particular. I argue that a reconstructive
(rather than a mere deconstructive) logic which explores possibilities for
producing new knowledge and understandings of children can be both
useful and fruitful for contemporary childhood studies as a field.
To talk about disclosing childhoods then is to pinpoint the significant
role of childhood researchers in disclosing particular understandings
of children and childhood through their research work. Far from rel-
ativizing the production of knowledge, this understanding recognizes
that though in theory a vast number of childhoods may be produced
9
through research, in practice only a limited number of these childhoods

are enacted at any particular time: not all stories we tell about others can
be easily or convincingly brought forth especially because the materiality
of life can stand along the way (see Law 2004; Law and Urry 2004).
As Barad (2007: 185) so aptly put it, “There is an important sense in
which practices of knowing cannot fully be claimed as human practices,
not simply because we use nonhuman elements in our practices but
because knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelli-
gible to another part.” Our entanglements with the world, both human
and non-human, both material and discursive, is what constitutes
knowledge; as researchers we are part of the worlds we study and despite
our privilege and power in representing these worlds, we are certainly
not the only agents and power-holders.
Granted, the stories we bring forth are often those which are made
possible by our ‘epistemic cultures’, by “those sets of practices, arrange-
ments and mechanisms bound together by necessity, affinity and his-
torical coincidence which, in a given area of professional expertise,
make up how we know what we know” (Knorr Cetina 2007: 363). As
Foucault has shown us, in any particular era scientific knowledge is con-
stituted through particular configurations of power—regimes of truth—
which allow it to be brought forth and made visible (see Foucault 1979,
1980a, b). In her discussion of Foucault’s work, Hekman reminds
us that the epistemes which exist at any particular time disclose par-
ticular worlds which have particular material consequences on people’s
lives. But, and this is the important point here, other worlds—poten-
tially better ones—may come into being once new epistemes come
into existence (Hekman 2008: 111). It is in this way that the produc-
tion of knowledge carries with it both a sense of responsibility and
accountability.
My call in this book for a more ‘critical childhood studies’ is based
on the premise that the field needs to be critical in two senses as I have
alluded to above: (1) by being mindful and reflexive about the pro-
cesses through which it produces knowledge—that is, by scrutinizing
its knowledge practices, and (2) by being ethically and politically com-
mitted to disclosing knowledge which matters, that is, knowledge with
preferred material consequences on children’s lives. This second sense,
10
S. Spyrou
of course, does not rest on an a priori prescriptive understanding of a

‘right way’ to be ethically and politically committed which would, in
any case, be antithetical to the very argument I make in this book, that
knowledge and its production is a process and practice rather than an
outcome and hence an effect of multiple and shifting assembled forces.
It is, however, an orienting guide which can help childhood studies
move beyond the limits of its current relativist framework and to offer
informed insights into children’s lives which bypass the subjective-
objective impasse in knowledge production.
The Rest of the Book

The book is organized in seven chapters. Following this introductory
chapter which lays out the rationale and basic argument of the book,
the second chapter turns to a discussion of contemporary developments
in social theory—poststructuralist, feminist, and post-humanist—to
consider their impact on knowledge production in childhood studies
and their potential for further engagement with the field. I argue that in
different ways, the insights of these theoretical approaches offer the field
opportunities to decenter its very object of inquiry, namely, the child,
and to rethink its knowledge practices in ways which extent its scope.
I also consider what a critically reflexive childhood studies may look like
and how a diffractive way of thinking may help the field to reflect on,
and assess, its political and ethical commitments through the knowledge
it produces.
In the third chapter, I provide an overview of childhood studies’
development as a field by highlighting its underlying ontological and
epistemological foundations. Starting with the paradigmatic shift
brought about by ‘the new social studies of childhood’ in the 1980s,
I proceed to elaborate on the emerging critiques of the field and espe-
cially of its social constructionist orientation. Turning to poststruc-
turalist and posthumanist critiques, I discuss relational ontologies and
their potential for rethinking knowledge production in childhood
studies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the calls for more
11
interdisciplinary engagements in the field as a way towards tackling its

narrow conceptual reach. I argue that a certain kind of ‘undisciplining’
of childhood studies which allows for more theoretical and methodolog-
ical experimentation may provide the field with renewed potential for
critical knowledge production.
The following three chapters of the book each explore consecutively
a key concept of childhood studies, namely, voice, agency and partici-
pation. Each chapter offers a critique of the concept’s current use and
attempts to rethink it as a critical tool for knowledge production in the
field. Though the three concepts I focus on in this book are central to
childhood studies, they are not the only ones through which the field
needs to rethink its dominant frameworks. They are offered instead as
examples of the kind of deconstructive/reconstructive critique discussed
in Chapter 2 and its potential for enhancing critical knowledge prac-
tices. Similarly, the use of theoretical ideas discussed in the three chap-
ters is quite eclectic aiming to provoke productive insights rather than
a consistent and systematic critique which aims to valorize a particular
theoretical perspective.
Chapter 4 critiques the preoccupation with children’s voices in
childhood studies and the unexamined assumptions about the authen-
ticity and truth that children’s voices represent. Using poststructural-
ist insights, the chapter reflects on the interactional contexts in which
children’s voices emerge, the institutional contexts in which they are
embedded, and the discursive contexts which inform them in order to
critically assess questions of representation. Using Bakhtin’s dialogical
approach, and turning to the performative, multi-layered character of
voice and to its non-normative elements like silence, the chapter makes
the case for the production of more sensitive and ethical accounts of
children’s subjectivities through a relational, decentered lens.
In the fifth chapter, I explore the question of agency in childhood
studies. I first discuss the fascination of the field with agency as a foun-
dational concept of the ‘new paradigm’ along with the emerging cri-
tiques of the dominant, essentialist uses of the concept and the often
uncritical assumptions which surround it. I then proceed to situate the
discussion within broader debates about agency in the social sciences
12
S. Spyrou
and the ongoing attempts to transform the concept in more fruit-

ful ways by turning towards relational approaches which see agency
as assembled, distributed and networked. To illustrate the potential of
new materialism in rethinking agency in childhood research, I provide
an empirical example from my own work with Greek Cypriot children’s
border-crossing experiences. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of
what a critical understanding of agency might entail and how questions
of scale and scale-making in childhood studies can help the field to dis-
cuss more critically not only the concept of agency but also its knowl-
edge productions at large.
Chapter 6 provides a critical review of children’s participation in
research focusing in particular on ‘research by children’, a methodo-
logical approach which has been popularized in childhood studies for
promising to offer a qualitatively superior form of knowledge about
children and childhood from an insider perspective. I attempt to decon-
struct this form of knowledge, not by discrediting or invalidating it, but
by grounding it and drawing out its limits. Turning to children’s par-
ticipation in research as a process and knowledge practice, rather than
product or outcome, I argue for the utility of repositioning children’s
participation as a critical research tool for knowledge production in
childhood studies.
In the last chapter, I outline some of the key theoretical insights
explored in the book and their potential contributions towards the
development of a critical childhood studies. I make the case for a ‘crit-
ically open’ childhood studies which is aware of the irreducible charac-
ter of its very object of inquiry—the child—and mindful about its own
ontological entanglements with knowledge. I consider these insights in
light of the ethics and politics of knowledge production in childhood
studies and the material effects they have on children’s lives.
Notes
1. See, for instance, the discussion on the plurality of approaches to the
study of childhood put forth by James et al. (1998).
13
2. The notion of ‘disclosure’ has also been discussed by other philosophers

including Martin Heidegger, Charles Taylor and Nikolas Kompridis.
3. Hekman (2010: 91) borrows the term ‘disclosure’ from Rouse (2002)
but builds and expands on it.
References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entan-
glement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Castaneda, C. (2002). Figurations: Child, bodies, worlds. Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison
(A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1980a). The history of sexuality. Volume 1: An introduction
(R. Hurley, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1980b). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings:
1972–1977 (L. Marshall, C. Gordon, J. Mepham, & K. Soper, Trans.,
C. Gordon, Ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.
Fox, N. J., & Alldred, P. (2017). Sociology and the new materialism: Theory,
research, action. London: Sage.
Hekman, S. (2008). Constructing the ballast: An ontology for feminism.
In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 85–119).
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Hekman, S. (2010). The material of knowledge: Feminist disclosures.
James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Jenks, C. (1982). Introduction: Constituting the child. In C. Jenks (Ed.), The
sociology of childhood: Essential readings (pp. 9–24). London: Batsford.
Kidd, D. (1906). Savage childhood: A study of Kafir children. London: Adam
and Charles Black.
Knorr Cetina, K. (2007). Culture in global knowledge societies: Knowledge
cultures and epistemic cultures. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 32(4),
361–375.
Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. London and New
York: Routledge.
14
S. Spyrou
Law, J., & Singleton, V. (2013). ANT and politics: Working in and on the
world. Qualitative Sociology, 36, 485–502.
Law, J., & Urry, J. (2004). Enacting the social. Economy and Society, 33(3),
390–410.
Moran-Ellis, J. (2010). Reflections on the sociology of childhood in the UK.
Current Sociology, 59(2), 186–205.
Rouse, J. (2002). How scientific practices matter: Reclaiming philosophical natu-
ralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stainton-Rogers, W., & Stainton-Rogers, R. (1992). Stories of childhood.
London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
2
Towards a Decentering of ‘The Child’
Introduction
What is today referred to as the interdisciplinary field of childhood stud-
ies (1980s to the present), has come about as a result of a clear dissat-
isfaction with theoretical approaches, most notably in psychology but
also in sociology and anthropology where notions of children as becom-
ings rather than beings prevailed for much of the twentieth century.1 As
an interdisciplinary field of studies from its very beginning, childhood
studies sought to challenge these approaches by putting forth its own
theoretical propositions which have, more or less guided the research
agenda since then. In a much-influential edited volume, James and
Prout (1990c: 3) argued for an ‘emergent paradigm’ that “will consoli
date and continue the change in direction initiated by the research of
the 1970s” (see also James et al. 1998; James and James 2004; Qvortrup
1994). One of the main theoretical arguments put forth was that chil-
dren and childhood are constituted by different discourses which are in
turn constituted by children’s lives. They advocated the need to examine
childhood as a social construction taking into account its intersectional
character and the need to study children’s social worlds and cultures

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47904-4_2
16
S. Spyrou
from children’s own perspectives by highlighting their voices in research

and by recognizing their active, agentive role in social life particularly
with the use of qualitative approaches such as ethnography which are
better suited for these kinds of inquiries (James and Prout 1990c: 3–5;
James and Prout 1990b: 8–9)2. As part of the same overall challenge,
sociologists, most notably Jens Qvortrup (1994) also argued that child-
hood should be viewed and studied as a permanent structural feature of
society though for these theorists it is children’s generational position in
the social structure which matters most rather than the diversity of child-
hoods which exist both within and across societies. Leena Alanen (1994,
2000, 2001, 2009) and Berry Mayall (2000, 2002) have elaborated and
further refined a generational approach to childhood illustrating the
significance of the concept of generation in structuring society and illu-
minating our understanding of childhood and adulthood as relational
categories.
This new paradigm came to gradually shift the focus away from
development and socialization as the key paradigmatic concepts in the
study of childhood and towards approaches that would account for
children’s active role and participation in society. The adoption of the
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989 provided
additional momentum to this effort and highlighted the need for rec-
ognizing and ensuring children’s rights; children could no longer be
seen as adults in the making or human becomings but as human beings
with recognized rights in the present (Qvortrup 1994). For childhood
researchers, this shift was an ontological one which necessitated new
epistemological and ethical engagements3 with children in research (Lee
1998: 462) and a more general rethinking of how childhood research
should be carried out.
Childhood studies is today well-established and has in many ways
reached maturity. There are numerous academic programs offering
courses in childhood studies, international conferences are organ-
ized regularly, special interest groups bring childhood studies scholars
together and a vast amount of published work is produced through
specialized journals and book series. Much of this work is empiri-
cal and focuses on illustrating children’s agency (see Chapter 5) and
2 Towards a Decentering of ‘The Child’
17
highlighting their voices (see Chapter 4) while also putting forth a

strong case for the political, ethical and epistemological value of chil-
dren’s participation in the production of knowledge about children and
childhood (see Chapter 6). A social constructivist theoretical framework
has guided much of this work to date and continues to be the dominant
theoretical framework for the field at large while the agentic, reflexive
child has clearly become a fixation as reflected in much of childhood
studies’ research scholarship.
Yet, and despite the proliferation of this empirical research work, it
is not very clear what this adds to our understanding of children and
childhood and what direction the field as a whole is taking. It is not
clear, for instance, at this point in the field’s development, what more
empirical studies which illustrate children’s active role in the construc-
tion of their own worlds help us achieve theoretically in childhood
studies (James 2010: 486). This realization resonates with what Alanen
(2014) has argued in reference to the sociology of childhood, namely,
that there is a need for more theoretical engagement and for contribut-
ing ‘the missing childhood piece’ in current theoretical debates. It is not
enough, in other words, for childhood researchers to simply produce
more empirical work; they also need to have a bolder and more produc-
tive engagement with contemporary social theory.
This could happen in two ways. First, through contributing to ongo-
ing debates in social theory in ways that illustrate the value and sig-
nificance of the insights produced by childhood studies. And second,
through a more productive integration of theoretical and methodologi-
cal developments from other fields into childhood studies, an issue rec-
ognized early on by proponents of ‘the new paradigm’ who feared that
the field would otherwise ‘become an isolated and esoteric specialism’
(James and Prout 1990b: 24). Alanen summed up this argument when
she stated in an interview that:
You have to be connected with the basic debates of sciences, you have to
connect to where social science is heading. You have to bring those debates
into childhood studies and bring childhood studies into those debates, and
I think that is not happening enough. (Smith and Greene 2014: 23)
18
S. Spyrou
Broader Engagements with Social Theory

Since the so-called ‘crisis of representation’ and ‘the reflexive turn’ in the
social sciences (see especially Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and
Fischer 1986) brought about to a large extent by postmodern, post-
structuralist and feminist critiques of science, and more recently posthu-
manist/new materialist approaches, questions about epistemology and
ontology in general and about positionality, reflexivity, representation
and ethics in particular have preoccupied discussions about the role of
research in producing knowledge about others. Much of this discussion
originated and took place in my own discipline, anthropology, begin-
ning in the 1980s, though as Atkinson and Delamont (2008) point out
there are examples of much earlier work which reflects such concerns.
Childhood studies, however, took a different course. As Prout (2005)
has argued, childhood studies (or more precisely the sociology of child-
hood) as a field positioned itself within modernist sociology and the
dichotomized oppositions it represented (agency-structure, nature-
culture, being-becoming):
At the very time when social theory was coming to terms with late
modernity by decentring the subject, the sociology of childhood was val-
orizing the subjectivity of children. While sociology was searching for
metaphors of mobility, fluidity and complexity, the sociology of child-
hood was raising the edifice of childhood as a permanent social structure.
(Prout 2005: 62)
In its insistence on documenting and celebrating its modernist insights

(in the form of the socially-constructed, agentic child and the perma-
nent social structural position of childhood as a phenomenon), child-
hood studies has in many ways foreclosed more critical dialogue with
broader developments in social theory. In what follows, I provide a
brief overview of such developments (and the extent to which child-
hood studies has engaged with them) to draw out the field’s opportu-
nities for rethinking its future trajectory in new and potentially more
productive ways. A running thread in many of the theoretical insights
of these developments is a move to decenter the subject and to rethink
19
knowledge production, a point I take up both in this chapter and sub-

sequent ones to illustrate its potential for the field. I first turn to post-
structuralism, then move to examine feminist approaches and end with
a discussion of posthumanism and the ontological turn. Clearly, there
is overlap and cross-fertilization between these approaches and any
attempt to treat them as separate should not be taken to mean that they
operate in any simplistic way apart from each other.
Poststructuralism
Poststructuralist critiques have played a crucial role in destabilizing

meaning and questioning traditional positivist claims to truth and objec-
tivity as well as challenging grand narratives while drawing attention to
the processes by which knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is
produced. Long-held dualisms and oppositions which shaped much of
modernist science have been heavily critiqued for obscuring and exclud-
ing alternative forms of knowledge and understanding, while the role
of language in constituting knowledge about the world has been made
explicit through textual analysis. Poststructuralist thinkers have reframed
knowledge as fragmentary, contingent, partial and situated and as an
outcome of power relations. Texts are seen as having no singular meaning
but rather as proliferating with meaning which can be potentially incon-
sistent, contradictory and ambiguous. It is ultimately the reader, not the
author, who has the power to determine what something means; in this
sense, meaning remains provisional, indeterminate and defies closeness.
This openness and proliferation of meaning de-essentializes claims to
truth, allows for multiple realities, and recognizes the role of research
and of researchers in actively constructing certain realities at the expense
of others. Researcher reflexivity becomes a necessary and ongoing pro-
cess for the critical researcher who questions the intricate link between
knowledge, power and truth which produces and legitimizes particular
forms of knowledge and de-legitimizes others (see discussion on reflex-
ivity further down). The task of the researcher then is to deconstruct
texts, to find what is brought forth and what is absented and in this way
highlight the problem of representation (see Chapter 4).
20
S. Spyrou
As a result of these poststructuralist critiques, the authority of the

ethnographic text (and not just) and its writing conventions (includ-
ing the power relations implicated in the production of knowledge and
cultural difference) have been challenged (Clifford and Marcus 1986;
Marcus and Cushman 1982) and researchers started experimenting with
other modes of writing such as auto-ethnography (see Reed-Danahay
1997). The ‘textual turn’ in anthropology which extended beyond the
field (most notably in sociology) (see Atkinson and Delamont 2008)
called not only for a more critical look at the ideological underpinnings
of ethnographic texts but also for constructing more ‘messy texts’ which
would allow for multiple voices, contradiction and ambiguity (see
Marcus 1998; Fischer and Abedi 1990; Taussig 1987). Moreover, schol-
ars have extensively debated the socially-constituted nature of research
problematizing the role of power in the research encounter, reflecting
on the researcher bias inherent in the process of collecting, analyzing,
and reporting data as well as the ethics of knowledge production at
large. Taken-for-granted methodological approaches and modes of rep-
resentation have been critiqued and researchers have sought more col-
laborative and ethical approaches which question the power structures
of the research process and most notably the researcher’s own privileged
position in it (see Anderson 2006; Atkinson 1990; Butler 1990; Denzin
2002; Gordon 1988; Hammersley 1990; Haraway 1991; Lather 1995;
Kondo 1990; Paget 1990; Rosaldo 1993; Rose 1997; Wolfinger 2002;
Hoskins and Stoltz 2005).4
In short, poststructuralist critiques have rendered any claims to objec-
tivity highly suspicious and unconvincing, and unsettled once and for
all the task of representation. At the same time, they have illustrated
the need for more critical self-awareness of the situated, partial and lim-
ited character of all knowledge produced through research. Researchers
today are expected to reflect on their own role in constructing the real-
ities they wish to describe while it is more readily acknowledged by
critical social researchers that what is revealed through research is a
partial reality which is shaped by particular perspectives (theoretical,
methodological, political, and other) of the researcher, a point suc-
cinctly summed up by Denzin: “All inquiry reflects the standpoint of
the inquirer. All observation is theory laden. There is no possibility of
21
theory- or value-free knowledge. The days of naïve realism and naïve

positivism are over” (Denzin 2008: 101).
Oswell’s (2013) poststructuralist analyses of children’s subjectivi-
ties are particularly revealing of the limited impact of such insights on
foundational concepts of the field such as children’s agency. Though
this is beginning to change, the decentering of the subject and the shift
towards a more critical sense of subjectivity and agency as fractured,
constructed and performative have failed to capture the field’s theoret-
ical imagination. As he explains, “The sociology of childhood in the
early 1990s was often too quick to conflate children’s experience with
social agency and too quick to dismiss some contemporary theoretical
approaches which seemed to deny children experiential authenticity and
agency” (Oswell 2013: 62). In the same sense, it could also be argued
that childhood studies has failed to sufficiently integrate a critical post-
structuralist understanding of power (despite sporadic efforts to do so)
in its key theoretical concepts (see, for instance, Gallagher 2008).
This is not to suggest that questions of power and positionality in
relation to knowledge production are new to childhood studies. Early
on, for instance, Mandell (1988) posited the ‘least-adult’ role as a
means of minimizing or downplaying the physical and social charac-
teristics of the adult researcher while others advocated the ‘friend’ role
(e.g., Corsaro 2003; Fine and Sandstrom 1988). The value and limits
of such approaches have also been discussed extensively in the literature
(see, for instance, Thorne 1993; Raby 2007; Mayall 2000; Lewis 2008).
But, productive as these approaches may have been in critically assessing
the role of the researcher in knowledge production during the research
encounter, a larger critique of power in knowledge production has yet to
take place in childhood studies. The new social studies of childhood has
rendered such a critique on both developmental psychology and sociali-
zation theory but not sufficiently so on its own knowledge practices.
Feminist Approaches
In parallel to poststructuralist developments, the work of feminist schol-

ars has also informed critical understandings of knowledge production
22
S. Spyrou
in research. Feminist social epistemology (see Anderson 2017), for

instance, has insisted on developing better ways of knowing and not
merely exposing the means and practices of knowledge production.
Questions of power relations and asymmetries in the research context
have been central to the ongoing debates in feminist social epistemol-
ogy. Feminist social epistemologists have also questioned claims to the
universality of knowledge and truth and have insisted on the situated-
ness and partiality of all knowledge. Feminist standpoint epistemologies
in particular (see, for instance, Harding 1986, 1987, 1991; Haraway
1991; Smith 1990) found their way into childhood studies’ scholarship
inspiring the use of feminist methodologies that seek to elucidate chil-
dren’s experiences from their own perspectives (see Greene and Hogan
2005).
Childhood studies’ turn from research on children to research with
and by children (see Chapter 6) provides a fundamental acknowledge-
ment of the value of children’s situated knowledges and their role in
creating alternative understandings of their worlds which are more col-
laborative and less patronizing (e.g., Alderson 2001; Chin 2007; Kellett
2005, 2010; Theis 2001; Veale 2005). Similarly, the epistemic impor-
tance of the social location and position of the researcher in the pro-
duction of knowledge about children and childhood is widely accepted
today in childhood studies and considered to be a central feature of
reflexive research. This recognition has encouraged the questioning of
power asymmetries between children and adults in research and their
consequent role in producing particular types of knowledge and ‘truth’
(Christensen 2004). The role of powerful institutional forces in produc-
ing privileged and often biased understandings of children and child-
hood is also generally acknowledged by childhood studies’ scholars
today, though as I have alluded to in the previous section, the power/
knowledge nexus has yet to inform the field’s understanding of knowl-
edge production at large.
Up until the emergence of contemporary childhood studies, theo-
retical and methodological approaches to researching childhood largely
reflected the agendas and concerns of adults rather than those of chil-
dren. As a result, they contributed to the production of knowledge
about children without children’s active participation in the process.
23
This insight framed in many ways the fundamental critique that child-
hood studies levelled on developmental psychology and socialization
theories during the late 1980s and early 1990s (see James and Prout
1990a) and its consequent flourishing as a new paradigmatic approach
to researching childhood. The unprecedented attention paid to ‘chil-
dren’s perspectives’ (invariably referred to also as ‘children’s voices’) in
research and the methodological innovation which has accompanied
this preoccupation during the last three decades is illustrative of this
turn (see Chapter 4). In its more politicized versions, this preoccupation
seeks to develop a ‘children’s standpoint’ which could help address chil-
dren’s oppression from adults and adult-controlled institutions in soci-
ety. Proponents of a ‘children’s standpoint’ (see especially Mayall 2002)
argue that because of their location in the social structure, children have
unique perspectives about the world and their position in it and hence
research should acknowledge and bring forth this knowledge (see a
more detailed discussion of standpoint theories in Chapter 6).
In important ways, feminist approaches have provided childhood
studies with its raison d’être by making its very object of inquiry, the
child, central to its knowledge production. By highlighting the situat-
edness of knowledge and the power inequalities between children and
adults, feminist approaches did not only allow for the deconstruction of
adult perspectives on childhood but also foregrounded the need for, and
value of, exploring children’s voices and perspectives and developing a
children’s standpoint. The challenge for childhood studies is to maintain
the critical insights of feminist epistemologies about knowledge produc-
tion but without limiting its explorations and potential contributions to
its child-centered concerns. Indeed, as I show in the next section, it is
through a more radical decentering of the child that childhood studies
might reinvigorate its research agenda and engage more critically with
the wider empirical and theoretical worlds of knowledge.
Posthumanism, the Ontological Turn and Beyond
Beyond poststructuralist and feminist critiques of knowledge pro-

duction, in recent years we also see a renewed interest in ontological
24
S. Spyrou
issues—an ontological turn of sorts—concerned primarily with the

relationality and materiality of social life. The ontological turn is not
concerned with essences (as in most traditional discussions of ontology
in philosophy) but with what things are and what they could become
as a result of their relational encounters with the world: entities do not
pre-exist their relations. It seeks to move both beyond essentialism which
assumes the pre-existence of entities and social constructionism which
assumes a given and fixed social context which offers different choices
(Barad 2001: 103 as quoted in Fox and Alldred 2017: 191). In that
sense, it leaves the question of what something might be perpetually
open (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017: ix–x).
Though interest in relational ontologies is not new and relational
thinking comes in a variety of shades, these approaches take as their
starting point the assumption that the world is constituted through
social relations. Relational ontologies challenge what Aspers (2010: 269)
calls the ‘egological’ positions of sociological theories which assume that
human beings start alone and only gradually become social. The phe-
nomenological approach of Martin Heidegger (see especially Heidegger
1962) is one example of a well-known relational ontology which is how-
ever to be contrasted with relational approaches which have appeared
in more recent years, as is the work of Science and Technology Studies
(STS), seeking to encompass relations not just between humans but also
between humans and non-humans (see Woolgar and Lezaun 2013).
A form of relational thinking has impacted childhood studies early on
in relation to the field’s exploration of the generational order in the work
of scholars such as Alanen (2001, 2009) and Mayall (2002). For these
scholars, rather than being essentialized categories, childhood and adult-
hood are taken to be social categories, like gender or ethnicity, and hence
socially constructed and mutually constituted.5 For Alanen (2009: 161),
it is the intergenerational practices between children and adults which
produce and reproduce childhood and adulthood as part of the genera-
tional order or the particular structuring of social relations between these
two groups. This relational understanding of childhood draws attention
to, among others, the power dynamics of its constitution and the active
role played by children in their lives through the work they do from the
particular social locations they are afforded within the generational order.6
25
More recently, and drawing on current debates about relational

ontologies in the social sciences (especially assemblage theory and
actor-network theory), David Oswell (2013) has provided a systematic
and comprehensive critique of essentialized understandings of agency
(as in the work of Anthony Giddens) which have and continue to
guide much of the thinking in childhood studies. Oswell’s work is an
attempt to account for the material semiotics of children’s agency within
a poststructuralist frame which allows for a more nuanced understand-
ing of how agency operates across a variety of terrains (Oswell 2013:
36). From within this rethinking, children’s agency, Oswell suggests,
becomes networked, assembled, distributed, partial, and relative; it
does not reside, in other words, with the individual child. This kind of
rethinking finds inspiration in approaches that come under the banner
of posthumanism, a theoretical current which has had a more visible
presence since the early 1990s (see Chapters 3 and 5).
In its basic form, posthumanism (see Braidotti 2013) seeks to chal-
lenge the humanist tradition and its assumptions about ‘the human’.
From a posthumanist perspective, human beings cease to be the focal
point of attention and analysis, with emphasis being shifted to the
larger networks of forces, both material and discursive which constitute
them. In that sense, posthumanism is a post-hierarchical, post-dualistic
approach emphasizing relationality and interconnection (Ferrando 2013)
and signals a move away from the privileged status accorded to language
and culture in poststructuralist thinking. Posthumanism problematizes
distinctions made between humans and non-humans and the consequent
assumption that they are fixed categories of difference and proceeds to
investigate the very practices through which such categories are deline-
ated and come into being (Barad 2007: 32). By decentering human
beings, posthumanism challenges the humanist assumption of the auton-
omous, knowing subject and introduces instead its emerging, relational
character as an outcome of the encounter between human and non-
human entities.
“New Materialism” (which encompasses a number of diverse orien-
tations) is a particularly productive and promising theoretical approach
within posthumanism which seeks to reassert the central role of mat-
ter in the constitution of life (see in particular Alaimo and Hekman
26
S. Spyrou
2010; Coole and Frost 2010a; Hekman 2010; Dolphijn and van der
Tuin 2012). New materialists are highly critical of the cultural turn in
theory (and of radical constructivism in particular) and its emphasis on
language, discourse and culture and propose instead an ontological and
posthumanist orientation which takes matter as lively and agentic with
emphasis placed not on what it is but on what it does or how it affects
and is affected in particular event assemblages (Coole and Frost 2010b:
6–7; Fox and Alldred 2017: 24). They reject the culture-nature dualism
and the privileging of the former at the expense of the latter (which they
see as the failing of social constructivist approaches) arguing instead that
nature and culture are entangled (Ferrando 2013: 31). They also reject
the existence of social structures and propose instead a flat ontology
where life in all its complexity unfolds through countless events.
Actor-network theory and more recently Deleuzian-inspired
approaches which reflect new materialist preoccupations have inspired
new ways of thinking in childhood studies though admittedly still
to a very limited extent (see Chapter 3). Scholars who turn to these
approaches question the fundamental premises of ‘the new paradigm’
and seek to rethink knowledge production in the field through the use
of concepts like networks, assemblages, multiplicities and becomings.
By challenging essentialist understandings of childhood ontology and
decentering the child, this emerging line of work seeks to reimagine the
field beyond the dualisms of modernist sociology (Prout 2005).
Alongside the posthumanist and other ontologically-informed frame-
works outlined here, critical realism has also developed as a promising
alternative to both positivism and constuctivism for the critical pro-
duction of knowledge in the social sciences. Critical realism attempts
to reflect on the nature of the social world by granting ontology some
form of independence from epistemology while also recognizing that all
our attempts at representing the social world are bound to be situated
in, and limited by, the specific social, cultural and historical frameworks
in which we operate (see Archer 1995; Bhaskar 1998, 2008). Though
I limit my inquiry in this book mainly to new materialist thinking (with
which critical realism has both overlaps and differences), it is important
to keep in mind that critical realism constitutes another potentially pro-
ductive possibility for childhood studies to pursue questions of ontology
27
and knowledge production. The work of Priscilla Alderson (see in par-

ticular Alderson 2013; 2016a, b) provides a comprehensive exposition
of critical realism in childhood studies and will likely initiate a broader
dialogue about ontology in the field.
In the next section, I draw out the limits of childhood studies’ dom-
inant orientation—the socially-constructed, agentic child—and exam-
ine what it means to know reflexively and to enhance the field’s critical
imagination through diffractive thinking.
How to Know in Childhood Studies

The Limits of the Field
The limited theoretical innovation in childhood studies may be partly

attributed to the preoccupation and reproduction of foundational con-
cepts and ideas such as those of social construction, agency, voice, and
participation which have in many ways become the field’s ‘mantras’ (see
Tisdall and Punch 2012: 251). These orthodox concepts still guide most
of the empirical work produced in childhood studies but often with
inadequate critical scrutiny which almost three decades of use would
necessitate. In their concluding chapter of Theorizing Childhood (1998),
James, Jenks and Prout pointed out early on in the field’s development
“the need for a constant vigilance over the kinds of attention we pay to
our growing body of knowledge” (James et al. 1998: 197). Their realiza-
tion remains an imperative today as it was then.
This is not to dismiss the critical and reflexive work which childhood
studies scholars have produced over the years. The social constructivist
focus of the field has arguably encouraged a reflexive mode of thinking
in much of the scholarly work though attempts to critique the field’s
underlying orthodoxies and to re-theorize it are clearly more limited
(see, for example, ongoing discussions by Bluebond-Langner and Korbin
2007; James 2007, 2010; Gallacher and Gallagher 2008; Lee 2001;
Oswell 2013; Prout 2005). A number of scholars who have challenged
the taken-for-granted assumptions of the field—most notably dualistic
frames of reference—have paved the way for rethinking the trajectory
28
S. Spyrou
of childhood studies and their work is slowly but steadily impacting the
theoretical imagination of the field at large (see Chapter 3).
The field’s focus (one could say, fixation) with the knowing, reflex-
ive, agentic, and socially constructed child has in many ways trapped
childhood theory within a reproductive mode. The unitary child-agent,
placed within social structures who crafts, and is crafted by, a multi-
tude of forces—social, cultural, economic and political—may have
been fruitful in helping establish childhood studies as a distinct field of
study but its limits are indeed becoming apparent as scholarship seeks
to develop more nuanced approaches to understanding social life.
As we have seen, in recent decades both poststructuralist and post-
humanist calls for decentering the human subject have had signif-
icant influence in social science scholarship provoking a rethinking of
long-established humanist assumptions and consequent efforts to break
the molds of dualistic thinking. A so-called ‘ontological turn’ in the
social sciences has provided and continues to provide useful theoretical
insights not only in relation to the constitution of the human subject
but also in relation to the knowledge practices which enact objects of
inquiry and legitimate particular understandings of the social.
A turn to relational ontologies in childhood studies may prove quite
productive for a field whose potential has been greatly curtailed by its
inability to move decidedly beyond its foundational analytical frame-
works. To think relationally in childhood studies is not only to destabi-
lize and decenter the field’s object of inquiry—the child—and to move
beyond claims to truth and authenticity often represented through the
notions of ‘children’s voices’ and ‘children’s perspectives’ but to also
expand the networks of relations and associations which link children
with other humans and non-humans across multiple spatial and tem-
poral scales (see Sparrman and Sandin 2012; Samuelsson et al. 2015;
Kraftl and Horton, forthcoming). In doing so, an opportunity opens
up for the field to rethink the ethics and politics of its own knowledge
practices through its choices to disclose or bring into light certain child-
hoods rather than others.
In an editorial for Childhood where I called for the need to decenter
childhood, I argued that “unless childhood studies finds inroads
into the wider nexus of knowledge production which lies beyond its
29
categorical concerns, it will soon be confronted with its own limits as

a conceptual scheme” (see Spyrou 2017: 436; see also Philo 2016). At
this particular juncture in its historical development, childhood studies
is, indeed, well-placed as a field to overcome its child-centeredness and
to reflect on its own knowledge practices. In the next section, I explore
what it might mean for childhood studies to become more critically
reflexive about its knowledge productions.
Knowing Reflexively
Despite its highly productive trajectory, one may still find it necessary
to ask if childhood studies as a field is critical enough about its knowl-
edge productions. Alanen (2011), for example, argues that childhood
studies is not sufficiently critical. To become more critical, she suggests,
childhood studies needs to make “explicit the normative foundations of
childhood research” and to “address a number of normative issues con-
cerning the practices and arrangements ‘out there’, and specify in what
particular respects and for what specific reasons they are problematic”
(Alanen 2011: 150). She further extends her point about the field’s
reflexive capacities asking:
Does the researcher’s commitment to reflexivity make it [i.e., childhood

studies] critical? Which ways of being reflexive would qualify as critical
reflexivity? What, all in all, is implied by ‘critique’ and by being ‘critical’?
(Alanen 2011: 148)
There is no single, commonly-shared understanding of what being

reflexive means in the social sciences though the ongoing debates since
the ‘reflexive turn’ have provided many insights as to what being reflex-
ive may mean. Kendall and Thangaraj (2012: 94), for example, define
reflexivity as “an acknowledgement of epistemological and methodo-
logical commitments that mark the entire process of research from the
kinds of questions which one asks, to how one asks, to an acknowl-
edgement of one’s own limitations, to the kinds and forms of academic
and sociopolitical conversations in which one is engaged.” Though
their concern is with reflexive ethnographic practice, the questions
30
S. Spyrou
they propose could be equally applicable to any qualitative approach

to research and to much of the research work carried out in childhood
studies: “What counts as knowledge in the particular traditions in
which the ethnographer situates her/himself ?; What does the researcher
privilege as knowledge?; What do research participants privilege as
knowledge, and if this differs from the researcher’s construction of
knowledge, how are these reconciled?; How—within what relations—is
knowledge produced, constructed and represented?; How does the eth-
nographer negotiate his/her relationships with research participants?;
How does the ethnographer negotiate her/his own subjectivity?; Is it
evident how these negotiations influenced data collection, analysis and
writing?” (Kendall and Thangaraj 2012: 94).
The list captures the entire research process from the way we think
and conceptualize our research studies, to the way we collect and ana-
lyze our data and our ways of reporting and disseminating our research
findings. Needless to say, this is not (and could not be) an exhaustive list
of questions for the reflexive researcher; they encapsulate nevertheless
the core issues a researcher needs to reflect on in relation to any form of
knowledge produced through social research.
Today it is widely acknowledged that researcher reflexivity is neces-
sary in addressing the politics of representation and in producing more
ethical accounts of social life. Reflexivity’s value, it is often argued,
rests on its potential for making the very process by which we produce
knowledge more transparent. It is not sufficient any more to simply col-
lect and analyze data and report our research findings; we also need to
reflect critically on the very processes by which we generate data and
carry out our analyses (e.g., on how our theoretical frameworks and
assumptions and the methodological approaches we use result in par-
ticular kinds of data or enable particular interpretations), and ultimately
produce particular representations of others through our reporting prac-
tices. Reflexive researchers are called upon to attend to, among others,
their own biographical and social characteristics, political values and
agendas, and the power structures (social, cultural, institutional, and
interactional) in which the research process is embedded. By reflect-
ing on their own positionality in the research process as well as the
larger structures which legitimize and delegitimize particular forms of
31
knowledge, reflexive researchers, it is hoped, may be able to produce

knowledge which is more critical and ethical (see Chapter 4).
From its early beginnings the interdisciplinary field of childhood
studies has sought to be reflexive in this sense. In their introduction
to Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, editors James and Prout
(1990b: 27), argued for the need to consider research data reflexively
and to avoid the temptation of claiming authenticity even in ethno-
graphic research where naturalistic data is collected. At the same time,
however, they expressed a sense of discomfort with relativizing research
knowledge and suggested that when situating our understanding of
children as social agents within the structural constraints of society, we
can offer an accurate portrayal of “aspects of childhood as it is consti-
tuted at a particular moment in time and point in space” (James and
Prout 1990b: 29).
Despite this early acknowledgment for the need to remain reflexive in
relation to knowledge production, much of the discussion in childhood
studies has focused mainly on questions of power and principally the
power imbalances inherent in the adult–child research relationship (see
Fine and Sandstrom 1988; Christensen and James 2000; Christensen
2004; Graue and Walsh 1998). Thus, it has been quite common for
studies to acknowledge the researcher’s positionality and how it affects
the adult–child research relationship and to discuss the particular
approach of the researcher in tackling the problem of unequal power
relations (see Best 2007; Christensen 2004; Freeman and Mathison
2009; Greene and Hogan 2005; Thomson 2008).
But though a debate about power inequalities and positionality has
been ongoing in childhood studies, a serious discussion about ques-
tions of representation has yet to take place in the field. In an article
exploring children’s voices published in 2007, Allison James expressed
her surprise that despite the ongoing discussions about the problem
of representation (see my earlier discussion on ‘the crisis of representa-
tion’) since the 1980s (e.g., Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986;
Marcus and Fischer 1986), childhood studies has remained relatively
untouched. Best (2007: 12) has likewise argued for the need to direct
our attention to the larger problematic of power, knowledge, and
representation:
32
S. Spyrou
An acknowledgement of the imbalance of power in research requires care-

ful attention to the ways our methods, our definitional boundaries, and
our claims making construct a world and the groups in it as much as they
express it.
There are, no doubt, exemplary accounts of critically reflexive work in

childhood studies which seek to move beyond the question of power
asymmetries to discuss more explicitly the central role of positionality
in knowledge production. Connolly (2008), for example, illustrates
his argument by drawing on his ethnographic work with 5–6 year old
children in a multi-ethnic, inner-city primary school in England. As an
adult, he was expected to play a ‘teacher role’ in certain, more public
and formal contexts within the school through exercising his author-
ity and control over the children. However, in other more private and
informal contexts he purposely created within the school (e.g., group
discussions he had with the children), children were able to illustrate
their social competence by testing and challenging the adult–child
boundaries in place through the way they discussed issues related to
race and gender. Connolly shows that to some extent what the children
chose to talk about with him was a result of his identity as an adult,
white male. Thus, children’s introduction of adult ways of thinking and
knowing (e.g., of sexualized themes) in group discussions, could be seen
as means of challenging his authority as an adult; their choice of these
themes was not accidental but deliberate and was targeted at him as an
adult male. The same, he argues, could be illustrated in relation to chil-
dren’s introduction of themes related to race; it was Connolly’s identity
as a white male which made it possible (or encouraged) the particular
discussions around these issues.
In this sense, it could be argued, the interactions and exchanges
among the children need to be contextualized and interpreted in light
of Connolly’s (and not another researcher’s) presence in the research
scene. Had the researcher been female or black, a different dynamic
would very likely unfold generating a different set of data. This led
Connolly to recognize that to be critically reflexive is to overcome the
need to identify the ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ voices of children and to
recognize, instead, the need to take into account the very contexts in
33
which their voices are produced (see Chapter 4), acknowledging in this
way that both our research data and findings are an outcome of the situ-
ated research processes in which we participate.
Given ongoing discussions on reflexivity in the social sciences at
large, how could childhood studies become more reflexive and attend
to issues of representation more critically? In Ethnography Through
Thick and Thin (1998), George Marcus discusses different styles of
reflexivity including the sociological, anthropological and feminist. In
its null form, reflexivity, he argues is simply “the self-critique, the per-
sonal quest, playing on the subjective, the experiential, and the idea of
empathy” but often ends up reinforcing the voice and perspective of
the researcher rather than challenging the very paradigm it reflects on
(1998: 193). What Marcus finds more interesting is ‘anthropological
reflexivity’—resembling ‘a politics of location’—which draws attention
not to the discovery of knowledge but to its constitution through alter-
native representations. This type of reflexivity, Marcus explains, inserts
the researcher in the field of representations who is then called upon to
reveal its intertextual character (1998: 197).
Reflexivity of this type seeks to be highly vigilant and critical: it is
ever ready to question and deconstruct but also to reframe. Gergen
(2009: 12) defines critical reflectivity as
the attempt to place one’s premises into question, to suspend the ‘obvi-
ous’, to listen to alternative framings of reality and to grapple with the
comparative outcomes of multiple standpoints. For the construction-
ist this means an unrelenting concern with the blinding potential of the
‘taken-for-granted’.
In its critical form then, reflexivity is not about finding truth through
proper method but rather a means of constructing knowledge that is
local, situated and contingent. In that sense, it could be described as
a meta-methodology, “a methodology whose object of study is itself ”
(Freshwater 2001: 533).
Alvesson and Skoldberg (2009: 312–314) extend the discussion on
critical reflexivity by distinguishing between what they call D-reflexivity
and R-reflexivity (though they recognize that the two are interrelated).
34
S. Spyrou
D-reflexivity is mainly associated with the postmodern turn and focuses

primarily on deconstructing and destabilizing the knowledge produced
about the social world, exposing domination and oppression, challeng-
ing ‘truth’ and problematizing the otherwise scientific representations of
the social world. In contrast, R-reflexivity is about developing alterna-
tive ways of producing knowledge and understanding which are more
daring and creative. It is about creating new and more sensitive and eth-
ical ways of engaging with people and for thinking, interpreting, and
theorizing our understandings of the social world. It is about thinking
anew our relationship to research, the research task, the data we collect
and the knowledge we produce. In this sense, R-reflexivity is not para-
lyzing but empowering and creatively engaging. Moreover, as Alvesson
and Skoldberg (2009: 314–318) argue, it neither denies the social and
material realities of life nor the fundamental assumption that good
research should be based on sound empirical data (see, for instance,
Nightingale 2003).
This kind of critical reflexivity serves as a useful starting point for
rethinking knowledge production in childhood studies. It is critical
because it is both unsettling and reconstructing knowledge as part of
an ongoing process of finding productive insights into children’s worlds
and our way of representing them. Its reconstructive logic looks for
new ways of producing knowledge and understanding which are not
just more innovative but more ethical in their engagements with chil-
dren. Moreover, it remains restless or as Pillow (2003) argues ‘uncom-
fortable’ because it “seeks to know while at the same time situates this
knowing as tenuous” (Pillow 2003: 188; see also Meads 2007). It is a
kind of reflexivity which is not exhausted by the confessional tale told by
the researcher in an attempt to render the ‘other’ (the child in our case)
more familiar and transparent; it recognizes instead that the other is mul-
tiple, shifting and unknowable and that the aim should not be to turn
her into a familiar, singular, and knowable subject (Pillow 2003): “This
is a move to use reflexivity in a way that would continue to challenge the
representations we come to while at the same time acknowledging the
political need to represent and find meaning” (Pillow 2003: 192).
Alldred and Burman (2005) remind us that exercising this kind of
reflexivity is both necessary and difficult. While they recognize the
35
democratic potential of childhood research (and voice research in par-

ticular) for children’s social inclusion, they also warn us about the risks
of ‘othering’ and disempowering children through our representations.
What is needed, they argue, is to consider what our representations of
children mean to the children who participate in our research studies as
well as to children as a social group at large (Alldred and Burman 2005:
192). In a similar vein, Best (2007: 27) argues that in critically reflexive
childhood research “the task of the reflexive researcher is to continue to
flesh out the social dynamics of research, to develop more innovative
ways of doing social research, and to understand more specifically how
the social organization of the research (re)produces the very hierarchies
and inequities we seek to explain” (Best 2007: 27).
This is, in many ways a call, for expanding our understanding of crit-
ical reflexivity in research beyond the actual research encounter and the
power dynamics which constitute the production of meaning during
fieldwork to embrace the very act of representation in research reports
and publications which also constitute childhood in particular ways;
when reflexivity fails to encompass all stages of the research process, it
can easily resort to a privileging of the researcher’s account and author-
ity even when the overall approach—as is the case with ethnography—
professes to take into account multiple perspectives (Alldred 1998).
From this particular understanding of critical reflexivity, the force of
our arguments will greatly depend on the choices we make and our
ability to defend them (not as truths) but rather as good, worthwhile
and productive choices (among different alternatives) which can serve
our epistemological, political and ethical goals well while also avoiding
reductionist explanations. But does critical reflexivity exhaust the possi-
bilities for developing a critically-minded childhood studies which seeks
better ways of knowing?
Knowing Diffractively
Though reflexivity (and critical reflexivity in particular) has clearly

problematized the question of representation and the production of
knowledge, important critiques of the concept have initiated a larger
36
S. Spyrou
discussion about its limits. A systematic critique of knowledge produc-

tion from what has come to be known as STS has sought to problema-
tize the very processes through which scientific knowledge is produced
by considering the performativity of knowledge practices (see Knorr-
Cetina 1999; Latour and Woolgar 1986; Law and Urry 2004; Mol
2002).
Pickering (1995), for example, contrasts a ‘representational idiom’
with a ‘performative idiom’. The former, he explains, “casts science as,
above all, an activity that seeks to represent nature, to produce knowl-
edge that maps, mirrors, or corresponds to how the world really is”
(Pickering 1995: 5). This idiom is to be contrasted with “a performative
image of science, in which science is regarded a field of powers, capaci-
ties, and performances situated in machinic captures of material agency”
(Pickering 1995: 7). A performative idiom shifts, in that sense, our
attention from, on the one hand, a pre-given reality ‘out there’ which
is awaiting to be discovered and our successes or failures to represent it
faithfully, to a world which is full of performative agency.
Law (2004: 5) has creatively applied the concept of ‘performativity’
to a critical analysis of the role of method in the production of scien-
tific knowledge, critiquing traditional research methods used in social
science for their underlying “assumption that the world is properly to
be understood as a set of fairly specific, determinate, and more or less
identifiable processes”. As a result, he argues our methods for studying
the social often end up defining in absolute and uncontestable form the
boundaries of the knowledge produced when in fact “What is brought
to presence–or manifest absence–is always limited, always potentially
contestable” and revisable (Law 2004: 85). Drawing on the work of
Latour and Woolgar (1986), Law argues that methods do not sim-
ply describe reality but also produce it (2004: 5) and are in this sense
performative (Law and Urry 2004: 392–393; see also Barad 2007)7;
the realities which are brought forth are not arbitrarily constructed by
researchers but they are an outcome of the method assemblages and the
choices made during the research process (Law and Urry 2004: 395).
Interestingly, what is often absent is the mess (the inconsistent, non-
coherent, vague, confusing, contradictory, multiple, indefinite, slippery,
fuzzy, ephemeral, elusive, ambiguous, ambivalent and so on) which is
37
made invisible in an effort to keep the presence clean and hygienic (Law
and Urry 2004) (see Chapters 6 and 7).
What both Pickering and Law offer us are anti-representationalist
approaches which seek to resituate knowledge production in the per-
formative arenas of material-semiotic activity which constitute the world,
both human and non-human, as we come to understand it through our
practices of knowing. Their critiques provide a platform for elaborating a
critical childhood studies and for reflecting on the co-constitutive role of
research in the production of knowledge about children and childhood.
If our methods (or more generally our knowledge practices) are perform-
ative and hence can enact multiple realities, then we can ask “which real-
ities it might be best to bring into being” (Law 2004: 39). According to
Law and Urry (2004: 404),
… the issue is one of ‘ontological politics’. If methods are not innocent

then they are also political. They help to make realities. But the question
is: which realities? Which do we want to help to make more real, and
which less real? How do we want to interfere (because interfere we will,
one way or another)?
For childhood studies, attending to ‘ontological politics’ and to the way

our knowledge practices constitute particular understandings about
children and childhood while rendering others invisible invites a criti-
cal rethinking of the underlying ontological assumptions of some of the
field’s key paradigmatic concepts such as agency, voice or participation
(see Chapter 7).8
The performativity of knowledge and the recognition that any inter-
ference in knowledge production is necessarily political and in that
sense ethical, has encouraged a number of scholars to seek better ways
to account for how research assemblages constitute knowledge. Barad,
for instance, has criticized reflexivity for being representationalist and
for assuming a boundary between subject and object which keeps the
world at a distance while being self-referential and entrapped in the
researcher’s subjectivity (2007: 87–88). Drawing on Haraway (1992,
1997), Barad uses the notion of ‘diffraction’ as an alternative to that of
‘reflection’. While reflexivity entails the researcher as an autonomous,
38
S. Spyrou
independent human agent looking at data from the outside and reflect-
ing on what that means for the knowledge produced (e.g., how one’s
gender or ethnicity affects one’s interpretations), in a diffractive meth-
odology the focus shifts to the role of the researcher in “the world’s
differential becoming” because “practices of knowing are specific mate-
rial engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world” (Barad
2007: 91; see also Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010). Put another way,
the focus shifts from a concern with documenting difference from a dis-
tance and with how successfully the object of inquiry is represented (in
the reflexive mode) to a concern with producing difference by dissolv-
ing the distinction between knower and known through intra-action (in
the diffractive mode) (Bozalek and Zembylas 2017: 117). As Mitchell
(2017: 173) aptly puts it, “Unlike reflection that refers to our own posi-
tioning as pre-existing individuals, and which draws us back into our-
selves as knowing subjects, diffraction is a dynamic, entangled process
that enacts newness. It involves differences-in-the-making.” Well-known
dualisms like subject-object or knower-known become meaningless
from a diffractive perspective. The researcher participates in the materi-
alization and re-materialization of the world through the way s/he intra-
acts with other matter; the knowledge produced is from within, not
from standing outside and looking in.
In their comparison between reflection and diffraction, Bozalek and
Zembylas (2017: 123) explain how both approaches acknowledge the
role of the embodied researcher and the situated character of knowl-
edge but that “Diffraction provides additional affordances through its
connection of the discursive and the material, with knowledges mak-
ing themselves intelligible to each other in creative and unpredictable
ways.” The underlying ontological concern of this kind of thinking,
as Holbraad and Pedersen (2017: 11–12, 23) suggest, may be seen as
a further elaboration of reflexivity by leaving the question of ontology
perpetually open—what things are and could be—and engaging in con-
ceptual creativity by exploring “the contingencies of particular situations
and the analytical challenges that their subtleties pose” (Holbraad and
Pedersen 2017: 245).
The ontologies that emerge out of our knowledge practices (and con-
sequently our exclusions) delineate the world in particular ways and
39
create, as a result, specific forms of accountability and responsibility

since other alternative worlds may, likewise, be disclosed:
What often appears as separate entities (and separate sets of concerns)

with sharp edges does not actually entail a relation of absolute exterior-
ity at all. Like the diffraction patterns illuminating the indefinite nature
of boundaries – displaying shadows in “light” regions and bright spots in
“dark” regions – the relationship of the cultural and the natural is a rela-
tion of “exteriority within.” This is not a static relationality but a doing–
the enactment of boundaries–that always entails constitutive exclusions
and therefore requisite questions of accountability. (Barad 2007: 135)
As a methodological approach to knowledge production, diffrac-

tion allows us to recognize, explore or experiment with interfer-
ences in knowledge production (see Chapter 7). A diffractive analysis
for instance, may allow us as researchers to read one theory through
another (e.g., developmental theory through feminist theory) and to
illuminate the differences that emerge from this intra-action (Barad
2007: 30). Likewise, when carrying out data analysis, it may allow us to
apply different theoretical concepts to a set of data to disclose different
realities and ways of knowing (Mazzei 2013: 778).
By challenging established categories for comprehending the world
and redirecting attention towards the emergence of meaning resulting
from dynamic entanglements, concern shifts to how boundary making
comes to matter differently in the micro-political contexts of the here
and now (Taylor and Ivinson 2013: 666–667). It is, in this sense that
“Diffraction can then be regarded as an ethical and socially just practice,
in that it does not do epistemological damage, pitting one theory/posi-
tion/stance against another, but carefully and attentively doing justice to
a detailed reading of the intra-actions of different viewpoints and how
they build upon or differ from each other to make new and creative
visions” (Bozalek and Zembylas 2017: 118).
Examples of the use of diffractive methodology in childhood stud-
ies, though still limited, are becoming more visible (see, for instance,
Lenz Taguchi 2010, 2012; Lenz Taguchi and Palmer 2013; Davies
2014). A more decisive turn to diffractive methodologies in childhood
40
S. Spyrou
studies might mean that debates shift from discussions on how to get
power relations right (though, such efforts are significant in their
own right for what they can contribute to our relations as researchers
with children) in order to produce more ‘accurate’ or ‘authentic’ rep-
resentations of children’s worlds, to how differences get made in our
entangled research encounters with children. Researcher, research par-
ticipants, data, interpretations, and research reports (to name but a few
of the components) spring out of this entanglement which is by defini-
tion contingent and emergent on the research assemblage that is con-
stituted at any particular moment. Each element of the assemblage is
made and remade as a result of the shifting relations at work. In that
sense, a diffractive approach helps disclose particular ontologies which
are not pre-given but are the outcome of relational, material entan-
glements. The practices and infrastructures which enact (rather than
merely represent) the entangled world in particular ways are socio-
material and part of the ongoing ontological constitution and trans-
formation of the world (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017: 38). A recent
example of diffractive thinking used in a childhood setting is offered
by Mayes’s (2016) account of puppet production as a research method.
In her diffractive analysis, Mayes asks: “What is produced when we
view children, researchers, environments and materials as entangled in
research encounters?” to suggest that data is not elicited or collected but
produced or co-created out of the research activity in shifting assem-
blages where flows of affect and desire produce particular forms of
power relations and possibilities for becoming. The interest in this kind
of analysis lies, Mayes (2016: 118) argues, with “how each element of
a research assemblage (including human, as well as material and non-
human elements) diffracts and affects what is produced”.
A diffractive approach does not merely offer another reading of child-
hood but interferes in knowledge practices in such a way as to enact
certain realities of children’s worlds and lives (rather than others) with
preferred political and ethical effects. Thus, for childhood studies,
exploring diffractively the possibilities of knowledge and where it can go
might mean bringing forth the theoretically challenging—the mobile,
the messy, the fleeting, the multiple, the non-causal, and the complex
(Law and Urry 2004: 402–404) and rethinking with imagination and
41
resourcefulness in ways which challenge, invert, and reconstruct estab-

lished truths and ways of producing knowledge and understanding.
Though the task at hand is quite different now, contemporary child-
hood studies has come about as a result of a critical engagement with
earlier paradigms which also in their own way excluded aspects of chil-
dren’s worlds and lives from the scientific production of knowledge.
A new more critical momentum drawing on poststructuralist and
post-humanist insights is building up in the field seeking to, once again,
question established orthodoxies and reinvigorate the research agenda
while rendering a more direct and systematic critique of the ethics of
knowledge production in research. Barad’s attempt to draw out and
problematize the deeply ethical and political texture of knowledge pro-
duction is certainly important in this respect:
what we need is something like an ethico-onto-epistem-ology—an

appreciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and being—since
each intra-action matters, since the possibilities for what the world may
become call out in the pause that precedes each breath before a moment
comes into being and the world is remade again, because the becoming of
the world is a deeply ethical matter. (Barad 2007: 185)
Indeed, if the world is made and remade each moment, both as individ-
ual researchers and collectively as a field, we are responsible for its “dif-
ferential becoming” (Barad 2007: 396; see also Law 2004: 39; Law and
Urry 2004: 404), an issue which a critical childhood studies would need
to attend to more systematically in the years to come.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have explored the possibilities of a move to decenter
childhood studies’ object of inquiry—the child—a move which,
I argue, will allow the field to engage more broadly with issues and con-
cerns which lie beyond its child-centered preoccupations. This broader
engagement of childhood studies, whether empirical, theoretical or
methodological, will allow it to avoid the self-referential trap and its
42
S. Spyrou
further marginalization as a field of study precisely at a time when all

kinds of boundaries are questioned, redefined or collapsed. I have con-
sidered in particular what poststructuralist, feminist, and posthuman-
ist approaches have to offer childhood studies through a more reflexive
and critical engagement with knowledge production. Destabilizing and
de-essentializing the child through a relational lens, moving from singu-
larity to multiplicity and introducing more nuanced understandings of
power and its effects on knowledge all constitute critical engagements
with knowledge production as a practice. More importantly, they offer
us critical tools to rethink our knowledge practices diffractively and not
merely through a self-reflexive lens which privileges our own centrality
in the process of knowing. To think along the lines I outlined in this
chapter then is to think with a sense of responsibility about our political
and ethical commitments and their effects on the world—first and fore-
most on children and their lives given our remit as childhood research-
ers. Our ability to engage responsibly with our knowledge practices is
an essential first step towards the development of a more critical outlook
that is capable of moving beyond deconstructive critiques to consider
alternatives. In the next chapter, I attempt a more systematic, critical
review of childhood studies’ trajectory to situate it within the proper
intellectual climate in which it originated, became established and con-
tinues to develop.
Notes
1. Though critical work which contributed to the emergence of contempo-
rary childhood studies came from many disciplinary directions, includ-
ing psychology, it was sociologists and anthropologists who have more
systematically pursued the paradigmatic shift in the field.
2. See also Chapter 3 where I provide a more thorough critique and discus-
sion of this paradigm.
3. See, for instance, Morrow and Richards (1996).
4. An edited volume by Best (2007) devoted to the question of representa-
tion exemplifies these kinds of concerns for child and youth research.
5. See also Hopkins’ and Pain’s (2007) call for ‘thinking relationally’ in rela-
tion to age and Huijsmans (2016) call for foregrounding generational
43
relations in development. Kustatscher et al. (2016) provide a useful dis-

cussion of different relational frameworks through which children and
young people’s social identities have been conceptualized.
6. For a discussion of the potential of a relational understanding to chil-
dren’s rights see Cockburn’s article on ‘children and the feminist ethic of
care’. As Cockburn (2005: 83) explains the application of ‘the ethics of
care’ to childhood highlights the relational character of children’s social
lives as these are rooted in context, experience and relationality rather
than in abstract and universal rights including their responsibilities, rela-
tionships, practices and experiences.
7. For an example of how the knowledge produced from the use of scrap-
books, rather than interviews, provides different insights into children’s
worlds, see Bragg and Buckingham (2008).
8. Though not in the context of a discussion on ‘ontological politics’ see
Glauser’s (1990) attempt to deconstruct, the term ‘street children’ by
analysizing the complexity behind the term and the various interests
implicated in its use which attests to the significance of researcher’s
underlying ontological assumptions in the production of knowledge.
References
Alaimo, S., & Hekman, S. (Eds.). (2010). Material feminisms. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Alanen, L. (1994). Gender and generation: Feminism and the “child question”.
In J. Qvortrup, M. Bardy, G. Sgritta, & H. Wintersberger (Eds.), Childhood
matters: Social theory, practice and politics (pp. 27–42). Aldershot: Avebury.
Alanen, L. (2000). Childhood as generational condition: Towards a relational
theory of childhood. Research in childhood: Sociology, culture and history
(pp. 11–30). Odense: University of Southern Denmark.
Alanen, L. (2001). Explorations in generational analysis. In L. Alanen
& B. Mayall (Eds.), Conceptualizing child-adult relations. London:
RoutledgeFalmer.
Alanen, L. (2009). Generational order. In J. Qvortrup, W. A. Corsaro, & M.-S.
Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook in childhood studies (pp. 159–174).
Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Alanen, L. (2011). Editorial: Critical childhood studies? Childhood, 18(2),
147–150.
44
S. Spyrou
Alanen, L. (2014). Editorial: Theorizing childhood. Childhood, 21(1), 3–6.

Alderson, P. (2001). Research by children. International Journal of Social
Research Methodology, 4(2), 139–153.
Alderson, P. (2013). Childhoods real and imagined. Volume 1: An introduction to
critical realism and childhood studies. London and New York: Routledge.
Alderson, P. (2016a). The politics of childhoods real and imagined: Practical
application of critical realism and childhood studies. London and New York:
Routledge.
Alderson, P. (2016b). The philosophy of critical realism and childhood studies.
Global Studies of Childhood, 6(2), 199–210.
Alldred, P. (1998). Representing voices in ethnography and discourse anal-
ysis. In J. Ribbens & R. Edwards (Eds.), Feminist dilemmas in qualitative
research: Public knowledge and private lives (pp. 147–170). London: Sage.
Alldred, P., & Burman, E. (2005). Analysing children’s accounts using dis-
course analysis. In S. Greene & D. Hogan (Eds.), Researching children’s expe-
rience: Approaches and methods (pp. 175–198). London, Thousand Oaks,
and New Delhi: Sage.
Alvesson, M., & Skoldberg, K. (2009). Reflexive methodology: New vistas
for qualitative research. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, and
Washington, DC: Sage.
Anderson, E. (2017). Feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. In
E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2017 ed.).
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/feminism-epistemol-
ogy/. Accessed on January 21, 2018.
Anderson, L. (2006). Analytic autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary
Ethnography, 35(4), 373–395.
Archer, M. (1995). Realist social theory: The morphogenetic approach.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Aspers, P. (2010). Relational ontology: Being and order out of Heidegger’s
socioontology. In S. Mutzel & J. Fuhse (Eds.), Relationale Soziologie: Zur
Kulturellen Wende der Netzwerkforschuhng. Weisbaden: VS Verlag.
Atkinson, P. (1990). The ethnographic imagination: Textual constructions of real-
ity. London: Routledge.
Atkinson, P., & Delamont, S. (2008). Editors’ introduction: Ethnographic rep-
resentation and rhetoric. In P. Atkinson & S. Delamont (Eds.), Representing
ethnography. Volume 1: Contexts and controversies (pp. xix–l). Los Angeles,
London, New Delhi, and Singapore: Sage.
Barad, K. (2001). (Re)configuring space, time and matter. In M. Dekoven (Ed.),
Feminist locations (pp. 75–109). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
45
Best, A. (Ed.). (2007). Representing youth: Methodological issues in critical youth
studies. New York and London: New York University Press.
Bhaskar, R. (1998). The possibility of naturalism: A philosophical critique of the
contemporary human sciences (3rd ed.). London: Routledge.
Bhaskar, R. (2008). Dialectic: The pulse of freedom (2nd ed.). London:
Routledge.
Bluebond-Langner, M., & Korbin, J. E. (2007). Challenges and opportuni-
ties in the anthropology of childhoods: An introduction to children, child-
hoods, and childhood studies. American Anthropologist, 109(2), 241–246.
Bozalek, V., & Zembylas, M. (2017). Diffraction or reflection? Sketching
the contours of two methodologies in educational research. International
Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(2), 111–127.
Bragg, S., & Buckingham, D. (2008). ‘Scrapbooks’ as a resource in media
research with young people. In P. Thompson (Ed.), Doing visual research
with children and young people (pp. 114–131). London and New York:
Routledge.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New
York: Routledge.
Chin, E. (2007). Power-puff ethnography/guerilla research: Children as native
anthropologists. In A. Best (Ed.), Representing youth: Methodological issues
in critical youth studies (pp. 269–283). New York and London: New York
University Press.
Christensen, P. (2004). Children’s participation in ethnographic research:
Issues of power and representation. Children and Society, 18(2), 165–176.
Christensen, P., & James, A. (2000). Research with children: Perspectives and
practices. London: Falmer Press.
Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of
ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cockburn, T. (2005). Children and the feminist ethic of care. Childhood,
12(1), 71–89.
Connolly, P. (2008). Race, gender and critical reflexivity in research with
young children. In P. Christensen & A. James (Eds.), Research with children:
Perspectives and practices (2nd ed., pp. 173–188). London: Routledge.
46
S. Spyrou
Coole, D., & Frost, S. (Eds.). (2010a). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and
politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
Coole, D., & Frost, S. (2010b). Introducing the new materialisms. In D.
Coole & S. Frost (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics (pp.
1–43). Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Corsaro, W. (2003). We’re friends right? Inside kids’ culture. Washington, DC:
Joseph Henry Press.
Davies, B. (2014). Reading anger in early childhood intra-actions: A diffractive
analysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 20, 731–741.
Denzin, N. (2002). Confronting ethnography’s crisis of representation. Journal
of Contemporary Ethnography, 31(4), 482–490.
Denzin, N. (2008). Confronting ethnography’s crisis of representation.
In P. Atkinson & S. Delamont (Eds.), Representing ethnography. Volume
2: Reading qualitative research. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and
Singapore: Sage.
Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (2012). New materialism: Interviews and car-
tographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press.
Ferrando, F. (2013). Posthumanism, transhumanism, antihumanism, metahu-
manism, and new materialisms differences and relations. An International
Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics and the Arts, 8(2), 26–32.
Fine, G. A., & Sandstrom, K. (1988). Knowing children: Participant observation
with minors. Qualitative research methods 15. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Fischer, M., & Abedi, M. (1990). Debating Muslims: Cultural dialogues in post-
modernity and tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Freeman, M., & Mathison, S. (2009). Researching children’s experiences. New
York and London: The Guilford Press.
Freshwater, D. (2001). Critical reflexivity: A politically and ethically engaged
research method for nursing. Journal of Research in Nursing, 6(1), 526–537.
Gallagher, M. (2008). ‘Power is not evil’: Rethinking power in participatory
methods. Children’s Geographies, 6(2), 137–150.
Gallacher, L.-A., & Gallagher, M. (2008). Methodological immaturity in
childhood research? Thinking through ‘participatory methods’. Childhood,
15(4), 499–516.
Gergen, K. (2009). An invitation to social construction (2nd ed.). London: Sage.
Glauser, B. (1990). Street children: Deconstructing a construct. In A. James
& A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary
issues in the sociology of childhood (pp. 138–156). London: Falmer Press.
47
Gordon, D. (1988). Writing culture, writing feminism: The poetics and poli-
tics of experimental ethnography. Inscriptions, 3–4, 7–24.
Graue, M. E., & Walsh, D. (1998). Studying children in context: Theories, meth-
ods, and ethics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Greene, S., & Hogan, D. (Eds.). (2005). Researching children’s experience:
Approaches and methods. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage.
Hammersley, M. (1990). What’s wrong with ethnography? The myth of theo-
retical description. Sociology, 24(4), 597–615.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature.
London: Free Association Books.
Haraway, D. (1992). The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for
inappropriate/d others. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, & P. Triechler (Eds.),
Cultural Studies (pp. 295–337). New York: Routledge.
Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_witness@second_millennium.femaleman_meets_
oncomouse: Feminism and technoscience. New York: Routledge.
Harding, S. (1986). The science question in feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Harding, S. (1987). Feminism and methodology: Social science issues.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Harding, S. (1991). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women’s
lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.).
London: SCM Press.
Holbraad, M., & Pedersen, M. A. (2017). The ontological turn: An anthropolog-
ical exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hopkins, P., & Pain, R. (2007). Geographies of age: Thinking relationally.
Area, 39(3), 287–294.
Hoskins, M., & Stoltz, J. (2005). Fear of offending: Disclosing researcher dis-
comfort when engaging in analysis. Qualitative Research, 5(1), 95–111.
Huijsmans, R. (2016). Generationing development: An introduction. In
R. Huijsmans (Ed.), Generationing development: A relational approach to
children, youth and development (pp. 1–31). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hultman, K., & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric anal-
ysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to edu-
cational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education,
23(5), 525–542.
48
S. Spyrou
James, A. (2007). Giving voice to children’s voices: Practices and problems, pit-
falls and potentials. American Anthropologist, 109(2), 261–272.
James, A. (2010). Competition or integration? The next step in childhood
studies? Childhood, 17(4), 485–499.
James, A., & James, A. (2004). Constructing childhood: Theory, policy and social
practice. London: Macmillan.
James, A., & Prout, A. (Eds.). (1990a). Constructing and reconstructing child-
hood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. London:
Falmer Press.
James, A., & Prout, A. (1990b). A new paradigm for the sociology of child-
hood? Provenance, promise and problems. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.),
Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociolog-
ical study of childhood (pp. 7–34). London: Falmer Press.
James, A. & Prout, A. (1990c). Introduction. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.),
Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues inthe sociologi-
cal study of childhood. (pp. 1–6). Basingstoke: Falmer Press.
Polity Press.
Kellett, M. (2005). How to develop children as researchers: A step by step guide to
teaching research process. London: Paul Chapman.
Kellett, M. (2010). Rethinking children and research: Attitudes in contemporary
society. London: Continuum.
Kendall, N., & Thangaraj, M. (2012). Ethnography. In A. A. Trainor & E.
Graue (Eds.), Reviewing qualitative research in the social sciences (pp.
82–107). New York, NY: Routledge.
Knorr Cetina, K. (1999). Epistemic cultures: How the sciences make knowledge.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kondo, D. (1990). Crafting selves: Power, gender, and discourses of identity in a
Japanese workplace. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Kraftl, P., & Horton, J. (forthcoming). Children’s geographies and the ‘new
wave’ of childhood studies. In S. Spyrou, R. Rosen, & D. Cook (Eds.),
Reimagining childhood studies. London: Bloomsbury.
Kustatscher, M., Konstantoni, K., & Emejulu, A. (2016). Hybridity, hyphens
and intersectionality—Relational understandings of children and young
people’s social identities. In Families, intergenerationality, and peer group
relations, volume 5 of the Series, Geographies of children and young people
(pp. 1–19). Singapore: Springer.
Lather, P. A. (1995). The validity of angels: Interpretive and textual strategies in
researching the lives of women with HIV/AIDS. Qualitative Inquiry, 1(1), 41–68.
49
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986/1979). Laboratory life: The construction of sci-
entific facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
York: Routledge.
Law, J., & Urry, J. (2004). Enacting the social. Economy and Society, 33(3),
390–410.
Lee, N. (1998). Towards an immature sociology. The Sociological Review, 46,
458–481.
Lee, N. (2001). Childhood and society: Growing up in an age of uncertainty.
Buckingham, UK: Open University.
Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early child-
hood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. London: Routledge.
Lenz Taguchi, H. (2012). A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analyzing
interview data. Feminist Theory, 13(3), 265–281.
Lenz Taguchi, H., & Palmer, A. (2013). A more ‘livable’ school? A diffrac-
tive analysis of the performative enactments of girls’ ill-well-being with(in)
school environments. Gender and Education, 25, 671–687.
Lewis, A. (2008). Race in the schoolyard: Negotiating the color line in classrooms
and communities. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University
Press.
Mandell, N. (1988). The least-adult role in studying children. Journal of
Contemporary Ethnography, 16, 433–467.
Marcus, G. E. (1998). On ideologies of reflexivity in contemporary efforts to
remake the human sciences. In G. Marcus (Ed.), Ethnography through thick
& thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Marcus, G. E., & Cushman, D. (1982). Ethnographies as texts. Annual Review
of Anthropology, 11, 25–69.
Marcus, G. E., & Fischer, M. (1986). Anthropology as cultural critique: An
experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Mayall, B. (2000). Conversations with children: Working with genera-
tional issues. In P. Christensen & A. James (Eds.), Research with children:
Perspectives and practices (pp. 120–135). London: Falmer Press.
Mayall, B. (2002). Towards a sociology of childhood: Thinking from children’s
Lives. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Mayes, E. (2016). Shifting research methods with a becoming-child ontology:
Co-theorising puppet production with high school students. Childhood,
23(1), 105–122.
50
S. Spyrou
Mazzei, L. A. (2013). Materialist mappings of knowing and being: Researchers

constituted in the production of knowledge. Gender and Education, 25(6),
776–785.
Meads, H. (2007). Insider research into ‘experiment with light’:
Uncomfortable reflexivity in a different field. Quaker Studies, 11(2),
282–298.
Mitchell, V. A. (2017). Diffracting reflection: A move beyond reflective prac-
tice. Education as Change, 21(2), 165–186.
Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Durham and
London: Duke University Press.
Morrow, V., & Richards, M. (1996). The ethics of social research with chil-
dren: An overview. Children and Society, 10(2), 90–105.
Nightingale, A. (2003). A feminist in the forest: Situated knowledges and
mixing methods in natural resource management. ACME: An International
E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2(1), 77–90.
Oswell, D. (2013). The agency of children: From family to global human rights.
Paget, M. A. (1990). Performing the text. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography,
19(1), 136–155.
Philo, C. (2016). Childhood is measured out by sounds and sights and smells,
before the dark of reason grows: Children’s geographies at 12. Children’s
Geographies, 14(6), 623–640.
Pickering, A. (1995). The mangle of practice: Time, agency, and science. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Pillow, W. (2003). Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflex-
ivity as methodological power in qualitative research. International Journal
of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(2), 175–196.
Prout, A. (2005). The future of childhood: Towards the interdisciplinary study of
children. London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer.
Qvortrup, J. (1994). Childhood matters: An introduction. In J. Qvortrup, M.
Bardy, G. B. Sgritta, & H. Wintersberger (Eds.), Childhood matters: Social
theory, practice, and politics (pp. 1–23). Aldershot: Avebury.
Raby, B. (2007). Across a great gulf ? Conducting research with adolescents. In
A. Best (Ed.), Representing youth: Methodological issues in critical youth studies
(pp. 39–59). New York and London: New York University Press.
Reed-Danahay, D. E. (Ed.). (1997). Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the self and the
social. Oxford: Berg.
Rosaldo, R. (1993). Culture and truth: The remaking of social analysis. Boston:
Beacon Press.
51
Rose, G. (1997). Situating knowledges: Positionality, reflexivities and other

tactics. Progress in Human Geography, 21(3), 305–320.
Samuelsson, T., Sparrman, A., Cardell, D., & Lindgren, A. (2015). The active,
competent child, capable of autonomous action: An inherent quality or the
outcome of a research process? AnthropoChildren (5), 1–19.
Smith, D. (1990). The conceptual practices of power: A feminist sociology of
knowledge. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Smith, C., & Greene, S. (2014). Key thinkers in childhood studies. Bristol:
Policy Press.
Sparrman, A., & Sandin, B. (2012). Situated child consumption: An
Introduction. In A. Sparrman, B. Sandin, & J. Sjöberg (Eds.), Situating
child consumption: Rethinking notion and values of children, childhood and
consumption (pp. 9–31). Lund: Nordic Academic Press.
Spyrou, S. (2017). Editorial: Time to decenter childhood? Childhood, 24(4),
433–437.
Taussig, M. (1987). Shamanism, colonialism, and the wild man: A study in terror
and healing. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Taylor, C. A., & Ivinson, G. (2013). Material feminisms: New directions for
education. Gender and Education, 25(6), 665–670.
Theis, J. (2001). Participatory research with children in Vietnam. In
H. Schwartzman (Ed.), Children and anthropology: Perspectives for the
twenty-first century (pp. 99–109). Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.
Thomson, P. (Ed.). (2008). Doing visual research with children and young people.
London and New York: Routledge.
Thorne, B. (1993). Gender play: Girls and boys in school. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Tisdall, E. K. M., & Punch, S. (2012). Not so ‘new’? Looking critically at
childhood studies. Children’s Geographies, 10(3), 249–264.
Veale, A. (2005). Creative methodologies in participatory research with children.
London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage.
Wolfinger, N. H. (2002). On writing fieldnotes: Collection strategies and
background expectancies. Qualitative Research, 2(1), 85–95.
Woolgar, S., & Lezaun, J. (2013). The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology in
science and technology studies. Social Studies of Science, 43(3), 321–340.
3
Knowledge Production
in Childhood Studies
Introduction
In the introductory chapter, I briefly outlined the development of what
has come to be known as childhood studies. Though the field is not
unified as such, there seems to be a widely-shared set of assumptions
which guide much of the work produced. It is becoming increasingly
apparent, however, that these theoretical assumptions are constraining
rather than enabling the field to enhance its understanding of children
and childhood and are in need of rethinking. In this chapter, I offer a
more comprehensive (though admittedly selective) review of childhood
studies’ literature highlighting its underlying ontological and episte-
mological foundations and its conceptual limits. I start with an over-
view of the establishment and development of contemporary childhood
studies and then turn to a discussion of the emerging critiques of the
field paying special attention to the challenges of its dominant social
constructionist trajectory. More specifically, I discuss in particular the
poststructuralist and posthumanist critiques which are beginning to
challenge childhood studies’ dualistic assumptions and introduce a
more relational, ontological thinking which sees childhood as a complex

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47904-4_3
54
S. Spyrou
material-semiotic phenomenon. I conclude with a discussion of the calls

for more interdisciplinary engagements in the field as a way towards
tackling its narrow conceptual reach and a more specific call for a cer-
tain kind of ‘undisciplining of childhood studies’ which can open up
the field to more experimentation and innovation.
The Emergence of Contemporary Childhood

Studies
Childhood studies today is characterized as a multi- and inter-disciplinary
field with disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, geogra-
phy history, and law contributing to its ongoing development. From its
early days in the 1980s, childhood studies—also referred to as ‘the new
social studies of childhood’ or more narrowly ‘the new sociology of child-
hood’—was a reaction against the dominant paradigms of the time, most
notably the psychological paradigm of development and the sociological
paradigm of socialization (and its corollary from anthropology, that of
‘enculturation’). This was a mounting but gradual dissatisfaction with the
way the social sciences treated children as objects of study.
A number of isolated scholars (see, for instance, MacKay 1973;
Richards 1974; Jenks 1982a) had prepared the ground for a more
systematic critique of the study of children and childhood. In 1973
Charlotte Hardman published a seminal article titled ‘Can there be an
anthropology of children?’ which foregrounded in more definite terms
the paradigmatic shift that was about to come by the early 1990s. In
that article, Hardman argued for the need to attend to children and
their worlds as they, themselves, experience and understand them. A few
years later, Bluebond-Langner’s (1978) work with terminally-ill children
epitomized this new and emerging way of thinking about research with
children. Bluebond-Langner showed through a detailed ethnographic
study that dying children know a great deal about their own condition
and are able to manipulate that knowledge in socially-informed ways as
they interact with their parents and the medical staff. With that study,
Bluebond-Langner provided evidence that children, like Hardman had
argued before her, are willful and purposeful social actors. Far from
3 Knowledge Production in Childhood Studies
55
being passive, children were shown to be capable of interpreting their

social worlds and acting upon their interpretations as well as influenc-
ing the way others see them (Bluebond-Langner 1978: 12). In 1982, in
his introduction to an edited volume titled The Sociology of Childhood:
Essential Readings, Chris Jenks also provided a thorough critique of
socialization theories and Piagetian developmentalism, arguing that
childhood is not a natural phenomenon but a social construct rooted in
particular cultural settings and social discourses (Jenks 1982b: 12, 23).
Though it would take several more years for these isolated but
increasingly present critiques to be synthesized in a more comprehen-
sive statement, it is important to recognize that the paradigmatic shift
that was about to come was in many ways a gradual one and owes its
debt to those earlier works. When in 1990 James and Prout published
their edited volume titled Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, a
clear and systematic exposition of what they called at the time ‘an emer-
gent paradigm’ was put forth. The book brought together the work of
a number of scholars who were clearly dissatisfied with the dominant
theoretical and methodological approaches they inherited and offered
a new perspective on how to study children and childhood. The time
was ripe for this intellectual shift. As we have seen in Chapter 2, It
was greatly facilitated by the prevailing climate in legal and policy cir-
cles and most notably by the adoption in 1989 of the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child which provided an international
framework for situating the study of children and childhood and sup-
ported the underlying logic of the new paradigm (see Lenzer 1998).
James and Prout’s critique of the dominant paradigms, namely, devel-
opmental psychology and socialization theory, was harsh and under-
standably so; what they wished for was a break with the past and a new,
more intellectually productive engagement with the study of children
and childhood. Retrospectively, both paradigms might have been easy
targets given wider developments in social theory at the time, and per-
haps the critiques could have been more balanced and less dismissive of
what these perspectives had to offer.
As Woodhead (2009) shows, for example there were early and ongo-
ing critiques of the developmental paradigm from within developmen-
tal psychology (e.g., Ingleby 1974; Walkerdine 1993; Burman 1994).
56
S. Spyrou
Developmental theory had not ignored the active, competent, and

socially-engaged child; on the contrary, “for much of the past century,
developmental researchers have described children’s active role in their
development, even while they objectified children within discourses of
research” (Woodhead 2009: 53). Woodhead explains that in an attempt
to highlight the shortcomings of the cruder forms of developmentalism,
the new social studies of childhood inadvertently dismissed the insights
and contributions of developmental approaches which recognize the
significance of change and transition in human development (in rela-
tion to physical size, relationships and skills to name but a few) and the
need to account for the universal immaturity of children all of which
should be important concerns for childhood research (Woodhead 2009:
56–57).
Developmental psychology’s assumptions about rationality, natural-
ness and universality (see Piaget 1929/1951) have been the focus of the
new paradigm’s critique. The Piagetian model, it was argued, takes for
granted that all children everywhere go through the same developmen-
tal stages in order to achieve adult rationality. Moreover, the model links
biological with cognitive and social development—with the former
driving the latter—so that children’s social skills and abilities develop as
they mature biologically. The rigidity and determinism of the stages of
development that children go through and the lack of attention paid
to the cultural context of development and to children’s experiences of
growing up were taken as significant limitations in accounting for the
diversity of developmental paths that exist in a culturally-diverse world;
likewise, the experimental method used by developmental psychologists
was seen as too inadequate for exploring the fullness of children’s lives
(see James and Prout 1990b: 10–12, 19–20; see also Archard 1993;
Woodhead 1997).1
Sociological theories of socialization were also included in the same
critique. Under the influence of structural-functionalism, socializa-
tion theories sought to explicate the means by which children came to
identify with the social norms and rules of society and how they conse-
quently came to reproduce it (see especially Parsons 1951).2 This is how
James and Prout describe the overall approach of socialization theories
in their critique:
57
The child is portrayed, like the laboratory rat, as being at the mercy of
external stimuli: passive and conforming. Lost in a social maze it is the
adult who offers directions. The child, like the rat, responds accordingly
and is finally rewarded by becoming ‘social’, by becoming adult. In being
constructed as unable to initiate interactions the child’s nature is thus
visualized as fundamentally different from an adult’s. (James and Prout
1990b: 13)
The emphasis of socialization theories on social order and reproduction

has meant that children’s active engagement with the process of social-
ization (including the possibility of contradiction and conflict) were
not accounted for; this greatly limited the value and utility of these
approaches in accounting for the processes through which societies are
actively reproduced by their members (James and Prout 1990b: 14).3
In short, the critique of both the developmental paradigm and social-
ization theories centered on the recognition that these theories left little
room for children’s agency and engagement with the social worlds in
which their lives are embedded while being seen, by and large as passive,
incomplete, incompetent, and dependent becomings rather than beings.
The new paradigm proposed by James and Prout offered an alterna-
tive approach that would counteract the failures and limitations of the
dominant approaches.4 Drawing largely on social interactionism and
social constructionism, James and Prout outlined six key features that
would guide much of the research agenda in the field since then: (1)
childhood is a social construction, not a natural category and should
not be confused with biological immaturity which is universal, (2)
childhood should not be analyzed in isolation but always in relation to
other relevant social variables such as class, gender, and ethnicity, (3)
children’s social worlds and cultures are worthy of study in their own
right and from children’s own points of view and not just in relation to
adults, (4) children are not passive subjects in society but play an active
role in the construction of their own lives and their own social worlds as
well as the lives and worlds of those around them, (5) ethnography is a
particularly useful method for giving a voice to children and for gaining
insights of their worlds, and (6) to proclaim a new paradigm is to par-
ticipate in the very process of reconstructing childhood (see James and
Prout 1990b: 8–9; also James and Prout 1990c: 3–5).
58
S. Spyrou
By accounting for children’s voices and their active engagement with

the social and cultural worlds of their lives, researchers would be able
to bring forth a new and radically different understanding of children
and childhood. The new paradigm was to be, above all, child-focused or
child-centered; in fact, it largely derived the power of its argument from
this very orientation.
In parallel to James and Prout’s critique, Jens Qvortrup (1994) pro-
vided a similarly powerful critique, though one which would be con-
cerned with the institution of childhood as such which Qvortrup argued
needed to be viewed and studied as a permanent structural feature of
society; irrespective of the ever changing membership of the category
‘childhood’—with children exiting childhood as they grow older—the
very location of childhood as a generational space in the social structure
is permanent and universal (though highly diverse both historically and
culturally as it takes different forms across time and space). Childhood
and adulthood from this point of view are seen as permanent and oppo-
sitional features of the social structure which necessarily exist in a dialec-
tical relationship (see also Alanen 2001, 2009; Mayall 2002).
Taken together, these critiques meant that childhood would have to
be taken seriously as an important feature of any society and children
would have to be seen as human beings with recognized rights in the
present rather than human becomings or adults in the making (Qvortrup
1994). Some of the theoretical work which followed these early cri-
tiques further elaborated the fundamental tenets of this new paradigm
and its social constructionist agenda (see especially James et al. 1998;
Jenks 1996; James and James 2004; Christensen and James 2000).
Not surprisingly, the critique of the new paradigm was welcomed
by many researchers who were eager to find a new intellectual direc-
tion in their work with children. The studies initiated under the ban-
ner of the ‘new paradigm’ were qualitative (and with an ethnographic
bias) in nature and sought to illustrate that childhood is socially con-
structed and that children play an active role in its constitution. Many
of them proclaimed a child focus as a necessary corrective for the lack
of attention paid to children by previous studies. In contrast, much less
attention was paid to the intersectional character of childhood (point
two of James and Prout’s key features) and to the need for maintaining
59
a reflexive attitude on the role of research (and of the new paradigm

in particular) in reconstituting childhood (point 6 of James and Prout’s
key features).
Since the publication of James and Prout’s seminal work, the field of
childhood studies has seen an unprecedented growth and popularity.
Countless empirical studies have shown that children are, indeed social
actors while researchers have developed new, innovative, and child-
sensitive ways for studying children.
In the preface to the second edition (see James and Prout 1997b) of
Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood in 1997, James and Prout
(1997a) reflected on the work inspired by the ‘emergent paradigm’ and
pinpointed the already emerging diversity of theoretical approaches to
the study of childhood (the socially constructed child, the tribal child,
the minority group child, and the social structural child) that they
identify in another seminal work in childhood studies—Theorizing
Childhood—published in the following year, (James et al. 1998). In their
reflection, James and Prout discussed the potential limits of the social
constructionist approach and its relativizing of childhood “in the face
of the political, social, and economic maltreatment ventured against
children on an international scale” (James and Prout 1997b: xi). The
editors also reflected on a number of other problems and limitations
foregrounded by the ‘new paradigm’: the unproductive juxtaposition of
the ‘biological’ and the ‘social’; the problematic focus on so-called chil-
dren’s cultures set apart from the adult world which was unintention-
ally inspired by the ‘new paradigm’; and the recognition for a broader,
emerging methodological repertoire in the study of childhood (e.g., with
the development of participatory methods) that necessitated moving
beyond ethnographic approaches, the preferred approach identified in
the first edition of the volume (James and Prout 1997b: x–xv).
Emerging Critiques of the Field: The Limits of

Social Constructionism and Dualistic Thinking
Despite the new paradigm’s pervasive popularity, critiques of its under-
lying assumptions and fundamental tenets have surfaced, especially in
recent years, as scholars have become increasingly uncomfortable with
60
S. Spyrou
some of the underlying theoretical and methodological assumptions of

the field. What Ryan (2011) has called a ‘new wave of childhood stud-
ies’ has slowly but steadily worked towards problematizing the modern-
ist, dualistic framework which has guided much of the work under the
banner of the ‘new paradigm’. Though, as Ryan (2011: 449) points out,
this new wave of studies is not characterized by a single perspective but
rather by a more shared goal of breaking the grip of biosocial dualism,
its challenge is to re-conceptualize childhood through a relational lens
which (re)connects children with their corporeality and childhood at
large to the wider natural world of non-human and technological forces
which alter to various degrees what it is to be human. It is a turn, in
many ways, towards the more-than-social world of childhood (Kraftl
2013) which childhood studies (like so many other fields) has so far
failed to acknowledge as consequential to rethinking its object of inquiry.
In his book The Future of Childhood (2005), Alan Prout—one of
the key figures behind the new paradigm’s establishment and devel-
opment—provides a critical assessment of the field arguing that “pro-
ductive though the new social studies of childhood have been, the
intellectual limits of the programme are increasingly apparent” (Prout
2005: 2) so that by the end of the twentieth century it would become
abundantly clear that the childhood experience was fragmented and
would have to be accounted for in new ways (Prout 2011: 5).
Prout’s critique of childhood studies is part of a larger interest in rela-
tional ontologies and in particular with the so-called ‘ontological turn’
in the social sciences. As we have seen in Chapter 2, relational think-
ing seeks to challenge dualisms by exploring the relations which consti-
tute entities as these unfold within specific phenomena. Relationality in
poststructuralist theorizing has called for destabilizing, de-essentializing,
and unfixing identity categories through a closer look at the dynamic
processes of local, situated practices which give rise to multiple sub-
ject positions that are shifting and fluid while in posthumanist thought
relationality signifies a bolder return to ontology and extends to the
non-human realm.
Through this work, Prout seeks to challenge established dualisms
in childhood studies and the prevalent assumptions about the self-
reflexive and autonomous agentic child. Such dualisms whether they
61
oppose ‘agency’ with ‘structure’, ‘nature’ with ‘culture’ or ‘being’ with

‘becoming’ Prout argues “exclude all that lies beneath and between
them, effacing their mutual dependence and occluding important fea-
tures about the way in which contemporary childhoods are constructed”
(2011: 8). He shows how the new sociology of childhood emerged to
occupy a particular space within modernist sociology precisely at a time
in late modernity when it was becoming apparent that the social world,
including childhood, was becoming more destabilized, complex and
ambiguous (Prout 2011; see also Wyness 2006: 237); the new sociol-
ogy of childhood attempted to create a space for childhood in sociolog-
ical discourse by inserting itself into a set of dichotomized oppositions
at a time when social theory has been attending to the complexity and
hybridity of the social world. Prout argues that the dichotomized oppo-
sitions which have guided much of the research agenda to-date need to
be rethought and this should be done by using what he calls a strat-
egy of ‘including the excluded middle’, a turn, that is, to such things as
interdisciplinarity, hybridity, symmetry, networks and mediations, and
the co-construction of generational relations (Prout 2011).
More generally, it could be argued that dissatisfaction with dualistic
thinking, has urged a number of scholars to turn towards more flexi-
ble conceptual understandings as alternatives to the orthodoxies estab-
lished by the emergence of the new social studies of childhood. Nick
Lee (2001), for example, challenges the traditional division between
children and adults which assumes that children are dependent, change-
able and incomplete in contrast to adults who are assumed to be inde-
pendent, stable and complete. Lee argues that in the modern world
adulthood is uncertain and ambiguous: adult identities, careers and inti-
mate relationships are no longer stable but quite provisional; therefore,
childhood can no longer be regarded as incomplete and dependent in
relation to adulthood. Moreover, Lee argues, it is increasingly becom-
ing obvious that the ‘human being - human becoming’ distinction
sustained by current scholarship is no longer meaningful as a means
of distinguishing between children and adults since “The condition of
human becoming is spreading throughout the life-course” (Lee 2001:
85) and both children and adults, can likewise be characterized as both
beings and becomings.5
62
S. Spyrou
Coming from another direction, Adrian James (2010) has also been
critical of dualistic thinking and has called for the need to recognize
complexity and attempt integration in the field. According to James,
the field of childhood studies needs to integrate the disparate perspec-
tives that currently exist so that they cease to be seen as oppositional;
their complementary role should be recognized and appreciated for
what it can contribute to the field as a whole. Such disparate perspec-
tives include those of structure vs agency or childhood vs childhoods
which James argues prevent us from understanding the complexities
of children’s lives. For example, taking the structural determinants of
childhood and the commonalities they engender in children’s lives, he
argues, allows us not only to understand their role in creating a com-
mon structural and generational space for children but also, and simul-
taneously, to see how they give rise to different childhoods. Attending to
children’s voices, agency and experiences and to how they produce dif-
ferent childhoods complements rather than opposes our efforts towards
understanding the structural and generational space of childhood which
produces commonality. By integrating rather than opposing such per-
spectives, we are able to attend to both the commonalities and diver-
sities of childhood which constitute not two opposing understandings
but aspects of the same larger phenomenon (Adrian James 2010: 493,
496–497).
It would be fair to say that today much of the critique in childhood
studies is centered on the social constructionist approach celebrated by
the field and the need to move beyond it. There is no doubt that the
social constructionist paradigm popularized by the ‘new social studies
of childhood’ has and continues to offer much needed corrective insight
into the homogenizing tendencies of studies of childhood. As Tisdall
and Punch 2012: 254, 258) note, these tendencies are clearly illus-
trated through the universalized and globalized notions of childhood
(e.g., the emphasis on the child as an individual) which are exported
from the Minority World to the Majority World where children’s life
conditions can often be radically different. The need to historicize and
de-naturalize the concept of childhood which has been biologized and
universalized remains pressing to this day, a task towards which the
social constructionist agenda of childhood studies will likely continue
63
to work (Malkki and Martin 2003: 220). Bringing forth and elu-
cidating the discourses and practices which give rise to particular
social constructions of childhood not only reveals the historical and
contextually-rooted character of the phenomenon and its multiple man-
ifestations (across time and space and in relation to a variety of social
variables such as class, gender or ethnicity) but also highlights the power
structures and dynamics which produce its political knowledge-base.
As Alvesson and Skoldberg (2009: 36) suggest, social construction-
ism’s enticement partly rests on the use of the metaphor of ‘construc-
tion’ which implies fabrication, arbitrariness and manipulation and
consequently the need for disclosure. By problematizing knowledge
production and asking what knowledge is produced, by whom and for
whom, and for what purposes, social constructionism provides the pos-
sibility for reimagining and potentially reconstructing the social order
in a more equitable fashion; hence its political appeal. In that sense,
it would be fair to say that the basic, underlying assumption of this
approach—that childhood is a social construction which circumscribes
children’s lives and that likewise children are a central element and key
player of this social construction—will likely continue to shape much
of the future research in the field not only because it helps elucidate our
understanding of childhood as a social phenomenon but also because
it inadvertently exposes the workings of domination and the need to
reshape the oppressive structures which impinge on children’s lives.
As Alanen argues in a recent, deliberately provocative editorial of
Childhood (2015) titled ‘Are we all constructionists now?’, social con-
structionism has appealed to sociologists precisely because it seeks to
explain childhood as the outcome of social and cultural processes rather
than natural ones and hence provides a political agenda for change: if
childhood is socially constructed then it can be reconstructed in ways that
lead to more equality and justice for children. In that sense, we could add,
it provides a moral and ethical justification for research agendas and
endeavors which goes beyond the mere desire for producing knowl-
edge. However, Alanen explains, social constructionism is often used as
an assertion to gain legitimate entry into childhood studies without the
necessary reflection and critical scrutiny on what it entails. The putative
common-sense understanding of the term encourages its widespread
64
S. Spyrou
and superficial use without the need to provide evidence for what it
asserts: to claim that something is socially constructed is, in other
words, considered to be enough. Seeing, for instance, all differences
between children as socially constructed can obscure, as Hammersley
(2016: 5–6) points out, our understanding of real differences in capa-
bilities that exist between children. Moreover, social constructionism’s
preoccupation with how social constructions are carried out often ends
up in descriptivism and lack of theoretical insight (Alanen 2015). Social
constructionism’s anti-essentialism is likewise limited by its essentialist
stance towards the very idea of construction which is assumed to be an
essential and “an inherent, unchangeable, constant property of our real-
ity” and its lack of self-critique in relation to the role it plays in con-
structing “others’ construction” (Alvesson and Skoldberg 2009: 38). The
selective application of social constructionism only in relation to what
are seen as undesirable phenomena is problematic in that it fails to exer-
cise the same critical scrutiny to all phenomena such as, for instance,
children’s rights or children’s voices (Hammersley 2016: 6). Added to
this, is the overall weakening of a more universal agenda for childhood
when one takes a relativistic, social constructionist point of view which
discounts problems such as child neglect and abuse which have a more
universal presence in favor of arguments which are rooted in the local
and cultural specificities of children’s lives (Wyness 2006: 21–22). For
a field which celebrates social constructionism to such a great extent,
the invitation is, as Alanen (2015) implies in the aforementioned edito-
rial, to look beyond and attend to the ongoing philosophical dialogues
which could provide the necessary food for critical inquiry in childhood
studies.
Despite its productive impact, we could argue that the social con-
structionist paradigm precludes a more comprehensive understanding of
the childhood phenomenon which is not reducible to simply the social
but is also, simultaneously, biological, and technological. Inadvertently
perhaps, as Prout (2008) reminds us, the overexcitement with the
claims of social constructionism ended up reifying the nature-culture
dichotomy.
In their influential book Theorizing Childhood published in 1998,
James, Jenks and Prout already acknowledged the reductionist assumptions
65
of a social constructionist approach to the study of childhood and devoted

a chapter to discuss “The Body of Childhood”6:
Broadly speaking it might be said that social constructionism stands in

danger of replacing one reductionism with another: in brief, the body and
the child appear as effects of social relations, leaving little room for the
body/child as a physical and corporeal entity. In the social construction-
ist version, the body/child becomes dissolved as a material entity and is
treated as a discursive object – the product not of an interaction between
‘nature’ and ‘culture’ but purely an effect of discourse. (James et al. 1998:
146; see also Prout 2011: 7–8)7
In the same year, Gittins (1998) also exercised a harsh critique of social
constructionism (especially the radical version espoused by the Stainton
Rogers) which she sees as having the potential to trivialize real inequali-
ties, differences, and problems that exist in the world:
To argue that child prostitution in Bangkok is just another story, which

could then easily also be applied to the whole ‘story’ of Third World pov-
erty and underdevelopment, may be interesting and clever academically.
To deny that there are real embodied children suffering physical pain,
degradation and illness and to classify such phenomena as ‘stories’ begs
the question, as it were, and lets us off the hook. (Gittins 1998: 44)
Prout (2005; but also see Prout 2000b for a more limited exposition of
this critique) as we have already seen in relation to his larger critique of
dualistic thinking, picked up on the same theme a few years later also
criticizing the existing framework which posits childhood as a social
construction in opposition to that which is natural or biological insist-
ing that childhood is both social and biological and that such dichoto-
mies simply limit our ability to understand it:
Childhood should be seen as neither ‘natural’ nor ‘cultural’ but a multi-

plicity of ‘nature-cultures’, that is a variety of complex hybrids constituted
from heterogeneous materials and emergent through time. It is cultural,
biological, social, individual, historical, technological, spatial, material,
discursive … and more. Childhood is not seen as a unitary phenomenon
66
S. Spyrou
but a multiple set of constructions emergent from the connection and

disconnection, fusion and separation of these heterogeneous materials.
(Prout 2005: 144; see also Prout 2011: 8)
The limits of social constructionism in childhood research are well illus-

trated in the edited volume titled “The Body, Childhood and Society”
(Prout 2000a) where the contributors provide empirical and analytical
accounts of children’s bodies. In his introductory chapter, Prout argues
that it is necessary to include both the material and the discursive/
representational in our analyses of children’s bodies and to see them as
hybrid entities which “are inseparable from, produced in, represented by
and performed through their connections with other material objects”
whether these are other bodies, representations or technologies (Prout
2000b: 2). A number of contributors illustrate this mutually constitu-
tive relation between the body and its representations which bring into
sharp focus the need to rethink children’s bodies as hybrid. Lee (2000),
for instance, shows how a new heterogeneous assemblage of materials
including children’s bodies, discourses on childhood and technology
(in the form of video testimony) gave children participating in criminal
proceedings in English Courts a voice and allowed in this way the pro-
duction of their agency.8
Ultimately, for Prout it is unproductive “to arbitrarily separate chil-
dren from adults, as if they were some different species of being”; what
is more productive is to consider what kind of child or adult comes out
“from the complex interplay, networking and orchestration of different
natural, discursive, collective and hybrid materials” (Prout 2005: 81).
Childhood’s hybridity highlights the discomfort of modernist sociology
with childhood (as a partly social and partly natural phenomenon and
not reducible to either) which stems from its insistence with clarity and
separateness (Prout 2011: 6–7; see also Taylor 2011).
The recognition of childhood’s hybridity has encouraged childhood
studies’ scholars to explore the potential of non-reductionist approaches
to studying children and childhood such as actor-network theory
(ANT). As we have seen in Chapter 2, ANT, an approach popularized
by the work of Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law among oth-
ers (e.g., see Callon 1986; Latour 1987, 2005; Law and Hassard 1999),
67
seeks to describe the complex networks of relations (both material and

semiotic) between human and non-human actors. As Law explains,
ANT “describes the enactment of materially and discursively hetero-
geneous relations that produce and reshuffle all kinds of actors includ-
ing objects, subjects, human beings, machines, animals, ‘nature,’ ideas,
organizations, inequalities, scale and sizes, and geographical arrange-
ments” (2009: 141). One of ANT’s principal aims is to trace associations
through networks by following the actors themselves (Latour 2005).
The promise of ANT’s insights for childhood studies has been
pointed out by both Lee (2001: 129–131) and Prout (2005: 70–72,
2011: 9–10). For Prout, ANT’s use of the metaphor of ‘network’ holds
promise for the study of childhood because it suggests that “childhood
could be seen as a collection of different, sometimes competing and
sometimes conflicting, orderings” (Prout 2011: 9); thus, the notion of
the network, Prout (2011: 9–10; see also Prout 2005: 70–72) argues
offers an opportunity to overcome the dualist thinking of modernist
social theory by considering actors (or ‘actants’ as is the preferred ter-
minology of ANT) as hybrids of both nature and culture and of both
humans and non-humans (including artefacts and technologies).9 This,
he argues, allows us to ask what networks or different combinations of
humans and non-humans can come about at any particular time to pro-
duce particular types of childhood which are sometimes stable but at
other times quite unstable and shifting. Lee, likewise, finds promise in
ANT which challenges ideas of agency as self-possession and encourages
us to see it as the outcome of multiple forms of dependencies, exten-
sions and supplements; if agents are always, already inserted in net-
works of relations, then the exploration of children’s agency shifts to the
study of interdependencies between multiple actors (both human and
non-human) which constitute these networks at any particular time
(2001: 130). The promises identified by Prout and Lee have been ech-
oed more recently by Oswell (2013) who also recognizes the value of
the approach in drawing attention to the distributed nature of agency
and in helping us “think about children’s agency as assembled or infra-
structured across the human and the non-human” (Oswell 2013: 70).
Hybridity is a theme also taken up by Lee and Motzkau (2011) in
their critique of the concept in relation to the biopolitics of childhood
68
S. Spyrou
(see also Kraftl 2013, 2015). They argue that though the bio-social
dualism has served and continues to serve as an orienting framework for
research on childhood, its limits are apparent especially in light of the
mix and interplay of biological and social processes taking place in the
contemporary world (Lee and Motzkau 2011: 8). Drawing on the work
of Deleuze and Guattari, Lee and Motzkau offer a new navigational
guide comprised of three multiplicities, namely, life, resource and voice.
Each of these multiplicities is “a gathering of diverse practical, political,
theoretical and empirical concerns that are connected in complex and
varying ways to one other” which “has been composed of articulations
among a range of events and processes that cross conventional discipli-
nary boundaries” (Lee and Motzkau 2011: 10). The three multiplici-
ties which the authors outline are meant to help researchers navigate a
terrain where the biological, the social and the technical come together
in the lives of children. Taken together the three multiplicities draw on
resources developed by childhood research over the years to help con-
temporary researchers identify the complex bio-political forces and pro-
cesses at play today without resorting to bio-social dualisms (Lee and
Motzkau 2011: 15, 18).
This emerging concern with hybridity in childhood studies, however,
is not without its critics. Ryan (2011), for instance, is highly critical of
this new wave of childhood studies which attempts to rethink childhood
through the concepts of hybridity and multiplicity by breaking the grip
from the bio-social dualism which opposes nature to culture. According
to Ryan, there was never a split between the biological and the social as
often argued by the new wave of childhood studies but rather a shift in
focus—a zig-zagging of sorts—between the poles of the biological and
the social. So, rather than transgressing the bio-social dualism, this new
wave of studies, he argues, ends up inhabiting a space where “modern
western childhood is constituted not as a division between the biolog-
ical and the social, but in the form of an irreducible ‘biosocial nexus’”
(Ryan 2011: 450). From within this nexus, he argues, one may see both
developmental psychology and socialization theory as operating within
the same field of practice rather than from opposite ends.
Despite the limited work which utilizes notions of hybridity in child-
hood studies, it is reasonable to expect that the field will gradually turn
69
more decidedly to such issues which are becoming important theoreti-

cal concerns in the social sciences at large. A special issue of the journal
Global Studies of Childhood in 2013 (Volume 3, Number 4 edited by
Blaise, M. Banerjee, B., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., and Taylor, A.), for exam-
ple, was recently devoted to research on the naturecultures of postcolo-
nial childhoods which attests to this emerging interest in the field. In
the next section, I turn to a discussion of relational ontologies and their
appeal in offering an alternative orienting framework for the field.
The Appeal of Relational Ontologies

A basic and fundamental concern with questions of ontology has been
central to childhood studies as a field. In his early critique of sociol-
ogy and its failure to theorize childhood properly, Chris Jenks (1982b:
10), for example, had posed a question which is as important to current
debates as it was then: “It is as if the basic ontological questions, ‘What is
a child?’, ‘How is the child possible as such?’ were, so to speak, answered
in advance of the theorizing and then dismissed.” Jenks went on to argue
that it is crucial to examine the assumptions on which our understand-
ings of childhood and adulthood are based—to question our natural-
ized understandings of the social hierarchies in place—because “These
assumptions embody the values and interests of the theorist, which in
turn generate normative models of the social world” (Jenks 1982b: 10).
By avoiding presuppositions and leaving the ontological question open,
childhood research can avoid the pitfalls of theorizing childhood with-
out recourse to its relational counterpart, namely adulthood (see Honig
2009: 74).
The current concern with ontology and relationality has a much
more elaborate set of theoretical tools enlisted to rethink the study
of children and childhood. For example, Deleuzian perspectives of
assemblage and multiplicity are used to problematize the fixity, cer-
tainty and singularity which characterizes much of contemporary
childhood research (see, for instance, Alldred and Fox 2015; Prout
2005; Lee 2001; Johansson 2011; Mayes 2016; Renold and Mellor
2013). As Lee (2001: 115) explains, Deleuzian understandings of
70
S. Spyrou
multiple becomings allow us to “ask what assemblages they [i.e., chil-

dren] are involved in and what extensions they are living through”
at any particular time and as such how configurations and their
accompanying power dynamics change. Children’s (like adults’) lives
are based on connections and dependence on a wide assortment of
heterogeneous materials, including humans and non-humans; it is
these connections which allow children to enact agency in their daily
lives, not their self-possessed and individually-held ability to do so.
Likewise, Dahlberg (2009: 234) shows how both poststructuralist
and Deleuzian accounts of childhood have inspired new ways of look-
ing at the child, less in terms of what she is (e.g., the child’s iden-
tity) and more “towards encounter, connections, transformations, and
becomings” (see, for example, Renold and Mellor 2013).10
Though, they are unlikely to overtake current social constructionist
thinking in childhood studies, Deleuzian-inspired studies help challenge
the fixation of childhood studies with childhood as an identity and the
child as a bounded entity. A relational ontology of childhood informed
by Deleuzian and posthumanist ideas can help deprivilege the assumed
centrality of the child’s substance and move both theoretical and empir-
ical investigations into the material-semiotic sphere where the child as
an entity constitutes and is constituted by the phenomena in which s/he
participates.
In light of the new emerging ways of thinking about childhood, in
the next section I consider what the ongoing discussions about interdis-
ciplinarity in childhood studies might entail for a field which seeks to
understand childhood as a complex phenomenon whose study cannot
be contained within disciplinary boundaries.
Disciplinarity and Interdisciplinarity in Childhood

Studies
The interdisciplinary approach embraced by ‘the new social studies
of childhood’ has produced valuable insights into children’s worlds at
the same time that disciplinary approaches to childhood such as the
71
sociology, anthropology or geography of childhood have been devel-

oping in parallel to the field of childhood studies at large. In fact, it is
partly through these parallel disciplinary developments that the interdis-
ciplinary field of childhood studies has flourished.
In a reflective editorial in Childhood, Alanen (2012) points out that
interdisciplinarity in childhood studies is often seen as a means of
rethinking the limits of disciplinary understandings by pushing knowl-
edge in new directions and finding better and more creative solutions
to the complex problems we are faced with. For Alanen, maintain-
ing strong links with the mother disciplines, be it sociology, history,
or geography, is necessary for the development of an interdisciplinary
childhood studies. However, in practice, as she points out, so-called
interdisciplinary work ends up being simply multi-disciplinary due
to a variety of structural, knowledge and cultural barriers which limit
truly interdisciplinary work (Alanen 2012: 420–421; see also the views
expressed by the various interviewees in Smith and Greene 2014).
In a 2010 issue of Children’s Geographies (vol. 8, issue 2) a number of
leading scholars debated the merits, limits and challenges of interdiscipli-
narity for childhood studies. On one end of the spectrum there are those
like James and Korbin who strongly argue for, and defend, an interdis-
ciplinary approach. Allison James (2010: 216), for instance, is critical
of the recent fissions that have appeared in childhood studies whereby
disciplinary perspectives—sociological, anthropological, and geographi-
cal for instance—risk weakening the interdisciplinary focus of childhood
studies. Following Prout (2005), James argues that childhood is a com-
plex phenomenon and as such it requires that disciplinary ideas come
together to offer insights into childhood which cannot be addressed ade-
quately from any single disciplinary angle. Korbin (2010: 217) is simi-
larly a fervent supporter of an interdisciplinary childhood studies: “we
want childhood studies to be holistic, yet also bring the best from the
many disciplines and methods now studying childhood”. An interdisci-
plinary approach for childhood studies would necessitate, however, for
Korbin (2010: 218) interdisciplinary involvement during all stages of the
research process, from the conceptualization of the research problem to
data analysis and the interpretation and publication of findings.
72
S. Spyrou
This understanding of interdisciplinarity is also echoed by Prout in

The Future of Childhood where he posits that the heterogeneity and com-
plexity of childhood requires interdisciplinarity and openness (Prout
2005: 2) and “the capacity to step out of disciplinary comfort zones”
without foregoing the role and contributions of the different disciplines
(Prout 2005: 146; see also Alanen 2012: 421; Wyness 2015: 145). In
a more recent publication, Prout (2011) suggests that recognizing that
social phenomena like childhood are complex and heterogeneous and
that entities are hybrid “might promote an ontological hesitation” that
could reinvigorate the interdisciplinary study of childhood and urges
childhood scholars to engage more directly with the biological and med-
ical sciences which play such a big role in contemporary life as well as
with the arts and humanities which could shed light on how practices
of representation shape discourses of childhood. This kind of interdisci-
plinary engagement could encourage critical debate, analysis and inno-
vation in childhood studies (Woodhead 2009: 54) enriching both its
empirical and theoretical scope (see also Weston 2008).
On the other end of the spectrum are scholars like Cook and Aitken
who make a stronger case for experimentation in knowledge production.
Cook (2010: 222), for example, argues that it is important for research-
ers to recognize their specific disciplinary backgrounds (rather than deny
them) and the unique contributions that they make to the study of
children and childhood; at the same time, it is also important to recog-
nize that the knowledges they produce are partial. The promise, accord-
ing to Cook, lies in the space of the cross- and the multi-disciplinary
where the answers are not determined by the narrowness of disciplinary
orientations. This position is echoed by Aitken (2010: 219–220) who
advocates a “bold disciplinarianism”, a position which makes clear what
is different, say in the work of a geographer and a sociologist of child-
hood, while at the same time getting away from the disciplinary and
experimenting with the strange and the new which lies in the realm of
the transdisciplinary. For Aitken, it is in this realm of difference which
transgresses disciplinary boundaries where experimental and productive
engagements beyond disciplinary identities can be made.
This kind of experimentation which is forward looking does not deny
the continuing importance of disciplinary knowledges and perspectives
73
but calls for a constant sense of critical reflexivity. In her own reflec-
tive piece in Children’s Geographies, Pain (2010: 224) argues for “a timid
disciplinarianism: stepping back, decentring ourselves as knowledge
producers, listening a bit more, telling a bit less, opening up to the
many other sites of knowledge production” through our engagement
with children and young people as well as others who are implicated in
our work such as community activists. This is in many ways a call for
deconstructing and reconstructing knowledge in new, innovative ways
which may be inspired and informed by disciplinary knowledges and
understandings but are ever wary about their own limits and partiality.
Gagen (2010: 214) reminds us that any effort, whatever its orientation,
whether disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary or trans- and
cross-disciplinary can end up getting trapped in its own complacency:
“Perhaps it is a good moment to turn our attention outward again and
remind ourselves of opportunities which lie beyond established practices
whether they be disciplinary, interdisciplinary or extra-disciplinary”.
Without denying the continued importance of disciplinary knowledge
and interdisciplinary perspectives of the field, I argue that a certain kind
of ‘undisciplining’ of childhood studies might prove helpful for the field
at this particular juncture in its development.
Undisciplining Childhood Studies?

Undisciplining childhood studies necessitates first and foremost a reflex-
ive critique of the limits of disciplinary knowledges and the frame-
works from which they are produced. Indeed, the knowledge produced
by each and every discipline cannot be understood outside the pow-
er/knowledge nexus which gives rise to it: knowledge produces power
which in turn produces knowledge giving rise to a mutually constitutive
engagement, as Foucault reminds us.
As separate fields of study, academic disciplines are meant to disci-
pline knowledge: to produce new knowledge within a framework that
delimits the behavior, inquiries, and concerns of those who operate
within it. Each academic discipline has its own unique and character-
istic ways of doing research, of approaching and investigating its object
74
S. Spyrou
of inquiry and producing knowledge. The knowledge they produce is

disciplined in the sense that it is produced through the use of particu-
lar approaches and methods by scholars who are trained in specific dis-
ciplinary conventions. Disciplines produce, in this sense, out of a vast
number of possible knowledges, specific disciplinary knowledges within
well-circumscribed boundaries.
As Foucault has argued, what emerges are knowledge systems or
‘epistemes’ which help distinguish ‘scientific’ from ‘non-scientific’
knowledge:
the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all
the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within,
I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is
possible to say are true or false. The episteme is the ‘apparatus’ which makes
possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may
from what may not be characterised as scientific. (Foucault 1980: 197)
Yet, despite their inevitable selectivity, disciplines and the knowledge they
produce are the means through which we conceive the world of ‘facts’
and in that sense necessary even if limited. As Latour so aptly put it:
Without economics there are no economies; without sociology there is no

society; without psychology there is no psyche; without geography there
is no space. What would we know of the past without historians? How
would the structure of language be accessible to us without grammarians?
(Latour 2005: 257)
Without suggesting that disciplinary knowledge as such is problem-

atic, I would argue that a certain kind of ‘undisciplining’ could provide
childhood studies with a more creative and innovative direction which
goes beyond disciplinary confines. ‘Undisciplining childhood studies’
calls for moving past disciplinary epistemological frameworks to engage
with alternatives which constitute children and childhood in new, more
creative and potentially more politically and ethically committed ways.
In this chapter, we have seen how a number of childhood studies’
scholars are beginning to move beyond orthodox understandings of
the field and to experiment with new theoretical ideas and knowledge
75
practices. By turning to ontology, relationality, materiality and hybridity

they seek to decenter the child-subject in order to connect theoretically
children and childhood with the wider world of discourse and matter as
reflected in the empirical reality in which children’s lives are embedded.
As I show later on (see Chapters 6 and 7), ‘undisciplining childhood
studies’ might mean attending to the mess of children’s worlds and lives
(i.e., to that which is habitually and intentionally or unintentionally
ignored and excluded as well as to that which is ontologically irreduci-
ble to one category or another) through the development of appropriate
theoretical and methodological tools. Or, it might mean attending to
silence as a feature of voice defying in this way voice-based methodolo-
gies which privilege the uttered word (see Chapter 4).
If we are to attend to childhood as a complex phenomenon we need
to decenter it, not in order to lessen its centrality and significance but
on the contrary in order to allow it to connect with the wider world (see
Spyrou 2017).11 To produce new knowledge and understanding which
rises to the occasion we need to engage in a collaborative spirit which
seeks to encompass multiple disciplines and the expertise of diverse
scholars but is not exhausted within academic circles. Indeed, it might
be fruitful to collaborate in the spirit of undisciplining with policy mak-
ers, activists, artists, and practitioners where such collaborations may
yield new and perhaps unexpected insights which enrich our ongoing
efforts to produce knowledge that matters.
Conclusion
This chapter has provided a critical review of childhood studies’ emer-
gence and development as a field. The momentum of the paradigmatic
shift in the study of childhood has carried the field into the twenty-first
century and though productive in many respects, what we are witness-
ing today is a slow but progressive effort to rethink childhood stud-
ies and its remit. Both its preoccupation with the monadic, reflexive
child-agent who is capable of autonomous action and its overall social
constructionist orientation are increasingly confronted with their con-
ceptual limits. New theoretical orientations beyond childhood studies
76
S. Spyrou
are slowly but steadily making inroads into the field challenging it to
reconsider some of its most basic ontological and epistemological prem-
ises and to experiment with new ways of knowing. Efforts to move past
the field’s theoretical dualisms and to embrace hybridity and complexity
help open up childhood studies to a wider set of debates and influences.
The calls for more interdisciplinary collaborations are many and there
is clearly a push to consider new and different ways of knowing beyond
the dominant ones.
Building on this new, developing momentum which attempts to
rethink the field and move into new directions, childhood studies is
called upon to reflect more boldly on its taken-for-granted conceptual
frameworks. In the next three chapters I attempt to rethink three of the
field’s key concepts—starting with voice in Chapter 4, moving on to
agency in Chapter 5, and finishing with participation in Chapter 6—
in light of broader theoretical developments in the social sciences. My
main concern is to make their underlying epistemological and ontolog-
ical assumptions more transparent with a view to refining them as criti-
cal research tools for knowledge production.
Notes
1. For an example of the value of exploring children’s experiences see
James and Curtis’ (2012) exemplary study of sick children in hospital.
2. In anthropology, theories of enculturation similarly focused on how
children are taught the rules, norms, beliefs, and values of their culture
to gradually become full members of that culture.
3. Interestingly, James, one of the pioneers of the new social studies of
childhood, has recently attempted to revisit and revive the concept of
‘socialization’ which was heavily criticized and in many ways dismissed
by the new social studies of childhood (see James 2013). In the book
titled ‘Socializing Children’, James attempts to provide a child-centered
account of socialization which takes children’s experiences and perspec-
tives seriously and highlights their active participation in processes of
socialization. By focusing on how children learn about the social world,
James argues that the concept of socialization can still play an impor-
tant role in social inquiry (James 2013: 1–6).
77
4. See, however, Ryan (2008) who challenges the assumption that the new
sociology of childhood actually brought about a paradigmatic shift.
Concern with children’s agency (in some form), for example, is not a
recent one as often claimed but rather an ongoing issue in sociology,
Ryan argues.
5. In an article specifically attempting to problematize the being/becom-
ing dualism, Uprichard (2008) argued that children and childhood are
both ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ by necessity and that as alternative tempo-
ral frames both ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ interact and complement each
other: ‘being’ a child is informed by the child’s understanding of the
future and likewise the child’s ‘becoming’ is necessarily informed by the
child’s ‘being’ in the present. More recently, Hanson (2017) has called
for adding a third component—‘been’—to the dualism being/becom-
ing as a means of acknowledging and embracing in theoretical discus-
sions children’s past and not just the present and the future.
6. In his edited volume ‘The Body, Childhood and Society’, Prout (2000b:
3) points out that there was some reservation early on about the limits
of social constructionism (e.g., in James and Prout 1990a) in relation
to the materiality of children’s bodies in making social constructionist
arguments about childhood but that these concerns remained by and
large marginal to the field.
7. Though social constructionist approaches come in various shades, in its
most extreme version social constructionism sees childhood as purely a
product of discourse (see, in particular, Stainton-Rogers and Stainton
Rogers 1992).
8. In the same volume, Place (2000), using ethnographic data from a
study of a pediatric intensive care unit shows how the boundaries of
ill children’s bodies are negotiated and contested through the connec-
tions between the corporeal and the technological (e.g., the connection
of children’s bodies to medical equipment); this, argues Place (2000:
172) “raises questions about a conception of children’s bodies simply
as naturally occurring entities—biological and physical—and redirects
attention to the notion that such entities may consist of heterogeneous
elements—technological and figurative—in addition to those of a cor-
poreal character” (see also Prendergast 2000).
9. See also Taylor (2011: 430–431) who makes a similar call for consid-
ering the complex and heterogeneous assemblages of nature and cul-
ture in rethinking contemporary childhoods through hybridity and the
interconnectedness between human and non-human entities.
78
S. Spyrou

10. In a recent (2013) special issue of the journal Global Studies of
Childhood (Volume 3, Number 3, edited by Jones and Duncan) titled
‘Deleuze and early years education: Explorations in theory and lived
experiences’, the contributors turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s work to
fruitfully rethink children and childhood in general and early childhood
education in particular. Contributors to the special issue use concepts
from the work of the two scholars such as the ‘imaginary’ to rethink
children’s drawings (Knight 2013); the ‘nomad’ and ‘rhizome’ to rethink
mathematical learning (Saar 2013); ‘smooth and striated space’ to
study infants in Family Day Care (Stratigos et al. 2013); and ‘rhizome’,
‘nomadicism’, and ‘becoming’ to rethink child labor (Miller 2013).
11. See also Twamley et al. (2017) for a specific attempt to connect

childhood scholarship to feminist scholarship.
References
Aitken, S. (2010). Bold disciplinarianism, experimentation and failing spectac-
ularly. Children’s Geographies, 8(2), 219–220.
Alanen, L. (2001). Explorations in generational analysis. In L. Alanen
& B. Mayall, B. (Eds.), Conceptualizing child-adult relations. London:
RoutledgeFalmer.
Alanen, L. (2009). Generational order. In J. Qvortrup, W. A. Corsaro, & M.-S.
Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook in childhood studies (pp. 159–174).
Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Alanen, L. (2012). Disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and childhood studies.
Childhood, 19(4), 419–422.
Alanen, L. (2015). Are we all constructionists now? Childhood, 22(2),
149–153.
Alldred, P., & Fox, N. J. (2015). The sexuality assemblages of young men: A
new materialist analysis. Sexualities, 18(8), 905–920.
Archard, D. (1993). Children: Rights and childhood. London: Routledge.
Blaise, M., Banerjee, B., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Taylor, A. (Eds.). (2013).
Researching the naturecultures of postcolonial childhoods. Special issue of
79
Bluebond-Langner, M. (1978). The private worlds of dying children. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.
Burman, E. (1994). Deconstructing developmental psychology. London:
Routledge.
Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation:
Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In J. Law
(Ed.), Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge (pp. 196–223).
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Cook, D. (2010). The promise of an unanswered question: Multi-/cross-
disciplinary struggles. Children’s Geographies, 8(2), 221–222.
Dahlberg, G. (2009). Policies in early childhood education and care:
Potentialities for agency, play and learning. In J. Qvortrup, W. A. Corsaro,
& M.-S. Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies (pp. 228–
237). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings:
1972–1977. (L. Marshall, C. Gordon, J. Mepham, & K. Soper, Trans.,
edited by Colin Gordon). New York: Pantheon Books.
Gagen, E. (2010). Disciplinary domains: Searching out different ways of doing
children’s research. Children’s Geographies, 8(2), 213–214.
Gittins, D. (1998). The child in question. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Hammersley, M. (2016). Childhood studies: A sustainable paradigm?
Childhood, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568216631399.
Hanson, K. (2017). Embracing the past: ‘Been’, ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ chil-
dren. Childhood, 24(3), 281–285.
Hardman, C. (1973). Can there be an anthropology of children? Journal of the
Anthropology Society of Oxford, 4(1), 85–99.
Honig, M.-S. (2009). How is the child constituted in childhood studies? In J.
Qvortrup, W. A. Corsaro, & M.-S. Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of
childhood studies (pp. 62–77). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ingleby, D. (1974). The psychology of child psychology. In M. P. M. Richards
(Ed.), Integration of a child into a social world (pp. 295–308). London:
Cambridge University Press.
James, A. [Adrian]. (2010). Competition or integration? The next step in child-
hood studies? Childhood, 17(4), 485–499.
James, A. [Allison]. (2010). Interdiciplinarity—For better or worse. Children’s
Geographies, 8(2), 215–216.
80
S. Spyrou
James, A. (2013). Socializing children. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

James, A., & Curtis, P. (2012). Constructing the sick child: The cultural poli-
tics of children’s hospitals. The Sociological Review, 60(4), 754–772.
James, A., & James, A. (2004). Constructing childhood: Theory, policy and social
practice. London: Macmillan.
Falmer Press.
James, A. and Prout, A. (1990c). Introduction. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.),
hood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood (2nd ed.).
London: Falmer Press.
James, A., & Prout, A. (1997b). Preface to the second edition. In A. James
& A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary
issues in the sociological study of childhood (pp. ix-xvii). (2nd ed.). London:
Falmer Press.
Polity Press.
Jenks, C. (Ed.). (1982a). The sociology of childhood: Essential readings. London:
Batsford.
Jenks, C. (1982b). Introduction: Constituting the child. In C. Jenks (Ed.), The
sociology of childhood: Essential readings (pp. 9–24). London: Batsford.
Jenks, C. (1996). Childhood. New York: Routledge.
Johansson, B. (2011). Doing adulthood in childhood research. Childhood,
19(1), 101–114.
Jones, L., & Duncan J. (Eds.). (2013). Deleuze and early years education:
Explorations in theory and lived experiences. Special issue of Global Studies
of Childhood, 3(3), 203–349.
Knight, L. (2013). Not as it seems: Using Deleuzian concepts of the imaginary
to rethink children’s drawings. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(3), 254–264.
Korbin, J. (2010). Interdisciplinarity and childhood studies. Children’s
81
Kraftl, P. (2013). Beyond ‘voice’, beyond ‘agency’, beyond ‘politics’? Hybrid

childhoods and some critical reflections on children’s emotional geogra-
phies. Emotion, Space and Society, 9, 13–23.
Kraftl, P. (2015). Alter-childhoods: Biopolitics and childhoods in alternative
education spaces. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105(1),
219–237.
Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers
through society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network the-
ory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Law, J. (2009). Actor network theory and material semiotics. In B. S. Turner
(Ed.), The new Blackwell companion to social theory (pp. 141–158). Oxford:
Blackwell.
Law, J., & Hassard, J. (Eds.). (1999). Actor network theory and after. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Lee, N. (2000). Faith in the body? Childhood, subjecthood and sociological
enquiry. In A. Prout (Ed.), The body, childhood and society (pp. 149–171).
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Lee, N., & Motzkau, J. (2011). Navigating the bio-politics of childhood.
Childhood, 18(1), 7–19.
Lenzer, G. (1998). The importance of children’s rights programs in academic
institutions. Loyola Poverty Law Journal, 4, 251–262.
MacKay, R. (1973). Conceptions of children and models of socialization.
In H. P. Dreitzel (Ed.), Childhood and socialization (pp. 27–43). London:
Collier-Macmillan.
Malkki, L., & Martin, E. (2003). Children and the gendered politics of glo-
balization: In remembrance of Sharon Stephens. American Ethnologist,
30(2), 216–224.
lives. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Mayes, E. (2016). Shifting research methods with a becoming-child ontology:
Co-theorising puppet production with high school students. Childhood,
23(1), 105–122.
Miller, V. (2013). Wandering off the road to the end of child labor. Global
Studies of Childhood, 3(3), 339–349.
82
S. Spyrou
Pain, R. (2010). Ways beyond disciplinarity. Children’s Geographies, 8(2),
223–225.
Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Piaget, J. (1929/1951). The child’s conception of the world. London: Littlefield
Adams.
Place, B. (2000). Constructing the bodies of ill children in the intensive care
unit. In A. Prout (Ed.), The body, childhood and society (pp. 172–194).
Prendergast, S. (2000). ‘To become dizzy in our turning’: Girls, body-maps
and gender as childhood ends. In A. Prout (Ed.), The body, childhood and
society (pp. 101–124). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Prout, A. (Ed.) (2000a). The body, childhood and society. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Prout, A. (2000b). Childhood bodies: Construction, agency and hybridity.
In A. Prout (Ed.), The body, childhood and society (pp. 1–18). Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Prout, A. (2008). Culture-nature and the construction of childhood. In K.
Drotner & S. Livingstone (Eds.), International handbook of children, media
and culture (pp. 21–35). London: Sage.
Prout, A. (2011). Taking a step away from modernity: Reconsidering the new
sociology of childhood. Global Studies of Childhood, 1(1), 4–14.
Qvortrup, J. (1994). Childhood matters: An introduction. In J. Qvortrup, M.
Bardy, G. B. Sgritta, & H. Wintersberger (Eds.), Childhood matters: Social
theory, practice, and politics (pp. 1–23). Aldershot: Avebury.
Renold, E., & Mellor, D. (2013). Deleuxe and Guattari in the nursery:
Towards an ethnographic multi-sensory mapping of gendered bodies and
becomings. In R. Coleman & J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research meth-
odologies (pp. 23–41). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Richards, M. P. M. (Ed.). (1974). The integration of a child into a social world.
Ryan, K. W. (2011). The new wave of childhood studies: Breaking the grip of
bio-social dualism? Childhood, 19(4), 439–452.
Ryan, P. J. (2008). How new is the “new” social study of childhood? The myth
of paradigm shift. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXXVIII(4), 533–576.
83
Saar, T. (2013). Articulating the immanent: Children unfolding numbers.

Smith, C., & Greene, S. (2014). Key thinkers in childhood studies. Bristol:
Policy Press.
433–437.
Stainton-Rogers, W., & Stainton-Rogers, R. (1992). Stories of childhood.
London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Stratigos, T., Sumsion, J., & Bradley, B. (2013). Infants in family day care:
Stories of smooth and striated space. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(3),
265–275.
Taylor, A. (2011). Reconceptualizing the ‘nature’ of childhood. Childhood,
18(4), 420–433.
Twamley, K., Rosen, R., & Mayall, B. (2017). The (im)possibilities of dia-
logue across feminism and childhood scholarship and activism. Children’s
Geographies, 15(2), 249–255.
Uprichard, E. (2008). Children as ‘being and becomings’: Children, childhood
and temporality. Children and Society, 22(4), 303–313.
Walkerdine, V. (1993). Beyond developmentalism? Theory and Psychology, 3(4),
451–470.
Weston, K. (2008). ‘Real anthropology’ and other nostalgias. In N. Panourgia
& G. E. Marcus (Eds.), Ethnographica moralia: Experiments in interpretive
anthropology (pp. 126–137). New York: Fordham University Press.
Woodhead, M. (1997). Psychology and the cultural construction of children’s
needs. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing child-
hood: Contemporary issues in the sociological studies of childhood (pp. 63–84).
London: Falmer Press.
Woodhead, M. (2009). Child development and development of childhood. In
J. Qvortrup, W. Corsaro, & M.-S. Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of
childhood studies (pp. 46–61). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wyness, M. (2006). Childhood and society: An introduction to the sociology of
childhood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wyness, M. (2015). Childhood. Cambridge: Polity.
4
The Production of Children’s Voices
Introduction
Poststructuralist insights, as I have suggested in Chapter 2, have had
limited impact on the theoretical thinking of childhood studies’ very
object of inquiry, namely the child. Despite ongoing critiques of, and
efforts to decenter, the unitary, humanist subject of modernist science,
childhood studies at large has insisted (with few exceptions) on pre-
serving and reproducing an image of the knowledgeable, self-reflexive
child-actor. With the paradigmatic shift, this child-actor had to be
rescued from theoretical invisibility, first and foremost, through her
Significant parts of this chapter were originally published in the following two articles:
Spyrou, Spyros, The Limits of Children’s Voices: From Authenticity to Critical,

Reflexive Representation (Childhood, Volume 18, Number 2) pp. 151–165. Copyright
© [2011] (Spyros Spyrou). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568210387834.
Spyrou, Spyros, Researching Children’s Silences: Exploring the Fullness of Voice in Childhood
Research (Childhood, Volume 23, Number 1) pp. 7–21. Copyright © [2016] (Spyros Spyrou).
Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568215571618.

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47904-4_4
86
S. Spyrou
own voice and the concerted efforts of scholars who have been sensi-
tive enough to ‘capture’ this voice. The child’s very authenticity as a
presence—a being—in the world has largely rested on her ability to
speak through her own, unique and unadulterated voice.
In this chapter, I offer a critique of the preoccupation with chil-
dren’s voices in childhood studies, a preoccupation which stems from
an often, unexamined assumption, about the authenticity and truth of
voice. I focus in particular on exploring the limits of children’s voices by
reflecting on the processes which produce them and argue that a critical,
reflexive approach to child voice research needs to take into account the
actual research contexts in which children’s voices are produced and the
power imbalances which shape them. By focusing on the interactional
contexts in which children’s voices emerge, the institutional contexts
in which they are embedded, and the discursive contexts which inform
them, we can move beyond simplistic claims to truth and authenticity
and begin to look critically at issues of representation. Using examples
from ethnographic research, I draw in particular on Bakhtin’s dialogi-
cal approach to explore how voices are produced in research encounters.
I also show how an approach that situates voice in social context and
recognizes its performative character allows us to explore the multi-
layered character of voice, its non-normative elements which defy easy
interpretation, as well as aspects of voice which are often left out from
analysis. Silence is one such feature of voice I elaborate on in the rest
of the chapter to illustrate how an expanded and more comprehen-
sive view of children’s voices can result in more nuanced and ethical
accounts of children’s subjectivities. I argue that a critical childhood
studies needs to push the limits of children’s voices by moving beyond
what is simply uttered to examine the unspoken and the unspeakable
which can produce new and more sensitive representations of children.
By placing children’s voices in the larger relational fields of the social
world, we are offered an opportunity to decenter the child as a subject
and to produce knowledge that is ethically attuned to the relational-
ity of social life. Poststructuralist thinking is, in this context, a fruitful
entry point not only for elaborating a relational understanding of chil-
dren’s subjectivities but also a critical means for examining how we, as
researchers, are implicated in the knowledge practices at work.
4 The Production of Children’s Voices
87
Voice Research in Childhood Studies

The concept of ‘children’s voices’ perhaps more than any other con-
cept, has come to be associated with the so-called ‘new social studies of
childhood.’ One could argue that the interdisciplinary field of child-
hood studies has built its very raison d’être around the notion of chil-
dren’s voices. By accessing the otherwise silenced voices of children–by
giving children a voice–and presenting them to the rest of the world,
researchers hope to gain a better understanding of childhood.1 The dis-
empowered social position of children and the need to attend to chil-
dren and childhood from a social justice and rights perspective also add
a moral imperative to the cause. Yet, this preoccupation with children’s
voices, which is well deserved both in an ethical and a research sense,
has mostly failed to scrutinize itself and to attend critically to issues of
representation. Three pieces of work set the stage for a critical analysis
of children’s voices and the attending challenges to childhood research.
First, James (2007: 265) asks why it is that childhood researchers do not
reflect critically on their role in the process of representing children’s
voices through their work. This question has political significance, espe-
cially when the research seeks to destabilize power differentials between
children and adults by relying on the ‘authenticity’ of voice while aim-
ing to empower children. Second, Komulainen (2007) has decon-
structed the notion of ‘voice’ in childhood studies by paying particular
attention to the ambiguity of human communication and the modern,
liberal notion of a ‘speaking subject’ (see also Lee 2001). Komulainen
cautions against an uncritical use of the child’s voice by critiquing the
individualizing tendencies in voice research which attribute autonomy,
rationality and intention to the speaking child while simultaneously
divorcing the production of the child’s voice from its interactional con-
text (Komulainen 2007: 25). Following Bakhtin’s theoretical insights,
Komulainen considers voice as social and co-constructed instead of indi-
vidual, fixed straightforward, linear or clear (Komulainen 2007: 18, 23).
For Komulainen, we need as researchers to become more aware of how
children’s voices are constantly constrained and shaped by multiple fac-
tors such as our own assumptions about children, our particular use of
language, the institutional contexts in which we operate and the overall
88
S. Spyrou
ideological and discursive climates which prevail. These issues may

become particularly salient in research with children who have little or
no speech. Third, in a similar vein, Mazzei and Jackson (2009) remind
us about the preoccupation with the modern, metaphysical assump-
tion of a unitary subject with an authentic voice speaking the truth,
and invite us to consider how ‘polyvocality’ in qualitative research does
not resolve the problem of representation. It is impossible to grasp voice
and represent its essence due to the problem of ‘authenticity’. However,
our failure to do so rests not on methodological deficits (e.g., the place
where an interview is held, whether it is a group or individual interview)
but rather on the wrongly held assumption that it is possible to capture
that essence through people’s words (MacLure 2009). Instead of relying
on authenticity, Mazzei and Jackson urge researchers to consider episte-
mologies and power relations in data generation, and thereby more pro-
ductive ways for representation (Mazzei and Jackson 2009: 3). In this
chapter, I extend and build upon the critiques outlined in the previous
paragraphs in an attempt to explore the limits of children’s voices by
reflecting on the processes which produce them.
From Interview Methods to Visual Methods

Much child-focused research has concerned itself with the problems
associated with accessing children and/or their voice. At one level, there
may be children who prefer not to take part in research, and children
who are intentionally excluded from research by adult gatekeepers
because of their perceived vulnerability or incapacity (Powell and Smith
2009: 126; see also Westcott and Littleton 2005: 146). At another
level, the problem is one of actualizing children’s voices: to get children
to freely and openly express themselves in such a way that the goal of
understanding is served. There may also be children who are shy and do
not feel comfortable communicating in an individual or group interview,
and other children who might be reserved in a focus group discussion
but more open and talkative in a friendship group (Hill 2006: 78–79,
81). An interview can, at times, appear in children’s eyes to be more of
an ‘interrogation’ or ‘investigation’; something which will obviously
89
affect their responses (McWilliam et al. 2009: 70). Last but not least, as
Wyness (2015: 54) points out, voice may also be class-based so that in
more conventional participatory processes (e.g., school councils) those
who are more likely to be in need of voice or representation (e.g., chil-
dren struggling with their schooling) are also more likely to be excluded
and marginalized; the same could be said for poor children who are often
excluded and marginalized by middle-class children who are seen as
more articulate and capable of representing other children. As Warming
(2011: 48) has so aptly put it: “some children’s voices and perspectives
are heard and recognized, while others are not even acknowledged.”
Attempts have been made to overcome such problems. As Greene and
Hill (2005: 17) argue, the choice of method might influence the kind of
answer one receives: similar issues explored through different methods
might yield different results. They point to alternative ways of eliciting chil-
dren’s experiences and voices which do not necessarily depend on interac-
tion with an interviewer. Such methods may involve scenarios, vignettes
and sentence completion tasks or methods which use computing technol-
ogy with which children are very familiar and comfortable (Greene and
Hill 2005: 14). Other researchers have suggested creative alternatives such
as role play and drama (Christensen and James 2000; Veale 2005), the use
of digital spaces where children might feel more comfortable (McWilliam
et al. 2009: 73–74), or the use of radio discussions, which might produce
different voices than those of the interview (Young and Barrett 2001: 388).
Indeed, in the so-called voice research there has been a recent turn to
the visual (Banks 2001; Beneker et al. 2010; Cook and Hess 2007; Pink
2001; Prosser 1998; Schratz and Loffler 1998; Thomson 2008a; Young
and Barrett 2001) with approaches such as: visual diaries with pictures
and drawings of children’s worlds (Burke 2008); photo-voice and par-
ticipatory photography where children document their lives or explore
issues of interest to them by taking pictures of what matters to them
and photo elicitation where children are invited by the researcher to talk
about pictures they took or ones presented to them by the researcher
(Clark-Ibanez 2008; Kaplan 2008); scrapbooks or media diaries com-
pleted by children (Bragg and Buckingham 2008); maps completed by
children of their environments (Morrow 2001); and video produced by
young people to explore their perspectives of schooling (Haw 2008).
90
S. Spyrou
There is a range of epistemological justifications for visual methods.

Thompson (2008b: 11, 13–14), for example, argues that images may
elicit different responses to speech or writing and are more likely to
elicit quicker emotional (and not just intellectual) responses. Similarly,
children who experience difficulties in expressing themselves verbally or
in writing may find that images allow them to express themselves more
easily and make their participation in research more pleasurable, espe-
cially when they are involved in aesthetic creation. Leitch (2008: 37)
shows, for example, how the sensitive use of drawings and collage with
children can help them narrate “the unrecognized, unacknowledged or
‘unsayable’ stories that they hold” while the power differential may be
lowered since children are co-creators rather than simply sources of data
(Leitch 2008: 48). The completion of scrapbooks by young people in a
project exploring their views on sexual media content provided for an
activity that, contrary to the interview, was less structured by the knowl-
edge and assumptions of the researchers. The young people completed
the scrapbooks at their own time and chose how to talk to the research-
ers about them allowing the latter to access a range of critical, pleasura-
ble and reflexive voices (Bragg and Buckingham 2008: 116–118).
Justifications for visual methods seem at first convincing. Yet, as a single
method they do not overcome the problems associated with representa-
tion and remind us about the limits of children’s voices. Whether it is
researchers who create images and children are asked to comment on or
whether it is children themselves who create them, images are selections
produced out of a number of possibilities and, like all other texts, cannot
be authentic depictions of social reality. Similarly, all verbal interpretation
of images (whether by children or adult researchers) will necessarily be
positioned and hence selective representations (Komulainen 2007).
Participant Observation and Peer Culture

Research
Power mediates all research production, and child research is no excep-
tion. For some time, this has been a much debated concern in child-
hood studies (e.g., Best 2007; Christensen 2004; Freeman and Mathison
91
2009; Greene and Hogan 2005; Thomson 2008a). Various attempts

have been made to reduce adult authority in research settings involv-
ing participant observation within the so-called peer culture tradi-
tion. Mandell (1988), for instance, coined the term ‘least-adult’ role
whereby the researcher minimizes their adult characteristics (both phys-
ical and social) and authority so as to blend in with children’s activi-
ties more easily. Other researchers (Corsaro 2003; Fine and Sandstrom
1988) have adopted the role of a ‘friend’. In a similar vein, for example,
Thomson and Hall (2008: 153) report that in their research with chil-
dren’s self-portraits, they found that when one of them sat on the floor
while the child sat on a chair and both turned their back to the other
researcher and the recorder, the children became much more animated
and their self-portrait explanations were much more authoritative.
Peer culture research through participant observation—when under-
stood as simply an adult ‘blending in’ with children—has faced some
criticisms. For instance, Thorne (1993) adopted a least-adult role in her
work with children, however finding that negotiating a position for her-
self as a researcher between the children and the other implicated adults
was anything but straightforward and required that she, at times, had
to switch back to adult roles. Raby (2007: 51) also suggested that when
working with older children or adolescents such a role may actually be
much more difficult and less desirable because the perceived gulf can
appear to be greater and teenagers can see an adult who tries too hard to
fit into their peer cultures as an imposter.
Mayall (2000) takes issue with both Mandell (1988) and Thorne
(1993), arguing that researchers need to acknowledge the subordinated
role of children to adults in the research encounter and illustrates how
in her own work she prefers to position herself as an adult who lacks
the knowledge that children have about childhood and who wants to
learn from them (Mayall 2000: 122). Lewis (2008: 201–203) has fur-
ther described how her relationship with children in the three schools
where she carried out research differed, and that there is not necessarily
one strategy which works well in all cases: her role among children var-
ied between the three settings.
There have been recent attempts to increase the agentic potential of
children in research (e.g., Alderson 2001; Chin 2007; Kellett 2005,
92
S. Spyrou
2010; Theis 2001; Veale 2005). This trend comes in mainly two varie-
ties: children as co-researchers or collaborators and children as primary
researchers. In the former variety, children are offered the opportunity
to make some (e.g., whether to be interviewed alone or in a group), but
certainly not all, decisions about the research (Freeman and Mathison
2009: 166–167). In the second variety, children are actively involved
in all stages of the research process. They are in charge of identifying
research questions, deciding on methods and collecting data and ana-
lyzing, interpreting, reporting and disseminating the research findings.
This kind of research is seen as offering new perspectives on childhood
from an ‘insider’ perspective: “Children observe with different eyes, ask
different questions—they sometimes ask questions that adults do not
even think of—have different concerns and immediate access to a peer
culture where adults are outsiders. The research agendas children prior-
itize, the research questions they frame and the way in which they col-
lect data are also quintessentially different from adults” (Kellett 2010:
105) (see also Chapter 6).
Nevertheless, although the goal is to overcome the power imbalances
between children and adult researchers and to neutralize the power
dynamics at work in child–child research, this is not always possible.
Kellett (2010: 91–92) explains that children are not exempt from power
differences that are ascribed to different groups of children (class, age,
linguistic skill, physical ability or popularity) and which are likely to
shape the research encounter. Despite its notable advantages, we cannot
therefore necessarily assume that this approach to research will result
in higher quality or more authentic research or that the fundamental
problem of representation and the politics associated with it is overcome
(James 2007: 268).
Institutional Contexts
Considering how children’s voices are produced within specific institu-
tional contexts further highlights the role of power in association with
adult authority. How do particular institutional contexts produce cer-
tain voices rather than others? Will, for example, a less adult-controlled
93
social setting like the playground provide for a different understanding

of a particular issue than a highly circumscribed, by adult authority, set-
ting like the school (Punch 2002: 328; see also Westcott and Littleton
2005: 148)?
Reflecting on my own work on Greek-Cypriot children’s construc-
tions of national identities (Spyrou 2001a), for example, I found that
children drew on their local Cypriot culture and tradition when con-
structing their identities in the neighbourhood (e.g., in terms of the
themes they chose for their games, the language they used and so on)
but resorted to a more official, nationalistic voice when expressing their
identities at school. The structured and highly controlled space of the
school encouraged children to provide the ‘correct answer’ while the
more child-controlled neighborhood playground provided them with
significantly more leeway to draw upon alternative discourses which
in some cases undermined or contradicted the ones they drew on at
school. As Haw (2008: 195) has suggested, “in different relationships
different voices are articulated, prioritized and privileged.”
What claims could I have made if my research had focused, for
instance, exclusively on the school? Recognizing how institutional con-
texts are constitutive of the processes which produce children’s voices
goes a long way in understanding their situated and variable charac-
ter. It is within these institutional contexts and the cultural and social
norms that regulate social relations within them that children’s voices
take shape as the respective characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity, race
and ability, to name the most obvious ones), interests and agendas of
the researcher meet with those of the child to produce particular voices
(Freeman and Mathison 2009: 55).
Hence, though instructive about the possibilities for minimiz-
ing adult authority in our research encounters with children, it is also
increasingly evident from studies that an adult can never become a
‘native’ in children’s worlds, not just because of the difference in phys-
ical size but also because of the privileged status that one’s identity as
an adult, and an adult researcher as such, comes with. Recognizing how
our adult status impacts the whole research process and by extension
the production of children’s voices requires a reflexive self-awareness.
Leonard (2007), for example, illustrates how adult gatekeepers such as
94
S. Spyrou
parents or teachers often use their power to control children’s access to

research. Reflecting on her own researcher role, she also shows us how
an otherwise well intentioned researcher can inadvertently act as a gate-
keeper of children’s voices when being a speaker or interpreter of these
voices.
Rapport, Layers of Meaning and the Problem

of Time
In an effort to lessen the inherent power imbalances between children
and adults in the research encounter, researchers try to build close,
trusting relations with children. That is why social research with chil-
dren is, if done well, a time-consuming enterprise. Though few would
argue otherwise, in practice pressures of time in research often prevent
researchers from truly building rapport with children and in this way
accessing deeper layers of children’s voices. These deeper layers are not
necessarily more authentic or true; they might, however, present differ-
ent (and sometimes more complex) understandings of children’s views
which might, on occasion even contradict their initially articulated
voices. Here, I wish to provide another example from the same research
with Greek Cypriot children’s constructions of national identity that,
I think, illustrates this point well (Spyrou 2002).
In most of my interviews, when it came to discussing what they
thought about the Turks and the situation in Cyprus, most children,
most of the time, described the Turks as barbarians, evil, invaders and so
on. In fact, the strength of many children’s descriptions left little room
for even considering the possibility of the children imagining the Turks
as anything but that. However, what I found with time was that the
children were not as simplistic and stereotypical in their descriptions of
the Turks as they initially appeared to be. In the context of other con-
versations with them and as a result of the rapport I built with them
over time, I gradually discovered that when they described the Turks in
these negative terms they meant that only in reference to some Turks—
those in the government, the politicians, the military—and not all the
Turks. “Of course they are not all bad,” they would say “only some of
95
them are bad and others are good people like us.” Children were not
necessarily less authentic at the beginning and more truthful later on;
but as a researcher I had to gradually identify this complexity behind
their voices and to evaluate its significance. Had I taken their initial
statements to be their true voices I would perhaps be stereotyping them
the same way they were stereotyping the Turks (see also Montgomery
(2007: 422) for a discussion of how children prostitutes provided jour-
nalists with scripted responses but provided the anthropologist with
more complex understandings as a result of her long-term fieldwork
experience with them).
By recognizing how children’s voices are multi-layered we can move
beyond the often misguided assumption that voice research with chil-
dren is by definition good, valuable, or of high quality. The tendency of
researchers to jump in and out of children’s worlds in order to quickly
‘collect data’ which they can also quickly analyze by extracting quotes
from children to illustrate their findings may end up caricaturing chil-
dren more than really offering us meaningful insights into their lives
(see Bluebond-Langner and Korbin 2007: 243; James 2007: 265).
The Non-normative and the Undomesticated

in Children’s Voices
Both the intersubjective nature of voice research and the very character-
istics of voice as a mediational tool for accessing children’s experiences
and perspectives challenge us to acknowledge the limits of children’s
voices and to think more creatively about the ways we address them.
Mazzei, for example, identifies a problem with the tendency of research-
ers ‘to seek that voice which can elucidate, clarify, confirm, and pro-
nounce meaning’ (Mazzei 2009: 46–47). Instead, she argues, researchers
need to go beyond the ‘voiced’ in voices (i.e., that which is verbalized by
research participants) and she asks whether voice does not also happen
“when they/we fail to audibly voice an opinion with words and instead
voice displeasure, discomfort, or disagreement?” (Mazzei 2009: 45).
This is the undomesticated voice, the non-normative voice, ‘the voice in
the crack’, which calls for attention, precisely because it is hard to reach
96
S. Spyrou
and interpret and requires that we acknowledge its performative charac-

ter (Mazzei 2009: 46, 48, 53).
Schnoor (2012) provides an interesting argument about this kind of
voice. He argues in favor of a kind of ‘literal listening’ which does not
resort to the more common attempt at capturing ‘children’s voices’ or
‘children’s perspectives’. From this perspective, children’s voices are pres-
ent and audible at a very early age and before they can articulate their
‘voices’, their ‘views’, and ‘perspectives’; this necessitates “recultivating
‘listening’ as a research technique that follows more intensely the audi-
ble side of practices in childhood settings” (Schnoor 2012: 11). Though
this might appear, at first glance, to have limited potential in helping
us decipher children’s views, wishes, needs, and perspectives, a more
open-minded approach about voice might also enhance the possibilities
for ‘voice’ (in this literal sense) to elucidate the sensorial production of
meaning. What does the screaming or the crying, the giggling or the
silence tell us about children’s presence in the contexts of their activity?
If its meaning is not readily discernible, it is not necessarily because it
says little or none but perhaps because it is hard to decipher and make
sense of. Rosen (2015) has likewise problematized children’s screams
insisting that children’s embodied vocal production is replete with
meaning—it is not mere noise devoid of significance “but an important
political expression, even in the limited but important sense of matter-
ing and affecting those who produce and sustain the vocal production”
(Rosen 2015: 49).
For the researcher these are opportunities to go beyond the ver-
bal to examine other than surface meanings. Another example from
my own work with children’s constructions of national identities illus-
trates this point (Spyrou 2001b). When I asked children to explain to
me who Turkish-Cypriots are, the kinds of responses that some chil-
dren offered at the beginning of my fieldwork suggested that they were
simply unaware of, or confused about, the category itself—a category
coincidentally which is extremely important in their lives since these
are the people who live on the other side of their divided country and
with whom they might have to live together if a solution to the polit-
ical problem of their country is found. Though my initial reaction
was to dismiss these responses as revealing of the children’s ignorance,
97
I gradually came to appreciate the larger significance of the children’s

statements. When I started looking more closely at the role of school-
ing, I realized that the children’s inability to make sense of hyphenated
identities like Turkish-Cypriots stemmed from the preoccupation of
the educational system with pure national categories like ‘Turks’ and
‘Greeks’ rather than with hyphenated ones (see Christou and Spyrou
2016). This insight allowed me to understand how nationalist imagi-
nation is shaped as a result of powerful authoritative discourses on
‘self ’ and ‘other’. Holding onto what does not make sense can provide
insights into the worlds of those whose voices are not normative.
Making sense or deciphering non-normative voices requires looking
at the reflection of voice in features such as irrelevance and inconsist-
ency and the non-verbal as in actions and noises which might be more
revealing of voice than the actual words used (Komulainen 2007: 24;
MacLure 2009: 97, 106; Rogers et al. 2005: 164; see also Tudge and
Hogan 2005). Thus, to follow up from my earlier example on how chil-
dren provided me with different evaluations of the Turks at different
times—an inconsistency of sorts in many ways—it was because of these
inconsistencies that I was able to make sense of their voices and to avoid
reifying their identities as something stable and unchanging.
Recognizing the complexity in children’s voices and the difficulty
involved in making sense of them might lead researchers to rethink
the often too readily idealized notion of empathy and sameness and
the ‘too-familiar eating of the other’ which results from our uncompli-
cated and unproblematized reading of the other’s (i.e., children’s) voices
(Lather 2009: 23), in short, from our inability to recognize the non-
normative and undomesticated in their voices. Though this might result
in more messy and limited understandings of children, it might also help
us overcome the danger of equating children’s voices with their truth.
Silence as an Example of Undomesticated Voice

In her work, Mazzei (see especially 2003, 2007) argues that silence is
often ignored in qualitative research which emphasizes voiced utter-
ances at the expense of the non-voiced or the silent which it treats as
98
S. Spyrou
non-data. In most cases, the transcript we end up coding and analyz-

ing has already gone through a kind of disciplining which left out all
the data that could not be readily heard, understood, and named, most
often in the form of what we might call “silent data” (Mazzei 2007:
632). What is recorded, transcribed, and coded is that which is uttered
and heard. Yet, as Poland and Pederson (1998: 293) remind us, “what
is not said may be as revealing as what is said, particularly since what
is left out ordinarily exceeds what is put in.” Our analysis, to the extent
that it is transcript-based and dependent, will more than likely remain
superficial as we fail to recognize the dense and multilayered character
of the totality of our data—both spoken and silent—which we largely
ignored (Mazzei and Jackson 2012: 745).
However, Mazzei (2003) argues, silence is neither an omission nor an
absence of empirical material but is rather both meaningful and pur-
poseful. Silence is not, in other words, lack of voice (Baurain 2011:
89–90), it is “something more than the opposite of sound” (Poland and
Pederson 1998: 294) and should not be positioned against speech but
rather should be seen as part of a continuum where silent speech is at
one end and voiced speech is at the other (Mazzei 2007: 633). The chal-
lenge is to hear what “silent speech” is saying despite its apparent noth-
ingness. In short, Mazzei (2003: 356) argues for listening to silences
and for that which is left out from our analyses because it is not vocal-
ized or because it is intentionally or unintentionally repressed.
Consider the following example also from the same piece of work on
Greek Cypriot children’s national identities mentioned above. In my
attempt to understand how Greek Cypriot children understood eth-
nic and national labels, I noticed that they often reduced the category
“Cypriot” to simply mean “Greek Cypriot” despite the fact that both
Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots are Cypriots and claim this label as
part of their identities. In the cultural context of divided Cyprus where
37% of the island’s territory is under Turkish occupation and under
the influence of a nationalistic educational system, it was unthinka-
ble for many of these children to imagine that the category “Cypriot”
could also encompass those of Turkish origin. For the same reasons,
most children could not elaborate on the history of Cyprus during the
period 1960–1974 during which the island went through a period of
99
inter-ethnic conflict involving violence from both Greek Cypriots and

Turkish Cypriots, reflecting in this way the silence of the official curricu-
lum on the matter. This would after all constitute a critical self-reflection
which could potentially challenge the very nationalistic framework of the
world (summed up as “we are right and they are wrong”) that the edu-
cational system propagates. In short, the children’s cultural understand-
ing became a taken-for-granted understanding which reflected a silence
about a politically sensitive issue that they themselves—most often
unconsciously and unreflectively—helped reproduce.
In the context of the researcher-child encounter, silence can also
happen in the nonresponses, the evasions, the denials, the pauses, the
breaths, the sighs, the deflections, and reframings (Mazzei 2004: 30,
2003) which might often be ignored as non-consequential. In these
cases, silence is often self-imposed. A pause followed by a sigh could sig-
nal a sense of discomfort and reflection and if followed by a deflection
(i.e., a turn of the conversation in a different direction) could also sug-
gest that the question is not one our research subject wishes to respond
to: the silence created has meaning and should constitute part of our
analysis; it is, in short, a silence with a purpose and as such it should be
attended to. The fact that we, as researchers studying children, are often
implicated in these silences (e.g., in the context of an interview we have
with a child) and may help produce them requires extra care and reflex-
ivity to enable us to attend to them.
Mazzei (2003: 364–366) identifies five different types of silence we
might encounter in research: polite silences, privileged silences, veiled
silences, intentional silences, and unintelligible silences. Polite silences
are those which happen when one remains silent for fear of offend-
ing another. Privileged silences are the silences which happen when
one ignores something by virtue of his or her privilege. Veiled silences
happen when one conceals what or who one is when asked about his
relationships with others. Intentional silences happen when one inten-
tionally chooses not to speak because they do not wish to reveal some-
thing about themselves or because they are unsure about the reactions it
may create. And, finally, unintelligible silences are those silences which
although purposeful are neither discernible nor knowable; these are the
silences that remain incomprehensible.
100
S. Spyrou
In my own work with children, I have identified other kinds of

silences which help elucidate the scope of voice research on silence.
One such kind is what I call wavering silences. These are the silences
that are partial, uncertain, ambiguous, and undecided, and hence, they
waver back and forth from concealment to disclosure. In the context of
an interview, the extent to which this kind of silence is disclosed partly
depends on the interviewer’s skill in encouraging the interviewee to do
so. But because it is uncertain and not fully committed to disclosure,
it wavers back and forth and can go either way, that is, toward more or
less disclosure. The following is an example of this type of silence. The
excerpt comes from an interview I had with a 12-year-old boy, Charis,
part of a project on understanding Greek Cypriot children’s views, per-
ceptions, and attitudes toward immigrants who work in Cyprus:
Spyros: o you think Cypriots treat foreigners well?

D
Charis: Yes, I think yes! There are many people who mistreat them.
Spyros: There’s many who mistreat them?
Charis: Yes.
Spyros: But there are others who treat them well?
Charis: Yes.
Spyros: You’ve heard something about this? That they mistreat them?
Charis: Yes.
Spyros: Where did you hear that?
Charis: I heard about many people mistreating their employees.
What we see in this interview exchange is what appears to be initially

a contradictory response. Charis first agrees that Cypriots treat foreign-
ers well, but he immediately goes on to suggest that “There are many
people who mistreat them.” He is clearly not happy with simply stating
that Cypriots treat foreigners well; hence, his immediate contradictory
response, but at the same time what we see as the exchange continues
is that he probably knows more than he is willing to share with me. His
simple “yes” responses suggest that he is only partly willing to disclose
information about the issue. Sensing his hesitation, I had decided not
to insist, but had I pushed him more to elaborate, he might have shared
more with me although it is possible that he might have also opted
101
to remain silent. In any case, however, he is wavering back and forth,

appearing undecided about the extent to which he wishes to disclose
what he knows about the issue.
Reflecting on this interview exchange with Charis as not simply an
instance of limited knowledge on his part or a failed attempt on my
part to elicit more concrete and useful data through our conversation
allows us to take what he does not say as a point of departure for con-
sidering the complex and multilayered meanings of immigrant treat-
ment in Cyprus. Charis’ ‘truth’ is more complex than his words reveal
and cannot be reduced to what he utters. But it is a truth which pin-
points the larger discursive silences built around the issue which Charis
is partly helping to reproduce through his own silences while also simul-
taneously helping bring forth through his partial acknowledgment.
But Charis’ wavering silence is also an outcome of the interactional
exchange between us—the types of questions I ask him, the probes and
affirmations I provide to him, the particular impression of himself that
he wants to communicate—and our respective social characteristics
(age, gender, and class to name a few). His decisions to reveal or refrain
from revealing certain information and his particular way of framing his
knowledge on the subject (“I heard about many people mistreating their
employees”) may have to do with the fact that he is being interviewed
by an adult researcher who is a professional and wants to know about
these issues. It might also have to do with his multiple (and perhaps
uncomfortable) positioning between different sets of values (and their
supporting discourses) such as the value of defending one’s in-group
(i.e., “Of course we treat them well!”) and the values of justice, equal-
ity, and honesty (i.e., “We are not that nice to them and we often mis-
treat them”). The fact that I am a Greek Cypriot myself allows him to
be more honest perhaps and to reveal culturally intimate information;
he shares, in other words, with me what is really going one; in con-
trast, had I been a cultural outsider I might have not had this privilege,
although admittedly these are conjectures.
Attending to children’s silences, or to any silence for that matter,
may entail risks which stem from our inability to fully comprehend
silence and our insistence on doing so. First, there is a risk that we will
end up filling the gaps of silence with our own “voice, fear, desires or
102
S. Spyrou
omissions” (Mazzei 2003: 362). This might happen when we, too read-
ily and unreflexively, try to explain away and close off silence, when we,
in other words, try to make it intelligible. The temptation to make sense
of all we are confronted with as researchers stems from our epistemo-
logical assumptions regarding the nature of social reality: that there is
a truth which we can figure out and make sense of provided we find
the right way to access and capture it. However, when we do operate
with this as our underlying assumption, we run the risk that silence is
reduced to our own limited, interpretive frameworks.
This suggests a second, related risk—that we too readily explain
away silence (often using a culturally specific and stereotypical expla-
nation of what silence is and means) in ways which are narrow and
reductive (e.g., as lack of interest or passivity or as “having nothing to
say”) (Mazzei 2003: 363). There is always an urgency, as MacLure et al.
(2010) suggest, to explain silence when confronted with it. MacLure
and her co-authors use Hannah’s story—a 5-year old’s refusal to speak
in class although she is willing to speak in other contexts without an
apparent explanation for her decision to do so—to show that when
silence resists analysis it is perceived as a threat which everyone, includ-
ing researchers, feel compelled to analyze and make sense of. This
imperative may, in its persistence and desire to settle, close off inquiry
and reduce silence to something other than what it is.
A third, also related risk, is that of essentializing silence by consid-
ering it to be more authentic and true than speech. As researchers, we
analyze silence not unlike the way we analyze voiced speech, that is,
within particular historical, political, economic, social, and institutional
contexts as well as theoretical discourses and biases (Bailey 2008: 284–
285). Silence is an aspect of voice, neither more nor less, in and of itself,
authentic or true than uttered speech. It cannot, in that sense, escape
the performative character of all communication. Hence, a constant
reminder—to attend to silence as performance—is necessary to avoid
the temptation of equating it with authenticity and truth.
Finally, researching silence might also necessitate that we rethink how
we take into consideration issues of validity and credibility (Bailey 2008:
285). This does not mean of course that we give up on validity and
credibility and that we simply resort to conjecture. Rather, it suggests
103
that we need to think beyond our existing conceptualizations of these

ideas precisely because our definition of empirical data is now expanded
to include the silent. The question of how we re-conceptualize validity
and credibility when researching silence to work around the particulari-
ties of silence will remain a crucial one and a challenge to our ability to
make research into silence productive and insightful without compro-
mising the rigor of good qualitative research.
As an illustrative example of a kind of ‘undomesticated voice’, I have
argued that silence may indeed be an opportunity to learn more by
attending to children’s voices in their complexity and fullness. When we
fail to attend to children’s silences, our analyses of their voices become a
lot more straightforward, expected, and clear, our work as researchers is
simplified in this way, but so are the worlds of those we seek to under-
stand. This also brings us to the larger issue of how we make sense of
what children’s voices really mean.
The Interpretation of What Children Mean

Though children’s voices are occasionally presented as ‘speaking for
themselves’, a form of analysis is always undertaken even if that is sim-
ply in the form of sorting and presenting quotes from what children
said. A reflexive approach to data analysis asks what kind of analytical
frameworks and categories the researcher imposes on children’s voices.
Does, for example, the overwhelming preoccupation with children’s
agency guide researchers to focus on the creative, innovative and pro-
ductive capacities of children (as evidenced through their own voices)
at the expense of investigating social and cultural reproduction (see also
Chapter 5)?
Similarly, we could ask whether researchers impose their own mean-
ings on the data they collect from children rather than illuminate other
possibilities for interpretation. Much of child research bypasses—often
despite good intentions—the commonly held standards for good eth-
nographic work which requires intensive and extensive interaction
with children so that their worldviews are revealed to the researcher
through the passage of time. In research practice, this might mean that
104
S. Spyrou
researchers are simply falling back on their own (adult) semantic cate-
gories to make sense of what the children are telling them rather than
having a clear and elaborate understanding of children’s own semantics.
Thus, what children say might be taken to mean what the researcher
understands rather than what the children mean. Consider the fol-
lowing example. In a cross-national study of single-parent children’s
perspectives of poverty and social exclusion, our research team found
that the term ‘family’ had very diverse meanings for children, not only
cross-culturally but also within the same cultural context. These mean-
ings varied across the nuclear-extended family spectrum but also in rela-
tion to the term’s social significance. Thus, some children classified close
family friends as family when asked to explain who is family. Similarly,
some other children classified pets as family because they were socially
and affectively significant in their lives. Though the children used a sim-
ilar symbol—‘family’—they did not all share the same understanding
of what the symbol stood for; there was, in other words, a discrepancy
between symbolic form and content (Cohen 1986: 9). With care-
ful analysis of interviews along the way and further enquiry with the
children we were able to outline more clearly the diversity of meanings
which the term ‘family’ entailed for them. This allowed us to make sense
of children’s references to ‘family’ in contexts and in relation to issues
where analysis would have otherwise fallen back on our own seman-
tic understandings of the term ‘family’. In the absence of an in-depth
investigation of children’s own semantic categories, adult researchers
may simply reify children’s voices by transposing on them their own,
adult, interpretive frameworks. This brings us to the larger issue of how
children’s voices are fundamentally social and reflective of prevailing dis-
courses even when coloured by each child’s particular understanding.
The Limits of Individual Voices

The common use of quotes to highlight children’s voices and perspec-
tives can only serve its intended purpose when voices are fully situated
in the discursive fields of power which produce them. Drawing on the
sociocultural, dialogic take on human communication, Komulainen’s
105
(2007) reference to Bakhtin’s notion of voice is a productive avenue for

exploring the limits and possibilities of voice in child research but needs
to be further highlighted and linked to the current preoccupation in
child research with voice.
The essence of Bakhtin’s argument is that languages (and voices by
extension) are social and ideological and therefore represent the inter-
ests, assumptions and values of particular groups (Bakhtin 1981: 272).
Thus, when children speak they do so by drawing from the repertoire
of their inherited social languages and speech genres which constrain
to some extent what they can say. For example, when a six-year-old
who has just joined primary school says ‘I am big now’, her statement
reflects certain ideological beliefs and values which cannot be under-
stood but within the larger historical, cultural and sociopolitical con-
texts in which her voice is situated (Wertsch 1991: 104–105). Among
others, these include discourses of childhood which attach value to the
evolving development of a child (e.g., the theoretical assumptions of
developmental psychology, cultural beliefs that link education to matu-
rity). Children’s experience in other words is mediated by the discourses
which they are able to access and this is what we, as researchers, are
offered through their words.
During the actual encounter with the adult researcher, the child’s
utterance (which is only partly hers), relates both to what has preceded
it and to what is anticipated to follow it (Bakhtin 1986: 94, 293–294).
These utterances reflect particular social languages, speech genres and
voices appropriated by the child at different times, which enter into dia-
logue with the child’s own particular voice and are reformulated accord-
ingly only to once again enter into dialogue with the social languages,
speech genres and voices of the adult researcher to create meaning
(Wertsch 1991: 65).
To fully appreciate the social and cultural significance of children’s
voices, researchers need to become familiar with the discourses that
inform children’s voices. Only then can they account for children’s par-
ticular rendering of the ideological, namely, their own perspectives. At
the same time, researchers need to become familiar with the discourses
that inform their own analyses and interpretations of children’s experi-
ences (Mitchell 2009: 93). This discursive approach to understanding
106
S. Spyrou
children’s voices connects what happens at the level of individuals and

the actual context of interaction between the child and the researcher
with the larger discursive levels where representations exist and from
which both children and researchers draw to make sense of, and create
meaning, during their encounter.
Consider a not-so-unlikely scenario in child research where chil-
dren’s voices appear to be too similar to those of adults, where, in other
words, we are unable to justify their uniqueness. Do we attribute this
to the overpowering influence of the dominant ideological discourses
that shape children’s worlds or do we consider it to be part of children’s
standpoint (Lee 2001: 53)? Given the current preoccupation with chil-
dren’s perspectives and voices we might have also inadvertently dis-
tanced children’s voices by making them stand out from the voices of
adults. As a result, we might have precluded from our analysis children’s
active (and not so active) role in social and cultural reproduction and
downplayed the role of the ideological which shapes children’s world-
views as much as it does those of adults. Locating children’s voices in
the discursive fields of power which produce them allows us to over-
come the overly romantic notion of children’s voices as unique in a way
that neither exoticizes nor ignores children’s perspectives (Alldred and
Burman 2005: 181, 192).
Ways for Representing Children Reflexively

The process of analyzing data and reporting research findings allows
the researcher to literally re-present data in a new light: to include, to
exclude, to provide data in the form of direct quotes, or to summarize
emerging themes. Similarly, though the data are collected from different
children at different times (e.g., over a period of several months in some
cases), a sense of simultaneity is created as if the data naturally occurred
in that particular configuration while in reality they are a newly created
outcome of analysis and repositioning.
That all reporting of children’s voices, irrespective of the intentions of
the researcher, is a situated and hence interested representation, should
come as no surprise (see Holland 2001). Taking, for example, the
107
widely practiced habit of inserting children’s voices in research reports

we may then ask: Are the researcher’s questions presented together with
children’s responses so that the exchange as a whole can be evaluated or
are children’s words presented as decontextualized quotes which prevent
the reader from examining and scrutinizing the researcher’s role in their
production (e.g., hidden agendas, underlying motivations and interests,
biases, assumptions, theoretical influences) (Alldred and Burman 2005)?
A critical reading of the first draft of a report on a project titled
‘Institutionalized children’s participation in decision-making’ I was
involved with revealed that inadvertently during the analysis of the find-
ings quotes from children who were more eloquent and commented on
their lack of participation in decision-making were highlighted much
more than those of children who had less to say and appeared to be
more content with their level of participation. A revised version tried
to create a more balanced presentation of the findings but the lesson
learned was instructive about the underlying, often quite unreflective
motivations that drive our analyses and presentations of research find-
ings (see also Bragg and Buckingham 2008: 128).
As Alcoff (2009: 130) argues, it is also important to consider where
the voices we report end up and how prevailing constructions of child-
hood will influence how children’s voices are heard (Alldred 1998).
A concern with the discursive effects of research (i.e., with what kinds
of discourses a particular research supports) has led some researchers to
ask of their research the kinds of questions which might otherwise seem
inappropriate for researchers who hold research objectivity as one of the
highest aims of any scientific endeavor:
Does it, in the specific context and debate, serve the interests of children
to present them as having a distinct perspective? Or does it serve chil-
dren better to show that their perspectives are not fundamentally different
from adults’ or even that differences between them are regarded as signifi-
cant? (Alldred and Burman 2005: 193)
Instead of taking on an uncritical positioning of children as agents, chil-

dren’s particularities as a social group should be continually considered.
Despite the currently widespread interest in childhood studies, children
108
S. Spyrou
probably never initiate research projects, let alone consume the knowl-
edge produced in the same ways as adults would. Children’s voices can-
not therefore be likened to so-called standpoint research (see Mayall
2002). Though power differences are present in all research encounters,
these differences can be more pronounced in child–adult research where
age differences (in addition to all other social differences) are also pres-
ent, as well as socially sanctioned adult responsibilities towards children
that inevitably shape the encounters.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I offer a critical poststructuralist reading of child-voice
research which resituates children’s voices and subjectivities within the
research process and the larger political, social and cultural contexts
which inform them. I argue that the concept of voice can be unrave-
led but it need not be dismissed. Attending reflexively to the processes
by which children’s voices are produced can elevate research discus-
sions to a more sophisticated level which is informed by the dynamics
of research rather than simply the methods used (see Kontovourki and
Theodorou, forthcoming). This kind of reflexive research accepts the
messiness, ambiguity, polyvocality, non-factuality and multi-layered
nature of meaning in ‘stories’ that research produces. The quick and
easy way with which much child-voice research is carried out and the
tendency to over-interpret or freeze the meaning of children’s voices is
clearly not the most ethical way; the ethical way necessitates time for
reflection. Children’s voices, like all voices, are always emerging and
hence cannot be reduced to secure meanings which escape the confines
of time, space, discourse, and matter.
The decentering of the child goes hand-in-hand with the dialogical
engagement which produces her voice, not as an authentic outcome of
some unadulterated inner truth but as an outcome of multiple relations
and situated encounters. The reflexive approach I have advocated in this
chapter (see Alvesson and Skoldberg 2009: 314–318) neither denies
the social or material reality of life nor the fundamental assumption
that good research should be based on sound empirical data. It rather
109
suggests that, to the extent that it is possible to make transparent the

very processes which produce children’s voices, our understanding is
enriched and acquires a significance which goes beyond superficial and
simplistic assertions about what these voices mean. In this way, our
readings and representations of children’s voices can offer more critical
and potentially more ethical disclosures of childhoods which would oth-
erwise remain unaccounted for. In the next two chapters which exam-
ine the notions of ‘agency’ and ‘participation’ respectively, I proceed a
step further from this initial poststructuralist decentering of the child
and her voice to implicate ontology and materiality as fundamental to
a more radical, relational rethinking of knowledge production in child-
hood studies.
Note
1. This preoccupation with children’s voices is vividly illustrated in the
countless published articles whose titles include an excerpt of children’s
actual words.
References
Alcoff, L. (2009). The problem of speaking for others. In A. Jackson &
L. Mazzei (Eds.), Voice in qualitative inquiry: Challenging conventional,
interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research (pp. 117–135).
Alderson, P. (2001). Research by children: Rights and methods. International
Journal of Social Research Methodology: Theory and Practice, 4(2), 139–153.
Alldred, P., & Burman, E. (2005). Analyzing children’s accounts using dis-
course analysis. In S. Greene & D. Hogan (Eds.), Researching children’s expe-
rience: Approaches and methods (pp. 175–198). London, Thousand Oaks,
CA, and New Delhi: Sage.
110
S. Spyrou

Bailey, L. (2008). A review of: “Inhabited silence in qualitative research:
Putting poststructural theory to work; a practical guide to the qualitative
dissertation”. Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational
Studies Association, 44(3), 282–288.
Bakhtin, M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. In M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialogic
imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Banks, M. (2001). Visual methods in social research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Baurain, B. (2011). Teaching, listening, and generative silence. Journal of
Curriculum Theorizing, 27(3), 89–101.
Beneker, T., Sanders, R., Tani, S., & Taylor, L. (2010). Picturing the
city: Young people’s representations of urban environments. Children’s
Best, A. (Ed.). (2007). Representing youth: Methodological issues in critical youth
studies. New York and London: New York University Press.
Bragg, S., & Buckingham, D. (2008). ‘Scrapbooks’ as a resource in media
research with young people. In P. Thomson (Ed.), Doing visual research
with children and young people (pp. 114–131). London and New York:
Routledge.
Burke, C. (2008). ‘Play in focus’: Children’s visual voice in participative
research. In P. Thomson (Ed.), Doing visual research with children and young
people (pp. 23–36). London and New York: Routledge.
University Press.
Christensen, P. (2004). Children’s participation in ethnographic research:
Issues of power and representation. Children and Society, 18(2), 165–176.
Christou, M., & Spyrou, S. (2016). The hyphen in between: Children’s intersec-
tional understandings of national identities. Children’s Geographies, 15(1), 51–64.
111
Clark-Ibanez, M. (2008). Gender and being ‘bad’: Inner-city students’ photo-

graphs. In P. Thomson (Ed.), Doing visual research with children and young
people (pp. 95–113). London and New York: Routledge.
Cohen, A. (1986). Of symbols and boundaries, or, does Ertie’s greatcoat hold
the key? In A. Cohen (Ed.), Symbolizing boundaries: Identity and diversity in
British cultures (pp. 1–19). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Cook, T., & Hess, E. (2007). What the camera sees and from whose per-
spective: Fun methodologies for engaging children in enlightening adults.
Childhood, 14(1), 29–45.
Corsaro, W. (2003). We’re friends right? Inside kids’ culture. Washington, DC:
Joseph Henry Press.
Fine, G. A., & Sandstrom, K. (1988). Knowing children: Participant observation
with minors. Qualitative research methods 15. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Greene, S., & Hill, M. (2005). Researching children’s experience: Methods
and methodological issues. In S. Green & D. Hogan (Eds.), Researching
children’s experience: Approaches and methods (pp. 1–21). London, Thousand
Oaks, CA, and New Delhi: Sage.
Greene, S., & Hogan, D. (Eds.). (2005). Researching children’s experience:
Approaches and methods. London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi:
Sage.
Haw, K. (2008). ‘Voice’ and video: Seen, heard and listened to? In P. Thomson
(Ed.), Doing visual research with children and young people (pp. 192–207).
Hill, M. (2006). Children’s voices on ways of having a voice: Children’s and
young people’s perspectives on methods used in research and consultation.
Childhood, 13(1), 69–89.
Holland, S. (2001). Representing children in child protection assessments.
Childhood, 8(3), 322–339.
Kaplan, I. (2008). Being ‘seen’ being ‘heard’: Engaging with students on the
margins of education through participatory photography. In P. Thomson
(Ed.), Doing visual research with children and young people (pp. 175–191).
Kellett, M. (2005). How to develop children as researchers: A step by step guide to
112
S. Spyrou

Komulainen, S. (2007). The ambiguity of the child’s ‘voice’ in social research.
Childhood, 14(1), 11–28.
Kontovourki, S., & Theodorou, E. (forthcoming). Politics and the interview:
Unraveling immigrant children’s narrations and identity performances.
In S. Spyrou, R. Rosen, & D. Cook (Eds.), Reimagining childhood studies.
London: Bloomsbury.
Lather, P. (2009). Against empathy, voice and authenticity. In A. Jackson & L.
Mazzei (Eds.), Voice in qualitative inquiry: Challenging conventional, inter-
pretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research (pp. 17–26). London
and New York: Routledge.
Leitch, R. (2008). Creatively researching children’s narratives through images
and drawings. In P. Thomson (Ed.), Doing visual research with children and
young people (pp. 37–57). London and New York: Routledge.
Leonard, M. (2007). With a capital ‘G’: Gatekeepers and gatekeeping in
research with children. In A. Best (Ed.), Representing youth: Methodological
issues in critical youth studies (pp. 133–156). New York and London: New
York University Press.
Lewis, A. (2008). Race in the schoolyard: Negotiating the color line in classrooms
and communities. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University
Press.
MacLure, M. (2009). Broken voices, dirty words: On the productive insuf-
ficiency of voice. In A. Jackson & L. Mazzei (Eds.), Voice in qualitative
inquiry: Challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in
qualitative research (pp. 97–113). London and New York: Routledge.
MacLure, M., Holmes, R., Jones, L., & MacRae, C. (2010). Silence as resist-
ance to analysis: Or, on not opening one’s mouth properly. Qualitative
Inquiry, 16(6), 492–500.
Mandell, N. (1988). The least-adult role in studying children. Journal of
Contemporary Ethnography, 16(4), 433–467.
Mayall, B. (2000). Conversations with children: Working with genera-
tional issues. In P. Christensen & A. James (Eds.), Research with children:
Perspectives and practices (pp. 120–135). London: RoutledgeFalmer.
113
Mazzei, L. A. (2003). Inhabited silences: In pursuit of a muffled subtext.

Qualitative Inquiry, 9(3), 355–368.
Mazzei, L. A. (2004). Silent listenings: Deconstructive practices in dis-
course-based research. Educational Researcher, 33(2), 26–34.
Mazzei, L. A. (2007). Toward a problematic of silence in action research.
Educational Action Research, 15(4), 631–642.
Mazzei, L. A. (2009). An impossibly full voice. In A. Jackson & L. Mazzei
(Eds.), Voice in qualitative inquiry: Challenging conventional, interpretive,
and critical conceptions in qualitative research (pp. 45–62). London and New
York: Routledge.
Mazzei, L. A., & Jackson, A. Y. (2009). Introduction: The limit of voice. In
A. Jackson & L. Mazzei (Eds.), Voice in qualitative inquiry: Challenging
conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research
(pp. 1–13). London and New York: Routledge.
Mazzei, L. A., & Jackson, A. Y. (2012). Complicating voice in a refusal to “let
participants speak for themselves”. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(9), 745–751.
McWilliam, E., Dooley, K., McArdle, F., & Pei-Ling Tan, J. (2009). Voicing
objections. In A. Jackson & L. Mazzei (Eds.), Voice in qualitative inquiry:
Challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative
research (pp. 63–75). London and New York: Routledge.
Mitchell, R. (2009). ‘Soft ears’ and hard topics: Race, disciplinarity, and voice
in higher education. In A. Jackson & L. Mazzei (Eds.), Voice in qualitative
inquiry: Challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in
qualitative research (pp. 77–95). London and New York: Routledge.
Montgomery, H. (2007). Working with child prostitutes in Thailand:
Problems of practice and interpretation. Childhood, 14(4), 415–430.
Morrow, V. (2001). Using qualitative methods to elicit young people’s perspec-
tives on their environments: Some ideas for community health initiatives.
Health Education Research, 16(3), 255–268.
Pink, S. (2001). Doing visual ethnography: Images, media and representation in
research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Poland, B., & Pederson, A. (1998). Reading between the lines: Interpreting
silences in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 4(2), 293–312.
Powell, M. A., & Smith, A. (2009). Children’s participation rights in research.
Childhood, 16(1), 124–142.
Prosser, J. (Ed.). (1998). Image-based research: A sourcebook for qualitative
researchers. London: Falmer Press.
114
S. Spyrou
Punch, S. (2002). Research with children: The same or different from research
with adults. Childhood, 9(3), 321–341.
Raby, B. (2007). Across a great gulf? Conducting research with adolescents. In
A. Best (Ed.), Representing youth: Methodological issues in critical youth studies
(pp. 39–59). New York and London: New York University Press.
Rogers, A., Casey, M., Ekert, J., & Holland, J. (2005). Interviewing chil-
dren using an interpretative poetics. In S. Greene & D. Hogan (Eds.),
Researching children’s experience: Approaches and methods (pp. 158–174).
London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi: Sage.
Rosen, R. (2015). ‘The scream’: Meanings and excesses in early childhood set-
tings. Childhood, 22(1), 39–52.
Schnoor, O. (2012). Early childhood studies as vocal studies: Examining the
social practices of ‘giving voice to children’s voices’ in a crèche. Childhood,
20(4), 458–471.
Schratz, M., & Loffler, U. (1998). Pupils using photographs in school
self-evaluation. In J. Prosser (Ed.), Image-based research: A sourcebook for
qualitative researchers (pp. 209–224). London: Falmer Press.
Spyrou, S. (2001a). One and more than one: Greek Cypriot children and
ethnic identity in the flow of everyday life. Disclosure: A Journal of Social
Theory, 10, 73–94.
Spyrou, S. (2001b). Those on the other side: Ethnic identity and imagination
in Greek Cypriot children’s lives. In H. Schwartzman (Ed.), Children and
anthropology: Perspectives for the 21st century (pp. 167–185). Westport, CT
and London: Bergin and Garvey.
Spyrou, S. (2002). Images of ‘the other’: ‘The Turk’ in Greek Cypriot children’s
imaginations. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 5(3), 255–272.
Theis, J. (2001). Participatory research with children in Vietnam. In
H. Schwartzman (Ed.), Children and anthropology: Perspectives for the
twenty-first century (pp. 99–109). Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.
Thomson, P. (Ed.). (2008a). Doing visual research with children and young peo-
ple. London and New York: Routledge.
Thomson, P. (2008b). Children and young people: Voices in visual research.
In P. Thomson (Ed.), Doing visual research with children and young people
(pp. 1–19). London and New York: Routledge.
Thomson, P., & Hall, C. (2008). Dialogues with artists: Analyzing children’s
self-portraits. In P. Thomson (Ed.), Doing visual research with children and
young people (pp. 146–163). London and New York: Routledge.
115
Thorne, B. (1993). Gender play: Girls and boys in school. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Tudge, J., & Hogan, D. (2005). An ecological approach to observations of
children’s everyday lives. In S. Greene & D. Hogan (Eds.), Researching chil-
dren’s experience: Approaches and methods (pp. 102–122). London, Thousand
Oaks, CA, and New Delhi: Sage.
London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi: Sage.
Warming, H. (2011). Getting under their skins? Accessing young children’s
perspectives through ethnographic fieldwork. Childhood, 18(1), 39–53.
Wertsch, J. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated
action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Westcott, H., & Littleton, K. S. (2005). Exploring meaning in interviews with
children. In S. Greene & D. Hogan (Eds.), Researching children’s experience:
Approaches and methods (pp. 141–157). London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and
New Delhi: Sage.
Young, L., & Barrett, H. (2001). Issues of access and identity: Adapting
research methods with Kampala street children. Childhood, 8(3), 383–395.
5
What Kind of Agency for Children?
Introduction
The concept of ‘agency’, much like the notion of ‘voice’ we looked at
in the previous chapter, has played a key role in childhood studies’ tra-
jectory as a field. In fact the two concepts have developed through an
entangled and mutually-informing relation which says much about the
field’s theoretical and political preoccupations. In this chapter, I turn
my attention to the question of agency in childhood studies, to con-
sider more systematically its past, present and future in the field. More
specifically, I provide a critical overview of the concept’s use in child-
hood studies in light of broader, ongoing debates about agency in the
social sciences, by first reflecting on the theoretical fascination of the
‘new social studies of childhood’ with children’s agency and then by
proceeding to discuss the emerging critiques of the dominant, essen-
tialist uses of the concept and the often uncritical assumptions which
surround it. I also discuss ongoing attempts to transform the concept
in more fruitful ways by turning towards relational approaches which
see agency as assembled, infrastructured and networked. To illustrate
the possibilities for rethinking productively the use of the concept in

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47904-4_5
118
S. Spyrou
childhood research, I offer a new materialist reading of agency through

an empirical example from my own work. Towards the end of the chap-
ter, I reflect on the challenges which the field faces as it seeks to rethink
children’s agency as a critical concept within its overall scale-making
practices.
The Fixation with Children’s Agency

Whether concern with children’s agency is rather new and brought
about by the paradigmatic shift of the ‘new social studies of childhood’
or whether it is an older concern which has preoccupied social scientists
in different ways and degrees over the years as Ryan (2008) has argued,
there is no doubt that the contemporary field of childhood studies has
made this concept paramount in its theoretical explorations. But why
this fascination with children’s agency? At one level, a paradigmatic
shift had to be accomplished through bold and strong statements which
would challenge dominant and prevailing assumptions about children’s
ontology while also offering a renewed agenda for research: if children,
and not just adults, are social agents and if they can act and transform
their worlds, then a new world could open up for the study of children and
childhood.
And so it happened. The gradual but mounting realization that the
dominant paradigms of psychology and sociology did not account for
children’s agency (or more moderately put, failed to recognize children’s
agency sufficiently) meant that it had to be acknowledged, brought
forth, and foregrounded in research. At another level, the claim that
children are social agents takes political significance which escapes the
narrow boundaries of theoretical concern and analysis. A new social
ontology for children necessitates a radically new approach to under-
standing children’s place in the world; if children are beings and not
mere becomings, a new way of seeing children and childhood is nec-
essary. Oswell (2013: 38) has argued that it was probably this political
goal which was originally of primary interest to the new childhood stud-
ies rather than an interest in theorizing childhood and addressing the
long-standing, adult-centric ways of researching children and childhood.
5 What Kind of Agency for Children?
119
In their seminal work, James and Prout (1990a) included as one

of the key features of the paradigmatic shift a clear statement about
children’s agency. They argued that children play an active role in the
construction of their own lives and social worlds and of those around
them, in short, that children are, like adults, social actors: “[Children]
can no longer be regarded as simply the passive subjects of structural
determinations” (James and Prout 1990b: 4), a recognition which drew
on the earlier contributions of social interactionism and social construc-
tionism which highlighted the role of agency in social life (see James
2009: 38). Though retrospectively, the emphasis on the creative, agen-
tic capacity of children was perhaps disproportionate compared to that
devoted to the structural constraints which children experience in their
daily lives, it was nevertheless an acknowledgement that children and
their childhoods could be placed within larger debates about the nature
of social life and subjectivity. In this way, children came to be recog-
nized as social agents who act on their worlds, reproduce and transform
them despite being constrained in their activity by the social structures
in which their lives are embedded. By situating children within social
structures and exploring their standpoint, researchers would be able to
bring forth a new way of thinking about children’s ontology and their
place in the world. As we have seen in the previous chapter, a steady
stream of studies exploring “children’s perspectives”, “children’s voices”,
“children’s experiences” or “children’s agency” has been, and continues
to be, published as a result of this new theoretical orientation.
In their programmatic discussion of a new sociology of childhood,
James and Prout (1990c: 28) acknowledged the complementary role of
structure and agency which they saw as an essential component of any
effort to create such a subfield of sociology by making reference to the
work of Anthony Giddens. In fact, it was Giddens’ theory of structur-
ation (see Giddens 1979, 1984) which provided much of the basis for
theorizing childhood and exploring children’s agency through empirical
work. What emerges out of Giddens’ theory of structuration is a human
subject who is both knowledgeable (discursively and practically) about
the world and able to reflexively monitor his or her actions. To be an
agent, one has to be able to ‘exercise some sort of power’ and to ‘make a
difference’ (Giddens 1984: 14). This ability to exercise power and make
120
S. Spyrou
a difference rests with an autonomous individual who is the driving

force behind an action. In Giddens’ words: “Agency concerns events of
which an individual is the perpetrator, in the sense that the individual
could, at any phase in a given sequence of conduct, have acted differ-
ently” (1984: 9).
Despite its wide appeal and applicability in childhood studies,
Giddens’ theory of structuration poses a conceptual challenge for child-
hood researchers, especially in relation to children’s agency. Are chil-
dren, for instance, social agents in Giddens’ sense? Are they, like adults,
independent, autonomous, self-willed individuals with intention?
Oswell (2013: 48) has argued that the model’s insistence on the posses-
sion of reflexive rationality and the ability for autonomous action would
limit its applicability in the case of some children such as the very
young (see also Wyness 2015: 56–57).
Attempts at elaborating the concept of agency in childhood stud-
ies came early on. Mayall (2002: 21), for instance, has posited a more
nuanced understanding of children’s agency by elaborating on the dis-
tinction between children as social actors and children as social agents.
Children, she argues, are social actors because they act on the world:
“they express their wishes, demonstrate strong attachments, jealousy and
delight, seek justice.” But the important question, she asks, is whether
they can also be seen as agents:
A social actor does something, perhaps something arising from a

subjective wish. The term agent suggests a further dimension: negotia-
tion with others, with the effect that the interaction makes a difference
– to a relationship or to a decision, to the workings of a set of social
assumptions or constraints. (Mayall 2002: 21)
Mayall illustrates what being an agent entails when she discusses chil-
dren’s moral agency. Despite society’s unwillingness to recognize them as
moral agents, she argues, children can and act responsibly towards oth-
ers. She shows how the children in her own studies “were both able and
willing to take account of other people’s views or actions responsively,
and they could and did put aside their own immediate interests with
the aim of helping others” (Mayall 2002: 110).
121
Mayall’s distinction between actor and agent (which largely reflects

Giddens’ theorizing of these terms), provides a necessary and useful
elaboration of the concept of actor and agent in relation to children,
a distinction which is rarely employed or is often collapsed in much
of the published work where children are interchangeably described as
social actors or social agents. For Mayall, if children are social actors
but not social agents, if in other words they are unable to make a dif-
ference through their actions in the world, then a serious discussion of
children’s place in sociological analysis would be quite unlikely (cf. King
2007).1
Beyond the political significance of recognizing that children possess
agency, what gradually became an axiomatic proposition for the field
fueled a new, and in many ways, productive research agenda. Countless
studies have documented children’s agentic capacity by illustrating their
social competence, their ability to be reflexive about their worlds, to
act in them and transform them. Researchers turned their attention to
what children do and not simply to what is done to them, to their own
voices and not just to the voices of adults, and to the development of
better ways through which this agentic capacity could be identified and
documented. A great deal of innovation and experimentation has gone
into developing participatory techniques and approaches to studying
children in research while children’s participation has, in many ways,
become the new trend not just in academic research but also in policy
circles (see Chapter 6). Moreover, this renewed thinking gained signifi-
cant political support as a result of the adoption in 1989 of the United
Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which acknowledged and
highlighted at a global level children’s subjectivity.
Emerging Fissures: Beyond Agency

as Self-Possession
Despite its productive trajectory, the ‘discovery’ of the independent and
autonomous child-agent has become in many ways a conceptual trap
for childhood studies and an obstacle to its theoretical imagination
122
S. Spyrou
(see Beauvais, forthcoming; Cook, forthcoming). What offered initially

new possibilities for understanding children (i.e., as active rather than
passive) gradually became a mere reproduction of the same. It could
be argued that this reductionist view of children’s agency—agency as
self-possession—has resulted in a theoretical dead-end for the field.
Indeed, to claim today that children possess agency is simply to state the
obvious and most researchers within the field would take it for granted
that one is bound to find evidence for children’s agency if one looks for
it. But though it is no longer a novel position, the preoccupation with
children’s agency still guides much of the work carried out in the field.
In recent years, a number of childhood studies’ scholars have become
highly critical of the theoretical understanding of children’s agency as a
property of the self and its subsequent celebratory treatment in child-
hood research. These scholars have identified what in many ways are the
limits of the concept in current theoretical treatments of the field. What
has become clearer in these debates is that the emerging critical concern
should not be with whether children have or do not have agency, with
whether they are passive or active, but rather with when, where and
how children’s agency happens (see Oswell 2013; see also Prout 2000:
16; 2005: 2, 64; James 2010: 486). Wyness (2006: 237), for example,
has argued that we need to gradually move beyond romanticizing chil-
dren’s agency. Simply locating children in our research communities,
Wyness explains, is not enough; what we need is to explore the complex
ways in which children manifest their agency.2
But how does a critical childhood studies move forward with what
is admittedly a fundamental concept of the field without reproducing
theoretically and empirically what is by now a well-known position,
namely, that children are capable of interpreting their worlds, acting on
them and occasionally transforming them despite the constraints they
are often faced with? How does the field move on from a romanticized
understanding of children’s agency which focuses on its transformative
power but lacks a deeper understanding of its operations?
To start with, moving beyond current conceptualizations of the
term requires becoming more critical with the overemphasis on the
transformative potential of children’s agency. Bluebond-Langner and
Korbin (2007: 242) have argued that the degree, impact and nature of
123
children’s agency as well as the role of structural constraints on children’s

ability to act in the world are still not clear. One of the problems with
this overindulgence with children’s agency and researchers’ tendency
to recognize, highlight and celebrate it has been to ignore the power-
ful constraints that often shape children’s lives and limit their poten-
tial for transforming their worlds (see, for instance, Ansell 2009; Ridge
2006). Indeed, the complexities of children’s lives are more likely to be
backgrounded when agency is emphasized in research (see Rosen and
Bluebond-Langner 2009).
In an effort to develop a more nuanced theoretical approach to chil-
dren’s agency in light of the variable constraints they experience in
their daily lives, Klocker (2007) distinguishes between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’
agency. The former refers to “decisions and everyday actions that are
carried out within highly restrictive contexts characterized by few viable
alternatives” while the latter refers to instances when one is confronted
with “a broad range of options”. For Klocker (2007: 85), structures,
contexts and relationships can expand or constrain an individual’s
choices and hence their agency (see also Abebe and Kjørholt 2009).
More recently, others have pinpointed the challenges posed by the
hold of the structure-agency dualism. More specifically, Esser et al.
(2016: 7–8) have noted the lack of theoretical connection between
the concepts of childhood agency and generational ordering both of
which are often ascribed to by a number of scholars. They argue that to
do this, the notion of child agency needs to be re-conceptualized as a
relational concept so that “the discourses and practices of generational
ordering present themselves as the condition for children’s agency,
which is made possible and limited by generational ordering” while
also taking into account how “the actions of children have a reproduc-
tive and transformative effect on the generational order” (Esser et al.
2016: 8).
In an effort to offer a productive elaboration of the structure-agency
dualism, Leonard (2016) has introduced the concept of generagency
as a conceptually useful tool for examining the relational processes at
work in childhood. The concept of generagency brings together the
two key theoretical concepts of the field–generation and agency–to
illustrate their interdependence. It acknowledges that children are
124
S. Spyrou
social agents but emphasizes how their agency is situated and limited
by the structural realities of generational relationships. Two deriva-
tive concepts–intergeneragency and intrageneragency–further refine
this relationship. Intergeneragency draws attention to the different
generational positionings of children and adults which reflect hierar-
chical relationships, power differences and constraints within which
children’s agency may be practiced while intrageneragency emphasizes
the diverse ways by which children are positioned within generational
relationships based on structural variables such as race, class and gen-
der which intersect with childhood to produce diverse experiences for
children. Generagency and its two derivative concepts provide a more
systematic way of recognizing children’s generational positioning and
the commonality of childhood as a status while also attending to the
diversity of childhood as it is lived and experienced by children. Agency
from within Leonard’s formulation is an outcome of a relational pro-
cess which takes place both across and within generational relation-
ships. Moreover, this relational process, argues Leonard is quite messy,
complex and full of contradictions; to begin comprehending chil-
dren’s agency therefore one needs to recognize its dynamism which
derives from its varied situatedness within relationships of power and
generation.
Other scholars have also sought to advance the debate on children’s
agency by offering more critical understandings of its constitution and
the need to re-theorize it. Valentine (2011), for instance, has argued for
the need to adopt critical models of childhood agency that account for
the diverse ways children express their agency and to be careful about
equating children’s agency with the possession of certain social privileges
associated with adulthood:
Given the conventional emphasis of agency on articulation, rationality

and strategy, a failure to incorporate a critical, embodied, engendered,
material account of agency into childhood studies risks reinscribing a
model in which privileged children will be accorded more agency than
those who do not display rationality and choice in conventional ways.
(Valentine 2011: 355)
125
Along the way, a further danger in conceptualizing children’s agency is

made apparent, namely, that by stressing their capacity as agents, their
vulnerability is obfuscated. This is a point powerfully argued by Mizen
and Ofosu-Kusi (2013). Drawing from their work on the children’s
movement in the streets of Accra, Ghana, they argue that children’s
vulnerability is actually fundamental to conceptualizing their agency
rather than a limiting force in its expression. Though the children in
their research did frame the reasons for leaving their homes and fami-
lies behind in order to live in the streets as their own individual choice,
Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi argue that a more nuanced reading of their
accounts reveals that these children were well aware of their vulnerabili-
ties (e.g., being unable to depend on their families for their survival and
well-being) and that it was these vulnerabilities which propelled them
to act the way they did. Their agency or capacity to act in that sense was
largely embedded in their social relations with their families and com-
munities rather than being individually constituted (Mizen and Ofosu-
Kusi 2013: 379).
A narrow Western-centric view of agency has in many ways limited
the concept’s ability to explain children’s everyday realities but has also
bypassed a critical engagement with the assumptions on which the con-
cept has rested. Cook (2011) has argued that in our efforts to construct
the child social actor through research, to increase children’s participa-
tion and to engender their citizenship we have mostly focused on turn-
ing the child into an actor based on an idealized adult actor. In practice,
the effort has been so far to extent adult privileges (e.g., agency, auton-
omy and voice) to children. Yet, what exactly is adulthood and what
are the boundaries and characteristics of adulthood is not clear and as a
result adulthood continues to be a ghostly presence:
To study childhood we must engage with adulthoods. The point here is

to locate and define the conceptual models underpinning the relevant
notions of ‘complete’ or ‘full’ persons operative in the worlds of the chil-
dren we study and to examine their epistemological and biographical
provenance so that we may begin to rid ourselves of a ghostly presence.
(Cook 2011: 5)
126
S. Spyrou
What emerges from these ongoing debates on children’s agency is a

more critical understanding of agency which asks which children are
able to exercise their agency and under what circumstances; an effort to
situate agency in its spatial and temporal contexts which would allow
the exploration of its varied manifestations. At the same time, these cri-
tiques signal a move away from the celebratory character of much con-
temporary research on children’s agency and a return to more grounded
and critical understandings of agency.3
From within this more critical understanding, scholars are now also
beginning to ask what children’s agency implies for children’s well-
being (James 2009: 44). This foregrounds the need to divorce children’s
agency from its current overwhelmingly positive connotations and to
recognize that children may exercise their agency against their own best
interests as well as against those of others (Valentine 2011: 354; see also
Bordonaro and Payne 2012). As Oswell argues, our concern with chil-
dren’s agency should not merely aim to document its universality but
to also “recognise incapacity, abuse, power relationality, torture and
exploitation” (2013: 280). The common normative use of children’s
agency in research in line with the researcher’s own political commit-
ments and as a means of critiquing the disempowered position of young
people in society (Coffey and Farrugia 2014: 462, 466) might serve a
political purpose but it short-circuits the further theoretical develop-
ment and utility of the concept in childhood studies.
Bordonaro and Payne (2012: 366) use the term ‘ambiguous agency’
to refer to examples of children’s agency which do not conform to what
is considered as good or positive given “established and normative con-
ceptions about childhood and moral and social ideals about the kind of
behavior young people should demonstrate, the activities they should
be engaged in, and the spaces and places deemed appropriate for them
to inhabit”. Moving away from a limited notion of agency as something
positive or good and characterized by resourcefulness and resistance,
allows us to consider the broader implications of children’s agency when
it challenges normative assumptions about childhood (Bordonaro and
Payne 2012: 367).4 In his classic Learning to Labor (1977), Willis shows
how the British working class high school students he studied ended
up reproducing their working class positions despite their active and
127
resistive counter-cultural activities in relation to the school culture and

its values: their agency expressed as resistance to the dominant school
culture ultimately failed to transform their social structural position as
members of the working class.
In my own work with Greek Cypriot children’s constructions of
national identities (see, for example, Spyrou 2000, 2006), I show how
children often reproduce nationalist ideologies of antagonism and
hostility through an active engagement with adult-informed knowl-
edge and discourses rather than through the passive acceptance of such
knowledge. In doing this, children use their own knowledge and under-
standing which springs from their own experience to scrutinize the evi-
dence they have and position themselves accordingly even though this
positioning is morally problematic and does not conform to normative
expectations of how children should relate to ethnic others in today’s
diverse world. Thus, for example, children often combined distant his-
torical knowledge they acquired from school with knowledge they
gained from lived history (e.g., current events, contemporary political
developments, etc.) to reproduce a negative image of the Turks in the
context of divided Cyprus.
Recognizing that agency may not be exhausted by its resistive and
transformative potential but might be equally reproductive in its orien-
tation allows us to investigate its various manifestations in context and
as an outcome of circumstances rather than as a pre-existing quality of
the self. As Coffey and Farrugia (2014: 465) argue in their discussion
of agency in youth sociology, young people often perform identities
that end up reproducing the structural environments of their worlds. In
these cases, it is interesting then to ask whether one explains these roles
in terms of structure or agency. Moreover, as they point out, equating
agency with resistance to existing structures may result “in a position
where those identities or actions that are not seen as emancipatory
become labelled as non-agentic, conditioned and structurally deter-
mined” (Coffey and Farrugia 2014: 468).
Of equal significance in critiquing the celebratory attributions to
children’s agency is the recognition that agency may take more mun-
dane forms as an aspect of the ordinary and the everyday. Payne (2012)
proposes the concept of ‘everyday agency’ as a productive alternative
128
S. Spyrou
to more abstract understandings of children’s agency. Drawing on her

work with child-headed households in Zambia, Payne illustrates what
this everyday agency looks like from the standpoint of children when
we move beyond prevailing notions of children’s agency as illustrative of
coping, resilience and competency. Though the children undertake what
are often seen as adult responsibilities (e.g., as breadwinners or care-
givers) and operate in so-called ‘crisis situations’ characterized by vul-
nerability, from their own points of view their expressions of agency are
part of everyday life rather than something extraordinary. This, argues
Payne, allows us to see children’s agency as it is exercised by children
themselves and not from an external point of view which imposes moral
judgements on their lives.
In sum, this non-exhaustive critical literature continues to create fis-
sures in the taken-for-granted theoretical assumptions about children’s
agency which are now much more explicitly challenged. The turn to
relational approaches by an increasing number of childhood studies
scholars signals not only a critique of the dominant, essentialist notion
of children’s agency but also a turn towards more nuanced and dynamic
theorizations of the concept. It is to a discussion of this new, emerging
thinking about agency that I now turn.
Rethinking Agency with Relational Ontologies

Relational approaches to children’s agency argue that agency is socially
and relationally produced; it is, in other words, an outcome of social
relations rather than an essential quality of the individual child (see
Oswell 2013, 2016; Esser 2016, 2017; Kraftl 2013; Lee 1998, 2001;
Prout 2000, 2005; Raithelhuber 2016). At one level, rethinking agency
as a relational concept5 pinpoints the interdependency between children
and adults and the willingness of both to negotiate the space of agency.
As Valentine argues occasionally children may come to see themselves
as vulnerable and dependent and be willing to defer power and control
to adults (Valentine 2011: 353) a point echoed by Wyness (2006: 236)
who points out that children themselves may not want to be always
considered as agents and might want adults to continue playing a role
129
in their lives as arbiters of their best interests. In a more recent publica-

tion, Wyness (2015) elaborates on this point by drawing our attention
to the limited amount of work on children’s own understanding of what
agency is. Taking work on children’s participation and voice as prox-
ies for their agency, Wyness examines how children’s understandings
of agency are not what they are often assumed to be: children’s under-
standings reinforce a notion of agency as relational or as the outcome
of their collaboration with adults; what children are asking for is more
collaboration with adults based on enhanced opportunities for dialogue
and negotiation, not more autonomy and independence (Wyness 2015:
27–33).
The emphasis in relational ontologies shifts from the autonomous
and independent individual who is knowledgeable and reflexive to
the connections and networks that make up the social world (includ-
ing ones between human and non-human entities in the case of post-
humanist approaches).6 Approaches which view agency as embedded
in social relations recognize that agency is distributed. They are there-
fore much more attuned to the constantly shifting power dynamics of
inter- and intra-generational relationships and see power as much more
fluid and dispersed than allowed for by traditional accounts of power
as possession. The turn here has mainly been towards concepts such
as networks inspired by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT)
and assemblages as elaborated in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, both of
which are theoretical moves towards the decentering of the subject.
Childhood researchers who have turned to ANT as a means of
rethinking children’s agency (e.g., Lee 2001; Prout 2005), have argued
for the need to place children’s agency within the networks of their
relations. From an ANT perspective, children’s agency is produced out
of the assembly of heterogeneous materials, including but not limited
to discursive, biological and technological ones, which enable or con-
strain children’s ability to act (Prout 2000: 16–17); it is the heteroge-
neous assemblages which emerge out of children’s networks of relations
which include both human and non-human actors (or ‘actants’ as often
referred to in ANT, a term which is broader and encompasses non-
humans as well), which constitute their agentic ability.7 It is as a result
of these networks of relations and children’s dependence on others, not
130
S. Spyrou
because of their individual, independent and inherent ability to do so,

that children’s agency comes about. In short, ANT provides a direct
challenge to essentialist understandings of children’s agency as self-
possession and offers a promising means for re-conceptualizing chil-
dren’s agency relationally while also expanding the investigation beyond
discourse to encompass the materiality of agency.
The related concept of assemblage, inspired by the work of Deleuze
and Guattari (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987; see also Delanda 2006)
has also offered a productive theoretical basis for elaborating the con-
cept of agency in childhood studies. Oswell (2013), for example, has
made a strong case for seeing children’s agency as fundamentally
relational—as networked, assembled, and infrastructured. Drawing on
assemblage theory, Oswell takes assemblage to be a generative arrange-
ment “which is a composition of dynamic, generative and agentic
parts, such that those parts have temporality, movement and capacity
only by virtue of their being composed or arranged” (Oswell 2013: 73).
Children’s agency, from this point of view emerges out of the mutual,
productive and generative relational engagement children have with
other agencies (Oswell 2013: 81).
Oswell (2013: 15) has elaborated his critique of childhood as a cat-
egorical identity which he finds as problematic especially in relation to
children’s agency. He identifies a number of problems which limit the
value of such a categorical ascription. Among others, he argues that
focusing on childhood as a category prioritizes the power and agency
of the category, that is the outcome, rather than the process by which
agency comes about. Likewise, categorical classification creates identity
or sameness for children rather than difference reducing the multiplic-
ity of children’s experiences to a single identity which cannot account
for this diversity. Moreover, according to Oswell, children’s individual
agency is taken as a universal attribute of the category, that is children
are seen a priori as social agents, and their agency as being beyond the
need for empirical investigation.
Oswell’s comprehensive critique of essentialist notions of children’s
agency builds on earlier critiques which sought to raise ontological
questions in relation to the field’s theoretical development. Lee (1998,
2001) was one of the first to criticize prevailing notions of children’s
131
agency which emphasize children’s independence, completion, and

stability. The attempt by sociologists of childhood, he argues, to bring
children into sociological theory as a group in its own right meant
that they had to conceive children as possessing ‘interpretive agency’;
children’s agency would come, in this way, to be seen as an individual
property or possession (Lee 1998: 463). This essentialist view of agency
therefore meant that children had to be positioned as beings rather than
becomings and, like adults, as complete, mature, and independent. This
ontological shift and its prejudice in favor of the mature and independ-
ent has helped establish the sociology of childhood as a legitimate sub-
field of sociology but it did so in the terms of mainstream sociological
theory: “this prejudice has led sociologists of childhood making children
fit into standard forms of sociological theory rather than develop socio-
logical theory that is fit for children” (Lee 1998: 460).
Lee has called for ‘an immature sociology’ which sees childhood as
‘constitutionally incomplete’ (Lee 1998: 465), a view which also encom-
passes adulthood which can also no longer be assumed to be stable and
complete: both children and adults are human becomings and always in
a process of change. With this, Lee challenges the essentialist notion of
agency as self-possession and turns towards ANT which views agency
as dependence: “instead of asking whether children, like adults, pos-
sess agency or not, we can ask how agency is built or may be built for
them by examining the extensions and supplements that are available to
them.” (Lee 2001: 130; cf. James and James 2008: 121).
Lee (2000) illustrates the possibilities of this relational notion of
agency by drawing on his research on children participating in crimi-
nal proceedings in English Courts. He shows that what allowed children
to perform as independent witnesses in court was not a general shift in
beliefs about children’s ability to perform credibly in court as speaking
subjects but rather the emergence of a new heterogeneous assemblage
which included among others the police, social workers and technolog-
ical supplements such as video-cameras and television screens. It was
this distributed agency which resulted in children’s changed subjecthood
in court. To the extent that children could appear as social agents, it
was because they depended on others, not because they could act inde-
pendently. This understanding allows for a view of children’s ontology as
132
S. Spyrou
malleable and emergent rather than an outcome of a fixed and determi-

nable status (Lee 2000: 149–150; see also Lee 2008).
These emerging ways of rethinking agency signal a move towards
re-conceptualizing the field’s ontological assumptions. In a recent pub-
lication, Oswell (2016) summed up this rethinking in contemporary
childhood studies by arguing that the new relational approaches to
agency have signaled a move from a strong to a weak ontology of child-
hood. The ‘new paradigm’ which emerged in the early 1990s, Oswell
explains, constituted a strong ontology of childhood which was founded
on what Derrida referred to as “the metaphysics of presence”: as reflex-
ive and agentic actors children were conceptualized as capable of acting
in the present and as having a clear and authentic voice through which
their experiences could be articulated (see Chapter 5). In contrast, the
more recent re-conceptualizations of childhood invite experimentation
by opening up the ontological world of children to investigation. As
a result, the interest shifts from the structure-agency problematic to a
concern with understanding children’s agency as assembled and infra-
structured (Oswell 2016: 24).
A New Materialist Reading of Children’s Agency

The scholarly challenges to children’s agency as self-possession have also
encouraged a larger search for theoretical perspectives beyond child-
hood studies to aid the field in rethinking agency. What has come to be
known as ‘new materialism’ or ‘feminist materialism’8 promises a pro-
ductive re-theorization of the social that could help move beyond the
well-rehearsed orthodoxies of contemporary social theory. In recent
years, ‘new materialism’ has made some inroads in childhood stud-
ies though admittedly it has had so far limited impact on the field’s
imagination.
We have seen earlier that ‘new materialism’ is in many ways a reaction
to the ‘linguistic turn’—the theoretical preoccupation with language,
discourse and culture—and its neglect of the material (see Alaimo and
Hekman 2008; Barad 2007, 2008; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost
2010a; Haraway 1991, 1997; Hekman 2010; Hird 2009; Dolphijn
133
and van der Tuin 2012; Braidotti 2013; Grosz 1994).9 New materialists
critique dualisms such as nature-culture, human-nonhuman, subject-
object or discourse-matter and though they acknowledge the contribu-
tions of social constructionist and postmodernist approaches to under-
standing social reality they also consider such approaches as inadequate
in explaining the complex material-semiotic constitution of the world:
our worlds are materially real even if culturally mediated (Alaimo and
Hekman 2008: 5; Coole and Frost 2010b: 26–27). Moreover, new
materialists espouse a posthumanist orientation which challenges
human exceptionalism; humans are no longer seen as being at the epi-
center of the world and as the only privileged ones with the capacity
for agency. On the contrary, for new materialists agency is distributed
widely beyond humans.
More specifically, in the context of our discussion here, nature (or
more generally matter) is not seen as inert but active, generative and
agentic. It is endowed with the capacity to act; it is neither out there
apart from humans and their cultures, nor is it a mere social con-
struction. Material objects are not discreet, separate and autonomous.
Matter interacts with other matter and is always in flux (Coole and
Frost 2010b: 9). Humans, as embodied, material entities (researchers
included) do not stand apart from, and make sense of, a passive nature
but participate in dynamic processes of materialization where nature,
both organic and inorganic, plays an active and agentic role (Coole and
Frost 2010b: 7–8). As Pickering (1995: 26) has put it: “the world makes
us in the same process by which we make the world”. The aim then for
new materialists is to account for the vitality of matter in all its imma-
nence. This means expanding the conceptual and empirical space for
doing research beyond humans to encompass all kinds of relationalities.
As a substantive reorientation of current theoretical thinking in the
social sciences, new materialism offers productive ways to rethink ques-
tions of ontology and agency in childhood studies. To consider what
this rethinking might entail, I turn to new materialist thinking and pri-
marily to Barad’s theory of ‘agential realism’ which offers a theoretically
comprehensive approach to rethinking agency as a potentially useful
framework for addressing some of the limits identified in current dis-
cussions about agency in childhood studies. So far, agential realism has
134
S. Spyrou
attracted limited interest from childhood studies’ scholars (Hultman

and Lenz Taguchi 2010; Lenz-Taguchi 2011; Malone 2016; Taylor
2011, 2013; Rautio 2013, 2014) though it is very likely that this inter-
est will increase as childhood studies seeks to address the limits of its
dualistic thinking.
Barad (2007: 26) defines ‘agential realism’ as “an epistemological-
ontological-ethical framework that provides an understanding of the
role of human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and
cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices, thereby
moving such considerations beyond the well-worn debates that pit
constructivism against realism, agency against structure, and idealism
against materialism”.10 From Barad’s post-humanist perspective what
matters are, on the one hand, the entangled practices which produce
through intra-action diverse phenomena (Barad 2007: 58) and, on the
other hand, the processes by which boundaries are produced: “how dif-
ferent differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclu-
sions matter” (Barad 2007: 30).
In agential realism focus is redirected from things to phenomena
which are “the ontological inseparability/entanglement of intra-acting
‘agencies ’” (Barad 2007: 139; emphasis in the original); it is phenom-
ena which constitute reality: “Reality is composed not of things-in-
themselves or things-behind-phenomena but of things-in-phenomena”
(Barad 2007: 140). What matters then is the ‘intra-action’ (as opposed
to ‘interaction’ which presupposes the existence of independent, dis-
tinct and separate agencies) or the way through which distinct agencies
emerge through their mutual entanglement—the process by which they
are co-constituted.11 As Barad explains, “It is important to note that
‘distinct’ agencies are only distinct in a relational, not an absolute, sense,
that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entangle-
ment; they don’t exist as individual elements” (Barad 2007: 33).12
Agential realism challenges liberal, humanist understandings of
agency as self-possession and invites us to see agency instead as an
enactment and an outcome of intra-acting (Barad 2007: 214). When
understood as such, “it seems not only appropriate but important to
consider agency as distributed over nonhuman as well as human forms”
(Barad 2007: 214) and to see it as present in matter through its ongoing
135
intra-activity with other entities including humans: “Agency is not an

attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world. The universe is
agential intra-activity in its becoming” (Barad 2007: 141).
Barad’s notion of agency does not rest on assumptions of subjectiv-
ity and intentionality (Barad 2007: 214). Thus, to attribute agency to
non-human entities does not mean that one is attributing either inten-
tionality or causal power to them. In reference to ANT (with which
‘agential realism’ would find common ground in relation to this ques-
tion) Latour explains what this might mean:
… there might exist many metaphysical shades between full causality and
sheer existence. In addition to ‘determining’ and serving as a ‘backdrop
for human action’, things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, per-
mit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on. ANT
is not the empty claim that objects do things ‘instead’ of human actors:
it simply says that no science of the social can even begin if the question
of who and what participated in the action is not first of all thoroughly
explored, even though it might mean letting elements in which, for lack
of a better term we would call non-humans. (Latour 2005: 71–72)
From this perspective then, agency is an enactment which comes about

as a result of intra-action between material and discursive forces; it hap-
pens when there is a difference or transformation to some state of affairs
as a result of a particular doing (Latour 2005: 52–53) when “other
agencies over which we have no control make us do things” (Latour
2005: 50). In the next section, I provide an empirical illustration from
my own work of the potential of new materialist thinking in providing
more nuanced and non-essentialized accounts of children’s agency.
An Empirical Illustration
The study I refer to here was carried out in 2010 and explored
10–12 year old Greek Cypriot children’s experiences of crossing over
to the occupied north of Cyprus following the partial lifting of restric-
tions in the freedom of movement in 2003 (see Christou and Spyrou
136
S. Spyrou
2012, 2014, 2016). The north of the island was inaccessible to Greek
Cypriots after the Turkish invasion in 1974 which resulted in the occu-
pation of 37% of the island’s territory. The children who took part in
the study recounted to the researchers their border crossing experiences
and their journeys to the other side with their parents and grandparents.
They detailed their emotional reactions and their encounters with peo-
ple, places and a variety of other nonhuman elements during these visits
from the moment they started their journeys and until they returned
back to their homes. A significant number of the children who partic-
ipated in the study came from refugee families, that is, families whose
parents and/or grandparents fled their homes in the north as a result of
the Turkish invasion and became refugees in 1974.
My example comes from an interview with Eleonora who was at the
time of the interview 11 years old and recalled having crossed three times
since the opening of the checkpoints. Eleonora’s mother is a refugee from
a village in the occupied north. It is important to note that at the time
of the study, Greek Cypriots who wished to cross to the occupied north
were required to show to the Turkish Cypriot authorities their passports
at a checkpoint. Their passports were not stamped by the authorities;
instead, people were given a stamped piece of paper which would con-
stitute their permit to cross. Though this was still a clearly problematic
arrangement for most Greek Cypriots—no illegal entity should request an
official document to allow lawful citizens of the country to visit the rest of
the island, many would say—it was an acceptable compromise for many
who wished to visit their occupied villages and towns since it did not
entail a direct recognition of the illegal state in the north, the so-called
“Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (“TRNC”).13
When asked how she feels when crossing to the other side Eleonora
explained:
[I feel] as if I am crossing to get into a water park, let’s say, that you go
through and you show your ticket, but as soon as I enter, I feel anger,
I feel a lot of anger when I know that that part would have been ours [i.e.,
it could belong to Greek Cypriots] but because the Turks were jealous of it
they came and took it from us…. When I saw there [at the checkpoint] the
other flags, instead of those of Cyprus and Greece, I felt disappointment …
137
What we are offered here by Eleonora is not data from direct

observation but part of a narrative which she shares with the researcher.
In this narrative she explains how she experiences emotionally her cross-
ing over to the other side.
In Barad’s terms, what Eleonora describes would constitute a phe-
nomenon [or, more generally, an event in new materialist think-
ing] where human and nonhuman forces intra-act to constitute both
Eleonora’s subjectivity and those of the other people she encounters
there but also the ontologies of those nonmaterial entities which make
up the particular assemblage she is part of. Eleonora’s subjectivity is
emergent and is only accountable through her intra-activity within the
ensuing phenomenon. This entanglement, to use Barad’s preferred term,
directs attention to the child Eleonora as an emergence or a becoming;
rather than being a preexisting entity in interaction with other entities,
Eleonora emerges as a particular kind of child out of her interdepend-
ent, entangled intra-relating with other human and non-human forces,
that is, by being part of a particular assemblage. It is what happens
within the assemblage that matters, what kinds of affects or capacities
emerge out of the relational encounters between the various materiali-
ties which assemble (Fox and Alldred 2017: 56).
As Livesey (2010: 18) explains,
Assemblages, as conceived of by Deleuze and Guattari, are complex

constellations of objects, bodies, expressions, qualities, and territories that
come together for varying periods of time to ideally create new ways of
functioning. Assemblages operate through desire as abstract machines,
or arrangements, that are productive and have function; desire is the
circulating energy that produces connections.
Because assemblages are characterized by a certain degree of unpredict-

ability and instability and defy fixity, they offer productive analytical
opportunities. As Colebrook explains, an assemblage is “the outcome of
a process of connections”—it is “a multiplicity that necessarily changes
in nature as it expands its connections” in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s
(1987: 8) words—and therefore cannot have finality; children, like all
human beings, are in this sense the outcome of a series of genetic, social
138
S. Spyrou
and historical assemblages, not independent entities which pre-exist the

connections which materialize them (Colebrook 2002: xx). As subjects
who participate in shifting assemblages of human and non-human enti-
ties, material and discursive forces, children are in a constant process of
transformation—they are becomings.
Using the concept of the assemblage allows for a more nuanced and
critical analysis of the possibilities which give rise to (or restrict) chil-
dren’s agency in the world. Since each new encounter constitutes a new
assemblage and a new subject position (however small and impercep-
tible), the real challenge is to understand the ongoing possibilities for
transforming the world which spring from social practice. Needless to
say of course that not all elements of an assemblage are discernible and
identifiable nor can they be isolated since any research assemblage is
constituted at any moment through the emergent entanglement of its
constituent parts. The constituent parts of the assemblage, Barad (2007)
reminds us, are discernible only through our ‘agential cuts’ which render
the entangled separate and apart and hence create inclusions and exclu-
sions: “What the agential cut does provide is a contingent resolution of
the ontological inseparability within the phenomenon and hence the
conditions for objective description: that is, it enables an unambiguous
account of marks on bodies, but only within the particular phenome-
non” (Barad 2007: 348). In this sense, any description of an assemblage
necessarily implies a decision to freeze an ontological entanglement in
order to describe its elements.
But who is part of Eleonora’s assemblage? Though it would be diffi-
cult to provide a comprehensive and exhaustive list of what constitutes
Eleonora’s assemblage, we could identify the most obvious and signifi-
cant agents that exist in an entangled relationship within the assemblage
she inhabits. Eleonora’s assemblage many include for instance: her par-
ents and grandparents, the other Greek Cypriots who are also lined up
to cross, the Turkish Cypriot police behind the window at the check-
point, the actual set up of the checkpoint which includes among other
things the booths, the signs in the Turkish language, and the visual sym-
bolism of the area they are about to cross (i.e., the Turkish and Turkish
Cypriot flags she sees there as well as the Greek and Cypriot flags which
she reflects on in their absence), the discourses she is familiar with about
139
the occupied north, the Turkish invasion and the refugees, the institu-
tional policies and the curriculum she has been exposed to at school
including the nationalistic learning she has acquired from school, the
ideas and beliefs she has developed about the conflict in Cyprus, the
stories she heard about the occupied north from her family and from
the media, her previous personal experiences with Turkish Cypriots and
the feelings she has towards them, her knowledge or experience of vis-
iting waterparks, her desire to visit her mother’s occupied village, her
emotional reaction to being at the checkpoint and having to cross over,
and so on and so forth.
Eleonora’s assemblage is comprised of natural and cultural, human
and nonhuman, material and discursive as well as micro and macro
forces. The actual phenomenon we are offered a glimpse into through
Eleonora’s words reveals how some of these forces intra-act with her.
Though she parallels the procedure of crossing the checkpoint with that
of entering a waterpark (an experience we can assume to be pleasurable)
she is nevertheless clear that what she feels is very negative: ‘I feel anger,
I feel a lot of anger’ she says. Her experience of crossing the checkpoint
is an embodied experience even if we are offered this understanding
through her retrospective narrative. She feels anger not simply because
she brings to her mind the injustice of the occupation but because she
was physically there and experienced crossing to the other side—her
experience is embodied, emplaced, situated and registered through her
material presence at the checkpoint.
But the materiality of the context (e.g., the actual checkpoint, the
spatial crossing from the ‘free’ to the ‘occupied’ part of Cyprus, her cor-
poreal presence there and the flow of bodies through the checkpoint)
has this power on her because it is already and simultaneously discur-
sively constructed. This materiality comes with meanings attached to
it which Eleonora shares and makes sense of in particular ways. Thus,
for instance, when she says that she feels a lot of anger “when I know
that that part would have been ours but because the Turks were jeal-
ous of it they came and took it from us” she is not simply expressing
her own understanding of the political situation in Cyprus but repro-
duces the well-rehearsed narrative about the Turkish invasion of 1974
that she more than likely learned at school (see Spyrou 2000, 2006).
140
S. Spyrou
The nationalistic narrative she draws on provides her with a discursive

framework for making sense of her border-crossing experience. The flags
she mentions contribute to the anger and the disappointment which
Eleonora experiences. Likewise, the passport she had to show in order to
get a permit to cross intra-acts with the discourse surrounding the ille-
gality of the occupied north as a political entity (and its illegal request
of documents from lawful citizens of Cyprus) and Eleonora’s emo-
tions to produce in her a particular subject position—as a refugee and
a pilgrim in her own country (see Christou and Spyrou 2012, 2014,
2016)—and make her aware of who she is and what she can and cannot
do while in the north.
In new materialist thinking, ‘affect’ may be used in place of ‘agency’
in reference to that which can affect or be affected—that is to what
something does in a relation—resulting in some form of change; affect
is not merely restricted to the physical or biological planes of materiality
but extends to the expressive realms of thoughts, ideas and feelings since
they, too, can affect or be affected by the relations in an assemblage and,
in that sense, also considered as being material (Fox and Alldred 2017:
18). The passport in the context of children’s border crossings acquires
a special significance. It is a real, material document which however
acquires its particular meaning within the context of these border
crossing experiences. The work it performs on the Greek Cypriot chil-
dren who cross—its emerging agency or affect—is the outcome of its
intra-activity within the assemblages that are constituted every time at
a checkpoint. Its materiality and the agency it is able to enact is already
and simultaneously discursively constructed. It is a material-discursive
device, much like the wrist band described by Watson et al. (2015: 272)
which helps materialize children’s bodies, their capacities and the cate-
gory boundaries which define them in particular ways.14
From a new materialist perspective then, the phenomenon which
constitutes Eleonora’s experience is a material-semiotic one located
in a specific time and space. Her corporeal experience at the check-
point is not simply an encounter with other human bodies where one
could clearly ascribe intention and will to all parties involved. She also
encounters matter in other forms (e.g., flags, booths, passports, stamped
permits, road blocks, signs, and so on) and this materiality, from a new
141
materialist perspective, is agentic or affective—it creates a response, it

affects and is affected. It ‘kicks back’ as Eleonora enters this particu-
lar assemblage. Though this material agency is neither intentional,
nor purposeful it springs from this coming together and acquires sig-
nificance through the intra-action between these various forces with
which Eleonora is entangled. It is out of this entangled relationship that
Eleonora is also able to be agentic, to feel anger, to reflect on the polit-
ical significance of crossing to an illegal entity and to make sense of the
context’s materiality, a materiality which is already inscribed with dis-
course and power. Eleonora’s agency is not, in that sense, hers but an
enactment which results from the particular assemblage which makes it
possible for her to be an agent in that instance, which is not, of course
to say that her own contribution in this is inconsequential; her knowl-
edge, her understandings, her experiences, her hopes and aspirations
(which of course can never be entirely her own) play a part in her agen-
tic enactment. As Latour (2005: 217–218) has put it, “when we speak
of actor we should always add the large network of attachments making
it act”.
The particular phenomenon analyzed here provides Eleonora and all
the other agents in the assemblage with their ontological status. It is not
that the flags she mentions did not exist as flags before she saw them at
the checkpoint. But it is as a result of this encounter, this intra-action
which includes Eleonora and all the other agents identified earlier, that
the flags acquire the particular significance they have—both as objects
with affective capacity to shape Eleonora’s subjectivity and as symbolic
representations of the occupation—and give rise to her feeling of anger
and disappointment.
But though agency is distributed in an assemblage like this, it is not
equally distributed. The Turkish Cypriot police behind the counter in
the booth at the checkpoint can exercise a certain kind of power and
agency which is by and large non-negotiable—the power, for instance,
to request documents and grant or deny permission to cross—and
this power does certainly affect the agencies which are enacted by the
remaining elements in the assemblage, children included.
The assemblages which come into being at any particular instance
as the children participate in these journeys to the other side of their
142
S. Spyrou
country (and their subsequent narrations of these journeys to us, as

researchers), provide glimpses into the complexities of their emerging
subjectivities out of the dynamic intra-action between discourse and
matter and its constantly shifting configurations. Bodies (e.g., of other
children, adults, Turks, Turkish Cypriots, soldiers, police, other Greek
Cypriots, etc.), space (e.g., the checkpoint), place (e.g., the occupied
territories, the refugee village), buildings (e.g., the homes left behind
in 1974, churches, mosques, etc.), symbolism (e.g., flags, monuments,
signs in the Turkish language), emotions (e.g., excitement, sadness,
anger, disappointment), values (e.g., freedom, etc.), hopes and desires
(e.g., for the re-unification of the island), ideologies (e.g., national-
ism, multiculturalism, etc.), histories (individual, family, and national
ones), to name but a few, intra-act in different ways to constitute chil-
dren’s subjectivities, not as fixed but as always unstable and changing.
Each child is produced differently during these journeys which is not
to say that similar assemblages do not come into play for many of the
children. Children’s schooling and shared generational experience, for
instance, provide them with certain cultural resources that impact their
emerging subjectivities in similar ways. There is a move, to use Deleuze
and Guattari’s term, towards ‘territorializing’, creating specific capac-
ities in particular bodies, creating, that is, stability and consistency in
what are otherwise complex flows of affect (Deleuze and Guattari 1987;
Colebrook 2002: 56–57). Many of the children who participated in this
study described to us how (especially during initial visits) they felt in
their bodies a sense of fear and discomfort while crossing at a check-
point and throughout their visits to the north and how they kept close
to their parents and grandparents holding their hands as a means for
feeling more secure. In that sense, Eleonora’s experience is not unique
but pinpoints similar processes which work towards territorializing
event assemblages for many of these children.
But there is always a dynamism to these processes and hence a con-
tingency and unpredictability. Some children, for instance, emerge out
of these visits significantly transformed. They might come to see, for
instance, how the ‘other’ is not as bad as they had learned all their lives
and that there is hope for the future. For other children, the emerg-
ing assemblages work in such a way as to help reproduce and further
143
reify their existing (and often negative) understandings of the ‘other’.

The possibility of being transformed, of becoming-other emerges in
particular spatial and temporal contexts as a result of event-assemblages
which enable new affects and capacities to emerge. For some of these
children, ‘lines of flight’ (made possible through specific assembled rela-
tions) help de-territorialize their otherwise highly territorialized and sta-
bilized assemblages enabling in them capacities to act on the world in
new ways (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; see also Aitken et al. 2014).
Working Towards a Critical Understanding

of Agency
I have argued that if agency as a concept is to acquire a more nuanced
and critical understanding in childhood studies, it will have to grap-
ple with prevailing and often unproblematized understandings which
equate it with the individual’s transformative potential. As we have seen,
new materialism often replaces the notion of agency with that of ‘affect’
or “the capacity to affect or be affected” whereby “a change of state or
capacities of one entity” produces additional affective capacities within
the assemblage with affective flows working towards territorializing
or stabilizing an assemblage or alternatively towards deterritorializing or
destabilizing it (Fox and Alldred 2015: 401). This suggests neither over-
powering and predetermined outcomes or unconstrained possibility for
change. Tuana uses the notion of ‘viscous porosity’ rather than ‘fluidity’
to describe this relational sense of agency:
Viscosity is neither fluid nor solid, but intermediate between them.

Attention to the porosity of interactions helps to undermine the notion
that distinctions, as important as they might be in particular contexts,
signify a natural or unchanging boundary, a natural kind. At the same
time, “viscosity” retains an emphasis on resistance to changing form,
thereby a more helpful image than “fluidity,” which is too likely to pro-
mote a notion of open possibilities and to overlook sites of resistance
and opposition or attention to complex ways in which material agency
is often involved in interactions including, but not limited to, human
agency. (Tuana 2008: 193–194; emphasis in the original)
144
S. Spyrou
In short, though a turn to assemblages (as the empirical example

above shows) offers us powerful analytical possibilities for exploring
the dynamic intra-actions between different entities, we are also being
reminded that transformation is always to a greater or lesser extent
checked and curtailed through stabilizing and territorializing forces.
Moreover, any agentic transformation and the possibilities it entails
are not a priori positive ones and instances of celebration but dynamic
interplays of multiple players with differential power, intentions and
effects. In that sense, describing and analyzing assemblages should not
merely be a means of accessing the complexity, relationality and con-
nectivity of different entities in an ever vibrant world. Though that
may serve epistemological goals, it would limit any serious attempts to
develop a critical childhood studies. A focus on everyday phenomena
(however limited and small in their apparent scale) invites an explora-
tion of the discursive and material manifestations and effects of struc-
tural inequalities in children’s lives.
Attending to children’s ongoing entanglements with other human
and non-human entities offers a non-reductive understanding of agency
and transformation which is dynamic, processual, connective, rela-
tional. However, the temptation to exhaust analysis at the level of the
micro-event of everyday interaction in children’s lives might result in
yet another form of reification of their agency and a celebration of their
transformative potential. Situating the materiality of children’s lives
within the powerful structural realities which impact their lives invites
childhood studies’ scholars not to lose sight of the larger complexities
of life and the viscous nature of an otherwise dynamic interplay of
forces, both human and non-human (see Sanchez-Eppler, forthcoming).
In that sense, it is important not to lose sight of all manifestations of
agency and how they co-produce inequalities, exploitation, oppression,
constraint and limitation in children’s lives.
Indeed, one of the dangers of this kind of micropolitical analysis is
to ignore larger questions of inequality and marginalization given that
“the emphasis on transient, embodied practices can work to individ-
ualize and depoliticize processes and relations of power” which take
place within larger socio-historical and political contexts (Mitchell and
Elwood 2012: 789). The challenge for new materialist approaches is to
145
provide convincing explanations for how stability and enduring forms

of oppression come into being and are sustained (Fox and Alldred 2017:
9) or as Latour (2005: 245) puts it, “to be able to consider both the
formidable inertia of social structures and the incredible fluidity that
maintains their existence”. Drawing on DeLanda’s (2006) work on
assemblages, Fox and Alldred reflect on this theoretical challenge for
new materialist thinking:
Assemblages do not exert some kind of force over relations: these forces
are a consequence simply of how relations affect, and are affected by,
other assembled relations. This model of a sociology of associations
– denied any recourse to ‘social forces’, ‘structures’ or ‘systems’ as explana-
tions of activity and events – is a radical departure from dualistic sociolo-
gies. It poses challenges that must be worked through adequately, in order
that a materialist sociology can provide both an ontologically-convincing
model of society that accounts for both continuity and change, and to
offer models for social inquiry that do not merely offer ‘explanations’ in
terms of social structures or extraneous social forces. (Fox and Alldred
2017: 57–58)
The turn to assemblages as an alternative to the structure-agency dual-

ism, offers a radical alternative not only in terms of rethinking agency in
childhood studies but also and more generally in conceptualizing scale
and scale-making for the field as a knowledge practice. It is to this that
I now turn to reflect on its potential contribution towards the develop-
ment of a critical childhood studies.
Scale-Making as a Knowledge Practice

in Childhood Studies
Despite their centrality in elaborating a more critical understand-
ing of knowledge production, questions about scale-making have yet
to capture childhood studies’ imagination. Drawing on emerging dis-
cussions about scale, Ansell (2009) suggests that a flat ontology may
offer an alternative to the hierarchical scalar thinking which still guides
146
S. Spyrou
much of the work in childhood studies. This, argues Ansell, requires

rethinking entrenched scalar distinctions between micro and macro,
local and global; in a flat plane of existence, everything is both local and
global at one and the same time—the two interpenetrate and cannot
be reduced to one or the other despite being partially connected (see
Strathern 2004). Much of the world which impacts on children’s lives
(e.g., policies, discourses) though connected in different ways to them,
lies beyond their direct experience of the local and cannot be captured
through their voices and experiences; therefore it is imperative, accord-
ing to Ansell, that we also research with those who impact children’s
worlds in this wider sense (2009: 200–205).
Beyond childhood studies, others have offered alternative ways of
problematizing scale that might prove to be productive starting points
for a more critical discussion of scale and knowledge production in the
field. In his exposition of ANT, Latour (2005), for example, insists that
we need to follow the actors in a flat and symmetrical plane of exist-
ence which links local sites connecting in this way the world rather than
establishing scales a priori which do little to tell us how the social is
assembled. From within this kind of understanding, agency ceases to be
about the individual and the local and becomes a networked and con-
nective link to understanding the wider plane of existence where things
happen through assembled relations.
Escobar (2007: 107, 109), likewise, has argued for the need to
rethink scale through assemblage theory which sees social reality as
multi-scaled and as the outcome of multiple interacting sites and their
unfolding event-relations; such a rethinking, according to Escobar,
refuses to reduce the world’s social complexity by presupposing identi-
ties which are essential and enduring:
Conventional approaches assume two levels (micro, macro) or a nested

series of levels (the proverbial Russian doll). The alternative approach
is to show, through bottom-up analysis, how, at each scale, the proper-
ties of the whole emerge from the interactions between parts, bearing in
mind that the more simple entities are themselves assemblages of sorts.
Moreover, through their participation in networks, elements (such as
individuals) can become components of various assemblages operating at
147
different levels. This means that most social entities exist in a wide range
of scales, making the situation much more complex than in conventional
notions of scale. (Escobar 2007: 108)
From this line of thinking, the key is to identify assemblages (and the
processes through which they become stabilized) out of the dynamic
and complex flows which constantly unfold. The challenge then is to
consider how one local site links to other local sites in multiple, diverse
and complex ways (Marston et al. 2007: 51, 56) and how what are nor-
mally thought of as ‘macro’ relations can become incorporated in, and
affect, other constituent elements of the assemblages studied (Fox and
Alldred 2017: 63). Children’s identities and worlds come into being out
of these dynamic entanglements but the objects enacted through this
ontological multiplicity can no longer be compared in terms of hier-
archical scales; there are no longer small and big, simple and complex
objects to compare along a particular axis (Mol 2002: 157).
Whether childhood studies will turn towards, and experiment with,
scales and scale-making or not, what is significant is that it begins to
problematize its choice of scale as a knowledge practice (see Spyrou
et al., forthcoming-b). Recognizing that different scales produce differ-
ent kinds of knowledge and that the choices made have political and
ethical consequences goes a long way towards the development of a
critical childhood studies, an issue to which I return in Chapter 7.
Conclusion
Despite its centrality in childhood studies, it is becoming increasingly
apparent that a notion of agency as a property of the self is theoreti-
cally limiting for the field. An understanding of agency which rests on
the knowledgeable, self-reflexive, independent and autonomous individ-
ual child finds its conceptual limits in light of social life’s relationality,
connectedness, and interdependence.15 Contemporary developments
in social theory offer productive opportunities for childhood studies
to rethink children’s agency through a relational lens and offer in this
way more decentered and nuanced accounts of its analytical power in
148
S. Spyrou
childhood research. As I have shown though the empirical example

I provided, rethinking agency through relational ontologies in the con-
text of emerging and shifting assemblages provides critical insights into
the very processes which produce capacities and affects. A relational
rethinking of agency also reminds us about the difficulties and chal-
lenges of theorizing an ever changing world which is simultaneously
and in many ways highly structured and constraining and quite often
oppressive in many children’s daily lives, a challenge which should con-
tinue to animate our theoretical imaginations. By decentering the child
as such, and engaging with the broader relational worlds which unfold
in the material-semiotic realm we are offered opportunities to disclose
childhoods which would otherwise remain in the margins or perhaps
unimagined and absented. It is in this sense then that a relational
rethinking of agency may enhance the field’s potential for theoretical
innovation as well as contribute towards the development of a critical
childhood studies.
Notes
1. King (2007) challenges the very premise on which contemporary
childhood studies makes claims about children’s agency. He argues
that ‘children’s agency’ has been produced by the new sociology of
childhood’s theoretical assumptions rather than being the outcome of
empirical research: “the account of the child as ‘social agent’ owes much
more to the new sociologists of childhood’s preferred image of rational,
competent, self-controlled children than to any evidence that the social
institutions on which society depends actually change themselves as
the direct result of children’s concerted actions and that these changes
reflect what the children wanted or intended” (King 2007: 208–209).
2. In their discussion of agency in youth sociology, Coffey and Farrugia
(2014) have also described agency as an ambiguous, complex and con-
tested term in need of unpacking.
3. Lancy (2012) is particularly critical about the so-called “agency move-
ment” which he sees as ethnocentric and hegemonic seeking to impose
a particular understanding from the western world to the rest of the
world; he urges childhood scholars “to not praise children’s agency nor
149
bury it but, to tackle it with all the empirical weapons in our arsenal”
(Lancy 2012: 14).
4. See Seymour (2012) for an empirical example using the notion of
‘ambiguous agency’.
5. See in particular the recent edited volume by Esser et al. (2016) which
aims to reconceptualize the notion of agency in childhood studies with
a view to capturing its potential as a theoretical concept. A number of
the chapters in the volume explore specifically the potential of rela-
tional approaches to children’s agency.
6. Relational ontologies also draw attention to the need for questioning
the value of universalizing what might be after all a very western-centric
notion of agency and considering instead local ways of understanding
what it means to be an agent (e.g., Gottlieb 2000).
7. See Turmel (2008) for the use of ANT in historical analysis to explain
how childhood is constituted as a social phenomenon. Turmel shows
how “the child as an object is configured in social practices” by “numer-
ous social actors interacting together to frame children and regulate
their behavior—using diverse artefacts such as graphs and charts”
(2008: 3).
8. To be distinguished from ‘materialist feminism’ which follows a Marxist
orientation (see Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 17–18, f. 3).
9. Outside feminist circles the work of Pickering (1995), Latour (1988),
and Deleuze and Guattari (1987) have also played a significant role in
helping rethink materiality and ontology.
10. This inseparability of ontology from epistemology espoused by Barad
is an attempt to move beyond this dualism that is still considered to
be an important and necessary distinction by other critical perspectives.
For instance, as Alderson (2016) explains, critical realism provides for
a clear distinction between ontology (factual being) and epistemology
(our perceptual knowledge of being) and hence would clearly distin-
guish between ‘children’ as physical and social beings and ‘childhood’
which would refer to our theories for what children are.
11. See also Tuana’s (2008: 191) similar formulation about “the porosity of
entities”.
12. For a childhood studies’ example, see Malone (2016) who shows

how child and dog are ontologically-speaking constituted out of their
mutual encounters with one another.
13. The so-called “TRNC” was unilaterally declared a state in 1983 but is
not recognized as such by any country with the exception of Turkey.
150
S. Spyrou
14. See also Esser (2017) on how different forms of agency spring from the
different enactments of children’s bodies and food.
15. See the chapters by Balagopalan, Cordero, and Kraftl & Horton in
Spyrou et al. (forthcoming-a).
References
Abebe, T., & Kjørholt, A. T. (2009). Social actors and victims of exploita-
tion: Working children in the cash economy of Ethiopia’s south. Childhood,
16(2), 175–194.
Aitken, S. C., Swanson, K., & Kennedy, E. (2014). Independent child
migrants: Navigating relational borderlands. In S. Spyrou & M. Christou
(Eds.), Children and Borders (pp. 214–242). Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Alaimo, S., & Hekman, S. (2008). Introduction: Emerging models of materi-
ality in feminist theory. In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material femi-
nisms (pp. 1–19). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Alaimo, S., & Hekman, S. (Eds.). (2008). Material feminisms. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Alderson, P. (2016). Critical realism and research design and analysis in
geographies of children and young people. In R. Evans & L. Holt (Eds.),
Methodological approaches. Geographies of children and young people (Vol. 2).
Singapore: Springer Reference.
Ansell, N. (2009). Childhood and the politics of scale: Descaling children’s
geographies? Progress in Human Geography, 33(2), 190–209.
Balagopalan, S. (forthcoming). Childhood, culture, history: Re-thinking ‘mul-
tiple childhoods’. In S. Spyrou, R. Rosen, & D. Cook (Eds.), Reimagining
childhood studies. London: Bloomsbury.
Barad, K. (2008). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of
how matter comes to matter. In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material
feminisms (pp. 120–154). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Beauvais, C. (forthcoming). Thinking the adult-child relationship with existen-
tialism. In S. Spyrou, R. Rosen, & D. Cook (Eds.), Reimagining childhood
studies. London: Bloomsbury.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC:
151

Bordonaro, L., & Payne, R. (2012). Ambiguous agency: Critical perspec-
tives on social interventions with children and youth in Africa. Children’s
Geographies, 10(4), 365–372.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Christou, M., & Spyrou, S. (2012). Border encounters: How children navi-
gate space and otherness in an ethnically-divided society. Childhood, 19(3),
302–316.
Christou, M., & Spyrou, S. (2014). What is a border? Greek Cypriot and
Turkish Cypriot children’s understanding of a contested territorial division.
In S. Spyrou & M. Christou (Eds.), Children and Borders (pp. 131–148).
Christou, M., & Spyrou, S. (2016). The hyphen in between: Children’s inter-
sectional understandings of national identities. Children’s Geographies, 15(1),
51–64.
Coffey, J., & Farrugia, D. (2014). Unpacking the black box: The problem of
agency in the sociology of youth. Journal of Youth Studies, 17(4), 461–474.
Colebrook, C. (2002). Understanding Deleuze. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen &
Unwin.
Cook, D. (2011). Editorial: A ghostly presence. Childhood, 18(1), 3–6.
Cook, D. (forthcoming). Panaceas of play: Stepping past the creative child.
In S. Spyrou, R. Rosen, & D. Cook (Eds.), Reimagining childhood studies.
London: Bloomsbury.
Coole, D., & Frost, S. (Eds.). (2010a). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and
politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
Coole, D., & Frost, S. (2010b). Introducing the new materialisms. In
D. Coole & S. Frost (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics
(pp. 1–43). Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Cordero Arce, M. (forthcoming). Who is (to be) the subject of children’s
rights? In S. Spyrou, R. Rosen, & D. Cook (Eds.), Reimagining childhood
studies. London: Bloomsbury.
Delanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social
complexity. London and New York: Continuum.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schiz-
ophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (2012). New materialism: Interviews and car-
tographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press.
152
S. Spyrou
Escobar, A. (2007). The ‘ontological turn’ in social theory. A Commentary

on ‘Human geography without scale’, by Sallie Marston, John Paul Jones
II and Keith Woodward. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers,
32(1), 106–111.
Esser, F. (2016). Neither “thick” nor “thin”: Reconceptualizing agency and
childhood relationally. In F. Esser, M. S. Baader, T. Betz, & B. Hungerland
(Eds.), Reconceptualizing agency and childhood: New perspectives in childhood
studies (pp. 48–60). New York, NY: Routledge.
Esser, F. (2017). Enacting the overweight body in residential child care: Eating
and agency beyond the nature-culture divide. Childhood, 24(3), 286–299.
Esser, F., Baader, M. S., Betz, T., & Hungerland, B. (Eds.). (2016).
Reconceptualizing agency and childhood. In F. Esser, M. S. Baader, T. Betz,
& B. Hungerland (Eds.), Reconceptualizing agency and childhood: New per-
spectives in childhood studies (pp. 1–16). New York, NY: Routledge.
Fox, N. J., & Alldred, P. (2015). New materialist social inquiry: Designs,
methods and the research-assemblage. International Journal of Social
Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and
contradiction in social analysis. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gottlieb, A. (2000). Where have all the babies gone? Toward an anthropology
of infants (and their caretakers). Anthropological Quarterly, 73(3), 121–132.
Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature.
London: Free Association Books.
Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_witness@second_millennium.femaleman_meets_
oncomouse: Feminism and technoscience. New York: Routledge.
Hird, M. J. (2009). Feminist engagements with matter. Feminist Studies, 35(2),
329–346.
23(5), 525–542.
153
James, A. (2009). Agency. In J. Qvortrup, W. Corsaro, & M.-S. Honig (Eds.),

The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies (pp. 34–45). London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
James, A. (2010). Competition or integration? The next step in childhood
studies? Childhood, 17(4), 485–499.
James, A., & James, A. (2008). Key concepts in childhood studies. Los Angeles,
London, New Delhi, and Singapore: Sage.
Falmer Press.
James, A., & Prout, A. (1990b). Introduction. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.),
ical study of childhood (pp. 1–6). Basingstoke: Falmer Press.
James, A., & Prout, A. (1990c). A new paradigm for the sociology of child-
ical study of childhood (pp. 7–34). Basingstoke: Falmer Press.
King, M. (2007). The sociology of childhood as scientific communication:
Observations from a social systems perspective. Childhood, 14(2), 193–213.
Klocker, N. (2007). An example of thin agency: Child domestic workers in
Tanzania. In R. Panelli, S. Punch, & E. Robson (Eds.), Global perspectives on
rural childhood and youth: Young rural lives (pp. 81–148). London: Routledge.
Kraftl, P. (2013). Beyond ‘voice’, beyond ‘agency’, beyond ‘politics’? Hybrid
childhoods and some critical reflections on children’s emotional geogra-
phies. Emotion, Space and Society, 9, 13–23.
Kraftl, P., & Horton, J. (forthcoming). Children’s geographies and the ‘new
wave’ of childhood studies. In S. Spyrou, R. Rosen, & D. Cook (Eds.),
Lancy, D. F. (2012). Unmasking children’s agency. SSWA Faculty Publications.
Paper 277. http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/sswa_facpubs/277.
Latour, B. (1988). The pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network the-
ory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
458–481.
Lee, N. (2000). Faith in the body? Childhood, subjecthood and sociological
enquiry. In A. Prout (Ed.), The body, childhood and society (pp. 149–171).
154
S. Spyrou

Lee, N. (2008). Awake, asleep, adult, child: An a-humanist account of persons.
Body and Society, 14(4), 57–74.
Lenz-Taguchi, H. (2011). Investigating learning, participation and becoming
in early childhood practices with a relational materialist approach. Global
Studies of Childhood, 1(1), 36–50.
Leonard, M. (2016). The sociology of children, childhood and generation.
London: Sage.
Livesey, G. (2010). Assemblage. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary (Rev.
ed., pp. 18–19). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Malone, K. (2016). Theorizing a child–dog encounter in the slums of La Paz
using post-humanistic approaches in order to disrupt universalisms in cur-
rent ‘child in nature’ debates. Children’s Geographies, 14(4), 390–407.
Marston, S. A., Woodward, K., & Jones, J. P. (2007). Flattening ontologies of
globalization: The Nollywood case. Globalizations, 4(1), 45–63.
Mitchell, K., & Elwood, S. (2012). Mapping children’s politics: The promise
of articulation and the limits of nonrepresentational theory. Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space, 30, 788–804.
Mizen, P., & Ofosu-Kusi, Y. (2013). Agency as vulnerability: Accounting for
children’s movement to the streets of Accra. The Sociological Review, 61,
363–382.
Oswell, D. (2016). Re-aligning children’s agency and re-socialing children
in childhood studies. In F. Esser, M. S. Baader, T. Betz, & B. Hungerland
Payne, R. (2012). Extraordinary survivors’ or ‘ordinary lives’? Embracing
‘everyday agency’ in social interventions with child-headed households in
Zambia. Children’s Geographies, 10(4), 399–411.
Prout, A. (2000). Childhood bodies: Construction, agency and hybridity. In
A. Prout (Ed.), The body, childhood and society (pp. 1–18). Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
155

Raithelhuber, E. (2016). Extending agency: The merit of relational approaches
for Childhood Studies. In F. Esser, M. S. Baader, T. Betz, & B. Hungerland
Rautio, P. (2013). Children who carry stones in their pockets: On autotelic
material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies, 11(4), 394–408.
Rautio, P. (2014). Mingling and imitating in producing spaces for know-
ing and being: Insights from a Finnish study of child-matter intra-action.
Childhood, 21(4), 461–474.
Ridge, T. (2006). Childhood poverty: A barrier to social participation. In E.
Tisdall, J. Davis, M. Hill, & A. Prout (Eds.), Children, young people and
social participation: Participation for what? (pp. 23–28). Bristol: Policy Press.
Rosen, D., & Bluebond-Langner, M. (2009, December 2–6). The agency of
children: Political and ethical dimensions of the new childhood. Paper pre-
sented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.
Ryan, P. J. (2008). How new is the “new” social study of childhood? The myth
of paradigm shift. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXXVIII(4), 533–576.
Sánchez-Eppler, K. (forthcoming). Geographies of play: Scales of imagina-
tion in the study of child-made things. In S. Spyrou, R. Rosen, & D. Cook
(Eds.), Reimagining childhood studies. London: Bloomsbury.
Seymour, C. (2012). Ambiguous agencies: Coping and survival in eastern
Democratic Republic of Congo. Children’s Geographies, 10(4), 373–384.
Spyrou, S. (2000). Education, ideology, and the national self: The social practice
of identity construction in the classroom. The Cyprus Review, 12(1), 61–81.
Spyrou, S. (2006). Constructing ‘the Turk’ as an enemy: The complexity of ste-
reotypes in children’s everyday worlds. South European Society and Politics,
11(1), 95–110.
Spyrou, S., Rosen, R., & Cook, D. (Eds.). (forthcoming-a). Reimagining child-
hood studies. London: Bloomsbury.
Spyrou, S., Rosen, R., & Cook, D. (forthcoming-b). Reimagining childhood
studies: Connectivities relationalities linkages. In S. Spyrou, R. Rosen, & D.
Cook (Eds.), Reimagining childhood studies. London: Bloomsbury.
Strathern, M. (2004). Partial connections (Updated edition). Walnut Creek:
Altamira Press.
Taylor, A. (2011). Reconceptualising the nature of childhood. Childhood,
18(4), 420–433.
156
S. Spyrou
Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. London: Routledge.

Tuana, N. (2008). Viscous porosity: Witnessing Katrina. In S. Alaimo & S.
Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 188–213). Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Turmel, A. (2008). A historical sociology of childhood: Developmental thinking,
categorization and graphic visualization. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Valentine, K. (2011). Accounting for agency. Children and Society, 25(5),
347–358.
Watson, K., Millei, Z., & Petersen, E. B. (2015). ‘Special’ non-human actors
in the ‘inclusive’ early childhood classroom: The wrist-band, the lock and
the scooter board. Global Studies of Childhood, 5(3), 266–278.
Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labour: How working class kids get working class
jobs (Morningside edition). New York: Columbia University Press.
Wyness, M. (2006). Childhood and society: An introduction to the sociology of
childhood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
6
Children’s Participation in Research
as a Knowledge Practice
Introduction
Since the emergence of the ‘new social studies of childhood’, and espe-
cially following the establishment of the United Nations Convention
on the Rights of the Child in 1989, children’s participation in research
has become one of the favored ways childhood studies scholars seek to
ensure that children’s rights are respected and safeguarded in research
practice, children’s perspectives are acknowledged, integrated and made
visible through research, and knowledge about children and childhood
is produced more democratically (see Percy-Smith and Thomas 2010;
Tisdall et al. 2014). Children’s participation in research has clearly cap-
tured the imagination of childhood researchers but a critical engage-
ment with participation as a knowledge practice has not gone in parallel
with its widespread adoption and use, though as I show later on there
have been a number of initiatives towards this direction in recent years.
As Thomas (2007: 199) explains, the term ‘participation’ may refer to
taking part in an activity or in decision-making, it may refer to an out-
come but it can also refer to a process, and it can refer to either indi-
vidual or collective decision-making. Discussions about what children’s

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47904-4_6
158
S. Spyrou
participation is or should be or how to go about identifying it are ongo-

ing in childhood studies. But despite efforts to define and make sense of
children’s participation, in practice the term lacks precision and is often
used loosely to refer to many different types and degrees of involvement
(Cahill 2007: 298–299; see also Lansdown 2010: 11). One key and
increasingly problematized dimension of this difficulty is how broadly
or narrowly to define children’s participation in general (and not just in
research). Wyness, for instance, critiques the dominant Western frame of
the individual participating child which clearly does not apply universally
and especially in contexts of the Global South where children participate
more collectively in the social and economic life of their families and
communities as compared to the more affluent West (2015: 86). Wyness
asks that we move beyond the dichotomy between discursive (voiced-
based) forms of participation which are prevalent in the North and the
more material forms of participation (often characterized by child labor)
which are more prevalent in the South and to see both forms as gradients
which encompass a range of possibilities (2015: 89–90, 92). For Wyness,
it is important to move beyond claims to seeing the former as authentic,
natural and appropriate participation and the latter as essentially deviant
(2015: 78).1 More recently, Horgan et al. (2017) have joined this critique
arguing that a move from the more performative to the more social con-
texts of participation is critical in our efforts to reduce the risk of gov-
ernance and over-responsibilization of children through participation
(Horgan et al. 2017: 285; see also Percy-Smith 2010).
The definitional complexities—what is children’s participation?—and
biases—what should children’s participation be?—also transfer to the
realm of research. Much of the work produced on children’s participa-
tion in research has clearly been outcome-based resulting in a product
which may be used to enhance scholarship and knowledge for child-
hood studies or to influence policy and inform practice. In the over-
whelming majority of cases, this outcome/product is a representation
of children’s voices, invariably a text which stands for ‘what children
think’ or ‘how children feel’ about an issue. Voiced-based participation
is largely driven by a desire to counteract the oppressive, paternalistic
and biased knowledge produced by adults about children without chil-
dren. As such, it is seen as offering a qualitatively better knowledge of
children’s worlds and perspectives.
6 Children’s Participation in Research as a Knowledge Practice
159
Much less attention has been paid to the processes through which
research knowledge is produced in children’s participatory engage-
ments. Part of the problem is that participation as a concept, often fails
to capture the particularities of children’s engagement with research and
glosses over the multiple contextually significant complexities which
shape children’s experiences of participation in practice (see Malone and
Hartung 2010: 32). A participatory discourse which does not attend
to the knowledge practices at work enacts a particular kind of knowl-
edge which fails to recognize its own situatedness and contingency even
when it professes to be critical. This general lack of engagement with
children’s participation in research as a knowledge practice extends
to a variety of other terms linked to the concept of participation also
used widely today in childhood studies (e.g., “child researcher”, “peer
researcher”, “child ethnographer” or “co-researcher”) which are seen as
challenging power inequalities between children and adults and produc-
ing higher quality research knowledge.
In this chapter, I provide a critical review of the notion of children’s
participation in research by focusing in particular on what has attracted
researchers’ and scholars’ imaginations in recent years, namely, ‘research
by children’ which promises a radically different and qualitatively bet-
ter kind of knowledge for childhood studies. I explore the purported
strengths as well as the limits and challenges of this approach to knowl-
edge production in a way that deconstructs the notion of children’s
participation in research but without rendering it obsolete. On the con-
trary, my intent is to explore its critical potential as a research tool. To
do so, I turn to the insights of Science and Technology Studies (STS)
to see how children’s participation in research entails an ontological
entanglement which yields specific forms of knowledge with consequent
political and ethical implications.
Research by Children
Children’s participation in research comes in a variety of forms.
Christensen and Prout (2002: 480–481) identify four different and
co-existing ways of seeing children and childhood in research, namely,
the child as object, the child as subject, the child as social actor and
160
S. Spyrou
the child as research participant or co-researcher. The approach that

sees children as objects considers children to be dependent, vulner-
able and incompetent who need to be protected very much by those
adults who are responsible for their welfare, be it parents, teachers, or
social workers. Therefore, it is adults who represent children in research
offering their knowledge and opinions since children are seen as inca-
pable of being subjects of research in their own right. The approach
that sees children as subjects seeks to challenge the previous one by put-
ting forth the argument that children are persons with subjectivities.
However, this approach still largely rests on the assumption that chil-
dren’s involvement in research as subjects is mainly determined by their
cognitive abilities and social competencies and therefore appropriate
(often age-specific) methodologies should be used to capture their views
and worlds. The third approach—children as social actors–like the sec-
ond one, also considers children to be persons with subjectivities, but as
social actors they also actively impact, and are impacted by, their social
and cultural worlds. Moreover, in this formulation children are not seen
as being qualitatively different from adults and so in research they are
to be treated, methodologically speaking, not unlike adults. The most
recent approach, that of children as co-researchers, sees children as
being actively involved in the research process and in the co-production
of knowledge about children and childhood.
This last approach—also referred to as ‘peer research’ or ‘child-led
research’ or ‘research by children’ (the labels currently used are many
and often used interchangeably though they do not all connote the
same thing)—is perhaps the most enticing, theoretically and meth-
odologically speaking, among existing approaches to researching chil-
dren. Its popularity has followed the establishment of the new social
studies of childhood and its attempts to promote the agentic potential
of children in research (e.g., Alderson 2001, 2004; Chin 2007; Kellett
2005a, 2010; Theis 2001; Veale 2005). As we have seen in Chapter 4,
‘research by children’ can take two different forms. In the first instance,
children participate alongside adults as co-researchers or collaborators
and make some of the decisions pertaining to a research project. They
might, for instance, be involved with data collection or data analysis or
data interpretation and in some cases they can serve as research advisors/
161
consultants. The most common form this takes is ‘peer research’ whereby
children interview other children from their peer group. For some
researchers this limited level of involvement is sufficient. Franks (2011:
18), for instance, has argued that participatory research with children
should aim at ‘pockets of participation’ where children choose to carry
out certain aspects of the research process with support while leaving the
rest to professional researchers. In contrast, those who favor the second
variety (i.e., children as primary researchers or child-led research) argue
that children should be actively involved in all stages of the research
process, that is, by being in charge of identifying research questions,
deciding on methods and collecting data, and analyzing, interpret-
ing, reporting and disseminating research findings. Child-led research
emphasizes the need for children to have decision-making power and
lead the process. But, despite proclamations about the value of this
approach, the reality is that most of children’s involvement in research as
researchers comes under the first variety and truly child-led projects are
still few and scattered.
The Case for Research by Children
The trend towards research by children reflects a broader turn in con-

temporary ethnography towards the reconfiguration of fieldwork roles
and relationships and, as such, it should be seen within this larger con-
text of rethinking the production of knowledge through research. As
Marcus (2008: 7) has argued, there has been a shift in contemporary
fieldwork from seeing “subjects as ‘counterpart’ rather than ‘other’” and
from the ‘ethnographer as an apprentice’ in need of learning about the
culture to the ‘ethnographer as collaborator’ who works together with
subjects in mutually interested ways. Additionally, research by chil-
dren should be placed within the larger popular trend of ‘standpoint
research’ which highlights the significance of incorporating the stand-
points of those researched so that a more real, truthful and valid view of
their worlds is revealed through research (see Chapter 2). More gener-
ally, research by children finds its historical precedents in feminist, eth-
nic and disability studies all of which have sought to illustrate the value
162
S. Spyrou
of an ‘insider perspective’ (Kellett 2005b) while in its child-focused

incarnation it is clearly linked to broader calls for children’s inclusion in
social life (Brownlie et al. 2006: 1). The increasing recognition of chil-
dren’s right to participate has been welcome by many childhood studies’
scholars who are today actively calling specifically for children’s right to
participate in research (e.g., Powell and Smith 2009). Article 12 of the
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is seen as providing
the legal backing for children’s right to participation though this right
is conditional and qualified in a number of ways. In sum, the emerging
popularity of research by children has taken place at this particular his-
torical juncture where social, political, and epistemological trends have
facilitated its development.
The literature which addresses ‘research by children’ is by now sig-
nificant (e.g., Davis 2009; Alderson 2001, 2004; Cheney 2011; Kellett
et al. 2004; Kellett 2005a; Jones 2004; Kirby 1999; Langhout and
Thomas 2010; Smith et al. 2002; Schafer and Yarwood 2008; Warren
2000; West 1999). As a methodological approach, it has captured the
imagination of many childhood researchers who consider it to be the
most empowering from among participatory approaches to research
and the one which respects and promotes children’s rights the most,
especially because it seeks to address squarely the power imbalances
between children and adults (Kellett et al. 2004; Schafer and Yarwood
2008: 122; Shier 2015). It is seen as a means of challenging the social
exclusion experienced by children and young people, democratizing the
research process and empowering young people to reflect on, analyze
and transform their worlds and in this way contribute to their commu-
nities (Cahill 2007: 298; see also Tisdall 2013). It is also seen as help-
ing children build up their self-confidence, knowledge, and skills and
to establish new friendships and professional connections (Hampshire
et al. 2012). As a methodological tool for knowledge production
research by children is seen as helping create “more vibrant research
agendas, new theoretical possibilities” which can “push scholarship
in new directions” (Cahill 2007: 299). When it takes a collaborative
form between children and adults it is seen as a step forward in under-
standing childhood and adulthood. Chin (2007: 269), for instance,
has argued that collaborative research between children and adults can
163
help both to “reach new understandings about their worlds.” Following

Thomas (2017: 174), it might be useful to think of ‘research by chil-
dren’ as not one thing but rather “a hybrid phenomenon, situated some-
where between academic research, community-based action research,
and education for children.”
The quality of the knowledge produced is often considered to be one
of the most significant benefits of research by children because it offers
a broadened perspective acquired as a result of children’s situated under-
standing. Though the view conveyed from such research is recognized
as being partial, its situatedness, it is argued, generates a distinct kind
of knowledge which is qualitatively better and not possible otherwise
(Smith et al. 2002: 204). When research has policy implications, the
kind of situated understanding which emerges through the involvement
of those directly affected is seen as offering distinct opportunities for
impacting policy (Kellett 2011: 216).
The higher quality of data generated through research by children
is justified in different ways. Kirby (1999: 20–21) identifies six fac-
tors which facilitate that: having the same age; speaking a common
language; knowing others; sharing common experiences; being on the
same side on issues; being able to address taboo topics. These factors
allow child researchers to offer new perspectives on childhood from an
‘insider’ perspective, from the way they observe, to the way they ask
questions and prioritize research agendas (Kellett 2010: 105; see also
Chin 2007: 272). Though it is recognized that children may have infe-
rior knowledge compared to adults with regards to many areas of life,
when it comes to childhood they are seen as having superior knowledge
(Kellett 2011: 207). Because children, as children, are themselves insid-
ers, they are thought to be experientially close to the worlds of child-
hood and hence in a better position to identify important and proper
research topics and questions and to design projects that are sensitive to
children’s real needs and concerns, the assumption being, of course, that
children are better qualified to represent themselves than adults doing it
on their behalf.
The argument about the epistemic privilege of children’s ‘insider
knowledge’ amounts to a claim for a children’s standpoint. Proponents of
standpoint theory in childhood studies, like their feminist counterparts,
164
S. Spyrou
argue that child–adult relations are largely affected by children’s subordi-

nate position in the generational order. To argue for a children’s stand-
point therefore is to suggest that children (because of their social position
in the generational order) have a shared experience of childhood; it is also
to argue that this shared experience is the outcome of the power struc-
tures in place which shape child–adult relations rendering children in
this way a minority group. Children’s experiences and perspectives are
important in this sense because they offer insights—one could say epis-
temically better knowledge and understanding—precisely because of
children’s social location. In spite of their partiality, children’s perspectives
carry therefore more weight because they could not be produced by other
knowers occupying different social locations.
Mayall has put forth a comprehensive argument in favor of a stand-
point perspective in childhood studies:
I argue that those inhabiting childhood have a particular take or view-

point on their status in relation to adult status, and that study of how
their experiences may be accounted for by society factors amounts to
arguing that a child standpoint (analogous to a women’s standpoint)
is important for contributing to a proper account of the social order.
(Mayall 2002: 8)
Though Mayall acknowledges and privileges the commonality of the

childhood experience in the generational order which she sees as ulti-
mately being more important than differences based on gender, eth-
nicity or age she is not, at the same time, discounting the diversity of
this experience; instead, she suggests that we need to also consider how
generation intersects with various other social variables and most nota-
bly gender (Mayall 2002: 136–137). Moreover, Mayall is not arguing
for one standpoint—children’s standpoint—but rather for considering
children’s standpoint alongside adults’ standpoint (Mayall 2002: 177).
Ultimately, for Mayall, developing a ‘child standpoint’ is essentially a
‘political enterprise’ (2002: 25–26): it is not important merely in order
to understand how children themselves experience and understand their
social positioning but also in order to understand how the generational
social order works and how it could be reshaped (Mayall 2002: 138).
165
It is worth noting that the popularity of research by children coin-

cidentally emerged at a time when the new social studies of childhood
offered significant literature which supported the underlying theoreti-
cal assumptions of this methodological trend. One key issue addressed
early on was the question of competence and responsibility. Are chil-
dren capable of developing the skills necessary to carry out and com-
plete research projects, the same way adults do? And, should children
be held responsible for carrying out entire research projects given that in
the adult-dominated world in which they live they often lack the power
necessary to adequately perform such a role?
Despite the existence of strong social discourses which position chil-
dren as largely incompetent, strong arguments by childhood studies’
scholars have pushed for the recognition of children’s competence and
abilities. The developmental paradigm which links age with ability has
been challenged from both within psychology (e.g., Woodhead and
Faulkner 2000) and from outside (e.g., James and Prout 1990a) with
experience granted more significance than age. To the extent that chil-
dren’s development seems to provide limitations, childhood studies’
scholars have urged researchers to use child-centered and child-sensitive
methodological approaches. Clark and Moss (2001), for example, have
shown that with the right use of diverse methods (e.g., the use of cam-
eras) even preschoolers are capable of exploring and researching their
own worlds by collecting relevant data. Nevertheless, the question of
age and competence still remains an open question for it is one thing to
refer to children who do research at the age of 9 or 10 and another to
refer to those at the age of 15 or 16 (see Thomas 2017).
But can children’s involvement in research as researchers result in
acceptable, good, and valid research? Do we expect that children will
conform to established research rules and procedures and end up
producing the same kind of research produced by adults? According
to Kellett (2011: 207–208), children are fully capable of producing
proper and valid research provided they are supported by adults in
developing the necessary skills (see also Fraser et al. 2004).Training
children in research methods also attempts to address the power dif-
ferences reflected in the degree of skill possessed by adults and children
which may exacerbate the extent of control of the latter by the former.
166
S. Spyrou
Cahill (2007: 301) argues that unless we do this there is the risk of
adult control over children. Others (e.g., Kirby 1999: 106; see also
Brownlie et al. 2006: 22; Kellett 2005b) argue that though provid-
ing proper training to children in research methods is important, it is
also crucial to provide them with the necessary support so that they
can perform their role as researchers as well as possible. There might
be tasks, for instance, that children lack the skill, confidence, interest
or time to perform such as coding and analysis or report writing which
adults can carry out on their behalf. Nevertheless, adults are advised
to be cautious when ‘interfering’ to avoid hijacking the process and
undermining the child’s perspective and ownership of the research
(Kellett 2005b).
The challenge, as proponents of this approach often argue, is to offer
children an opportunity to become active knowledge producers by over-
coming adultist assumptions and biases about children’s participation in
research. Chin (2007: 274) challenges our presuppositions about proper
and valid research and invites us to think critically about research by
children and its relation to mainstream adult-produced research: “Our
dominant research models give highest value to research designed pri-
marily to perpetuate the academy and the hierarchies of knowledge and
position that sustain it.” For Chin, to the extent that research by chil-
dren does not conform to the established rules of the game, that is with
the rules for producing proper research, it runs the risk of being dele-
gitimated: “The problem is in thinking about what counts in research;
what is important, good, useful, and worthwhile. If we value only what
adults do, and define the worthwhile as being fundamentally adult, we
have created a field of value from which children are barred by defini-
tion” (Chin 2007: 281).
As Schafer and Yarwood (2008: 123) argue, the conservatism which
characterizes much research carried out on young people’s lives by
adults limits children’s ability to find different ways for getting across
what they think. Indeed, if the goal of research is not exhausted by the
need for validity, reliability, rigor and so on, but also encompasses the
need for participation, political engagement and social change, then
one can envision a place for research produced by children in the larger
world of research. This is of course a larger epistemological question
167
whose answer depends on one’s understanding of the reasons behind

children’s and young people’s involvement in research. Kirby (1999: 7)
outlines three such reasons. Firstly, because such research can yield
better quality data. Secondly, because it is participatory and as such it
involves children and young people in the research process as active cit-
izens. And thirdly, because it results in children’s and young people’s
personal development. If one’s primary motivation is better research,
then acquiring the proper skills to carry out research is crucial as is the
validity and reliability of the research carried out. In contrast if one sees
children’s involvement in research as means for advancing children’s par-
ticipation and personal development, then rigour and skill are second-
ary (see Brownlie et al. 2006: 62).
The Limits of Research by Children
The discourse surrounding research by children may be noble but it

raises a number of important questions that require a critical look at
all the parameters implicated in this kind of enterprise (see Porter et al.
2012: 131). In the face of the social world’s unpredictability, partic-
ipation often fails to deliver its promised guarantees (Gallacher and
Gallagher 2008: 513). Moving away from celebratory assertions about
the value of children’s participation in research, scholars are beginning
to challenge the unquestioned utility of this approach. Freeman and
Mathison (2009: 165), for example, argue that involving children in the
design of studies does not by itself make the research more valid, nor,
similarly, does including children in adult-designed studies make such
studies less valid (see also Smith et al. 2002: 194; McCarry 2012).
Such critiques are not new to childhood studies though they are
becoming more common today as a result of the widespread adoption
of participatory research methods. Tisdall (2013: 184) has identified
a number of challenges to participation which include among others
tokenism, lack of feedback to children, exclusions of certain groups of
children and over-consultation of others, a tendency to consult but not
engage in dialogue with children and lack of sustainability of participa-
tory initiatives (see also Warming 2011).
168
S. Spyrou
More generally, and despite its benefits, as Hampshire et al. (2012:

223) have suggested, children’s participation in research may involve
costs for them. For instance, commitment to research might conflict
with children’s commitment to school, domestic work or paid employ-
ment. Moreover, it should be remembered that the values of participatory
approaches are not universally shared. Children’s participation needs to
be placed within a social and cultural context which may act as an obsta-
cle to hearing children and taking into account their views; when cul-
tural values such as respect and obedience (by children towards adults),
prevent adults from seeing children as being able to contribute to their
communities but rather as in need of protection, it becomes very difficult
to engage productively with children in participatory projects (Twum-
Danson 2009: 380; see also Porter et al. 2010; Cheney 2011: 168).
A whole host of other concerns have also been raised specifically in
relation to research by children. As James (2007) has rightly pointed
out, the fact that it is children who carry out the research does not do
away with the problem of representation. Given that as a group chil-
dren are very diverse (e.g., in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, class and
age to name a few social factors), it is necessary to ask which children’s
voices get heard in research and whose are left out? Which voices do
children-researchers end up representing through their research? Is it,
for example, the voices of the children who tend to be academically
good and able to fit within a particular model of research which uses
conventional methods (see Schafer and Yarwood 2008: 124)? Whether
it is adults or children who decide which children will become research-
ers, the question of who is left out is an important one to consider given
that particular groups of children might be muted and marginalized
during this process (Dockett et al. 2009: 289). Though participation
tends to be seen as fundamentally inclusive and empowering it should
be remembered that it can also become exclusionary and disempow-
ering (Schafer and Yarwood 2008; Matthews 2001). The assumption
about the qualitatively superior status of insider knowledge produced by
children as insiders needs to be critically assessed for its claims of rep-
resentativeness since it may fail to capture the heterogeneity of ‘insider
knowledge’ represented by the diversity of experiences that children
have (see Cahill 2007: 308–309; see also Todd 2012: 191; Hill 2006).
169
The question of power is also critical in this discussion. Children are

not exempt from power differences that are ascribed to different groups
of children (based on class, age, linguistic skill, physical ability or pop-
ularity) and which are likely to shape the research encounter (Kellett
2010: 91–92). Though involving young people in research as research-
ers can challenge inequalities it can also reproduce them and exclude
groups of them if such efforts fail to take into consideration the larger
research context as well as young people’s needs and interests; in that
sense, involving young people in research as researchers should not be
presented as a new research paradigm which can address marginalization
and exclusion (Schafer and Yarwood 2008: 132).
Indeed, the power relationships which unfold during research
encounters can be quite complex. For instance, power does not neces-
sarily flow from the child researcher to the researched child but it can,
at times, be reversed as when child-researchers are despised or ridiculed
by other children who might detest the ‘privileges’ granted to the for-
mer (Kellett 2011: 211). Likewise, age is only one variable which might
prove to be more or less important in a research encounter. Adults and
children may establish other commonalities which bring them closer
together, the same way that differences such as race or class can increase
the power imbalances among children of the same age (see Brownlie et
al. 2006: 26).
Alderson (2001: 140) also points out that one of the risks of peer
research is that the young researchers could overidentify with their
research subjects and take for granted certain aspects of the situa-
tion investigated, a problem of course, that is not limited to research
by children but rather to all ‘insider’ research. Similarly, though chil-
dren might be able to connect better with their peers, it is also possi-
ble that the reverse might take place when questions of confidentiality
arise. This might be the case, for instance, when some children feel
more reserved and cautious when sharing personal information with
their peers (as opposed to adults) if they cannot trust that the child-
researchers will keep information confidential (Smith et al. 2002: 201),
a problem which might be further highlighted in relation to confi-
dentiality and anonymity when children are engaged in data analysis,
not just of their own personal data but also data pertaining to others
170
S. Spyrou
(Holland et al. 2010: 372). Likewise, one could argue that not all chil-
dren’s ideas and suggestions may be appropriate and though this brings
up the larger issue of representation and adult control, it also sensitizes
us to the fact that adults may, and are likely to, intervene and exercise
their gatekeeping powers when what children put forth is problematic
(e.g., goes contrary to established values about justice, equality, fairness,
etc. (see McCarry 2012: 62).
But even the more fundamental question about children’s skill
and competence cannot be easily resolved by assuming that chil-
dren are indeed competent and fully capable in carrying out research.
Competence might depend on a number of factors apart from ability
which children may have little control over (e.g., time, resources, oppor-
tunities, etc.). If children are limited in this sense, then should they be
expected to conform to adult-developed and -centered approaches to
research? What if children cannot meet the rigorous demands of high
quality research expected by the research community? Dyson and
Meagher (2001: 65 as quoted in Brownlie et al. 2006: 13–14) argue
that the more fully children are involved with research, the more likely
they are to fail to meet the expected quality standards; as a result most
children might end up being disempowered through the process with
only few of them meeting the expected outcomes.
As we have seen in the previous section, an important question to
consider is what kinds of expectations would be reasonable to have of
child researchers and whether the knowledge they end up producing
could be acceptable and useful or simply not up to par. If, for instance,
child researchers are not judged by the same standards as adult research-
ers then does the knowledge they produce count as much as the knowl-
edge produced by adult researchers? To treat the two as the same might
question the value and utility of the need for developing skills, pursu-
ing research training, obtaining university degrees which attest to one’s
competence in research and so on. Hammersley challenges the argu-
ment pertaining to children’s competence and questions whether child-
led research is a research method to start with given that social research
requires the possession of specific skills and expertise which take time
to acquire and which very few adults and even fewer children possess
(Hammersley 2016: 10–11; see also Ergler 2017: 247).
171
Inadvertently, research by children has helped raise the question

as to whether adult-approved ways of doing research (e.g., scientif-
ically validated research approaches) are the only ways for carrying
out research? Could children-researchers, for example, use approaches
which move beyond established research paradigms and ways of think-
ing (Hampshire et al. 2012: 229–230)? Could research produced by
children realistically aspire to meet the standards set by adults in the
research world at large or should there be new ways of conceptualizing
research scholarship that liberate it from its current adultist forms?
Kellett (2005b) succinctly presents the larger epistemological prob-
lematic of research by children:
One of the great imponderables is whether child-led research can con-

tinue to grow within existing adult research parameters or whether we
need to begin to consider a new paradigm to accommodate it. What is
clear is that research by children is fundamentally different from adult
research about children and we cannot use the same norms of reference
nor the same terms of measurement and assessment. The time to begin
that deliberation process is now before we are overtaken by a wave of
child-led research which we are ill-prepared for and have not properly
considered how to receive it, measure it or value it.
Though Kellett does not provide specific suggestions on how to han-

dle this problematic, the issue she raises concerns control and power in
knowledge production. Indeed, one of the key concerns which often
surfaces in critical discussions concerning research by children and
child-led research in particular is the extent to which children have con-
trol over the participatory process. Are children, for instance, involved
in all stages of the research process (e.g., selection of the topic, research
design, data collection and analysis, interpretation and publication,
etc.), in only a few or just one? Except in those rare cases when chil-
dren have control of the entire research process from the identification
of research topics to the dissemination and publication of research find-
ings, adults remain central to the production of knowledge by children,
filtering to a greater or lesser extent how children and their lives are rep-
resented to the rest of the world. If research is initiated by adults rather
172
S. Spyrou
than children one could argue that it is more likely to represent adult
interests and agendas and more likely to be sanitized and managed in
such a way as to conform to adults’ worldviews and agendas.
In her review of critiques related to children’s participation, Raby
(2014) identifies a number of strong claims which suggest that chil-
dren’s participation in decision-making seeks to cultivate in them a
sense of western individualism, autonomy and self-governance so as
to ultimately ensure their complicity to neo-liberal capitalism (see also
Gallacher and Gallagher 2008). Some scholars have actually equated the
notion of participation in research with a new form of tyranny, a means
of control and domination as well as exclusion and marginalization
(Schafer and Yarwood 2008: 122; Cooke and Kothari 2001). Is adults’
desire for children’s participation in research a new means for colonizing
childhood by socializing children through research? Coppock (2011:
444) asks?
This problem extents to data ownership and control. Who owns the
data collected through participatory research or when using children-
researchers? Is it the adults who are ultimately in control of a project,
the children who help produce the data or both? How much room do
children have to review or edit data, compared to adults (Dockett et al.
2009: 293)? Are children involved in writing up and disseminating
research findings? As Kirby (1999: 107–108) points out, young people
are often excluded from authorship even when they themselves pro-
duced all or most of the research. This highlights further the problem of
representation I raised earlier which persists even when power relation-
ships between children and adults shift.
Scholars have argued for the need to involve children in data inter-
pretation and not simply in data collection as a way to address some of
these challenges. Cheney (2011: 174), for instance, suggests that young
researchers may help adult researchers resolve issues of representation
(e.g., by providing their own insights about the representativeness of
the views expressed by children who participated in a study). Similarly,
Dockett et al. (2009: 291) invoke the value of authenticity in children’s
interpretations through research of other children’s perspectives. This
argument assumes that children’s perspectives are by their very nature
(i.e., because they are invoked by insiders) more authentic than the
173
perspectives of outsiders (i.e., adults). While they are right in claiming

that including children’s perspectives during the data interpretation
phase avoids the danger of having a single–that of the adult researcher–
perspective reflected (Dockett et al. 2009: 290), the crucial point
remains that all perspectives and knowledges produced by subjects are
partial and limited (see Haraway 1988). Moreover, there is no guarantee
that children’s views and interpretations will be in line with the ideolog-
ical agendas of adults (e.g., with the emancipatory child rights’ agenda)
in which case adults would have to decide what such a position entails:
“are they to be viewed as unenlightened or as oppressed?”, Browlie et al.
(2006: 25) ask.
There is an often unproblematized assumption that when children are
themselves researchers or ethnographers, they necessarily and automat-
ically work towards representing children’s perspectives. A related, and
equally unproblematized assumption is that children are better suited to
capture children’s perspectives as a result of their insider status. As we
have seen earlier, both these assumptions are based on the belief that
there is a children’s standpoint while largely discounting intra-childhood
differences, whether these have to do with power or viewpoint. Kellett
(2010: 91–92) reminds us, that children’s relationships with their peers
are not exempt from power differences which stem from factors other
than age such as class, gender, ability, or personal reputation. And as
Haraway (1988: 576) argues “No insider’s perspective is privileged,
because all drawings of inside-outside boundaries in knowledge are the-
orized as power moves, not moves toward truth”. Nor, can we assume
that peer research is qualitatively better because it is done by children
rather than adults; again as Haraway (1988: 583) reminds us, “The
standpoints of the subjugated are not ‘innocent’ positions.” Similarly,
and precisely because of the social diversity which exists in childhood,
we cannot assume a single children’s perspective or viewpoint. The ques-
tion about who is representing who persists irrespective of who is doing
the research, an adult researcher or a child researcher.
Standpoint theories have come in the last few decades under a more
general attack by feminists who have argued that the diversity of wom-
en’s experiences—based on race, ethnicity and class for instance—
could not be discounted in favor of a unifying experience of life
174
S. Spyrou
(and patriarchal oppression in particular) by all women. Childhood

studies’ scholars have put forth similar critiques challenging the puta-
tive uniformity of the childhood experience and arguing for the need
to account for the diverse experiences children have based on their eth-
nic, racial, gender and class identities. James, Jenks and Prout have crit-
icized this approach—termed ‘the minority group child’—for imposing
a ‘politicized uniformity that defies the differences within’ and essen-
tially transforming ‘the universal child’ to a minority group (1998:
31). Lee (1998: 473), likewise, warns against the position that a chil-
dren’s point of view is preferable to an adultist one, arguing that this
may take us back to a notion of ‘unmediated self-presence’ which has
impacted in many ways the scholarship of the new sociology of child-
hood (e.g., through the development and use of methodologies that
allow for children’s self-presentations which are seen as ethically better).
Though Lee is careful to acknowledge the qualifying remarks of James
and Prout (1990b) who shy away from claims to authenticity, he argues
that “without an anchor of authentic self-presence, there are no grounds
to characterize research as embodying a child’s perspective” (Lee 1998:
473); this de-centering of the subject necessarily renders all ethical posi-
tions unstable and incomplete: “Since agency is not a property, there
is no ‘authentic’ place from which to speak of oneself or at which to
achieve ethical adequacy when speaking on behalf of others” (Lee 1998:
474).2 Even those who do not dismiss the potential of a ‘children’s
standpoint’, point out that “a closer empirical examination appears
necessary about the existence of a children’s ‘shared’ vantage point and
whether their research is significantly different from, and in what ways,
that conducted on them by adults” (Kim 2016: 234).
Towards the Co-production of Knowledge

In recent years, there have been calls to adopt more relational
approaches to children’s participation, to recognize the role of both
children and adults in the process and to acknowledge that the knowl-
edge produced is the outcome of interaction and exchange, collabo-
ration and negotiation. Wyness (2012), for example, is highly critical
175
about the absence of adults from discussions on children’s participa-

tion and asks that we rethink children’s participation in the context of
intergenerational dialogue, to acknowledge the interdependence which
exists between children and adults and to be critical about the tendency
for adults to recede in the background which was largely precipitated
by a desire to find the child’s authentic voice unmediated by adult
intervention.
This call for paying greater attention to mutuality, relationality and
interconnectedness in participatory contexts involving children and
adults (Graham and Fitzgerald 2010: 356; see also Nolas 2011) also
highlights the need to move beyond claims to children’s self-sufficiency
in research and to acknowledge that children may be able to inform
with special insights and knowledge certain aspects of the research pro-
cess such as data collection and interpretation but less so other aspects
such as research methodology or data analysis (McCarry 2012: 65; see
also Ergler 2017: 247).
Cheney (2011: 173) discusses how in her own work she found the
need to be flexible in her collaboration with youth researchers in terms
of the roles and tasks undertaken in a way that reflected the young peo-
ple’s diverse talents, interests, levels of competence, and circumstances:
some youth RAs [Research Assistants] just showed more propensity for
doing fieldwork; some did good fieldwork but did not keep detailed field
notes. In those instances, it was helpful to work with the youths’ individ-
ual talents. Malik, a musician, was quite taken with the digital recorders,
but he didn’t feel adept at writing, especially in English, so I encouraged
him to record his field notes orally and had them transcribed. James was
also very taken with the video camera, so I had him work with the camera
more extensively. Some had family issues or illnesses that prevented them
from conducting research as often as promised.
Since both children and adults might come equipped with differ-
ent skills and abilities, it might be more fruitful to consider what each
brings to the collaboration rather than attempt to create an unrealis-
tic kind of equality. These kinds of emerging child–adult collabora-
tions may be guided more by what Christensen and Prout (2002) have
176
S. Spyrou
termed ‘ethical symmetry’ based on an ongoing dialogue between adult

researchers and children:
The researcher working with ethical symmetry has equality as his or her
starting point and has, therefore, to consider their actions, responsibili-
ties, use of appropriate methods and ways of communication throughout
the research process. Asymmetries as well as symmetries will no longer be
held as necessarily stable between different contexts and situations. The
premise, rather, is that ethical practice is tied to the active construction of
research relationships and cannot be based in presupposed ideas or stere-
otypes about children or childhood. (Christensen and Prout 2002: 484)
The challenge of collaborative research work between children and

adults is to create the space that allows for knowledge production that
is different (see Cheney, forthcoming) and offers new ways of thinking
about the world and our place in it as interdependent beings in inter-
generational relations that matter. Thus, children might be able to pro-
vide their unique perspectives and insider knowledge of a context or
situation while adults might be able to provide more of their techni-
cal research expertise such as, for example, interview analysis (see Smith
et al. 2002: 198). Of course, there is always the danger that adults will
take over and end up controlling or even exploiting children when there
are significant power disparities in relation to knowledge.
Nevertheless, what needs to be recognized in these debates is both the
value of children’s role and contribution to research as well as the situat-
edness of their positioning and the partiality of the knowledge they pro-
duce. Thus, the more recent concern, as indicated by Porter, Townsend
and Hampshire, is not so much with how the knowledge produced by
children is superior to that produced by adults but “more with how
to best understand the different knowledges that emerge from diverse
actors within different generations and so ensure that maximum ben-
efits accrue to the children and young people with and for whom the
research is conducted” (2012: 132). Avoiding the temptation to valorize
children’s views and perspectives as being more ‘real’, ‘true’ or ‘authentic’
than those of adults and recognizing that both adults and children can
offer different insights (Hampshire et al. 2012: 230) which are valuable
177
goes a long way towards becoming aware that knowledge is always par-
tial and limited but not invalid because of this.
This highlights “the importance of getting the balance right between
supporting and managing children’s research” (Kellett 2011: 210): it
is about enabling rather than influencing, sustaining rather than lim-
iting, supporting rather than judging, helping rather than controlling,
and empowering rather than hijacking (Kellett 2011: 211). The ques-
tion of power and control is an ongoing concern for those who engage
in participatory research work with children; though there might be
obvious ways in which adults end up controlling children in research,
it is important to pay attention to the subtle ways through which power
shapes relationships between adults and children. By critically reflect-
ing on the very process of child–adult collaborative research–that is,
on how relationships between adults and children develop in research–
researchers can begin to engage more productively with the very task of
collaboration when power differences can very easily and quickly turn
hegemonic.
Attending to the dynamics of participatory research initiatives with
children offers an opportunity to critically assess knowledge production
as a practice. As Chin, has argued “it is often the process itself that pro-
duces the most interesting and useful knowledge, rather than the prod-
uct (data sets) being the most valuable outcome” (2007: 279).
Children’s Participation in Research as a

Knowledge Practice
In my discussion so far, I have mainly assumed children’s participation
in research as being outcome-based—the outcome, more often than
not, being in the form of children’s voices, perspectives or standpoints
(though of course these might take a variety of forms including visual
ones such as pictures, drawings and so on). I have tried to problematize
the assumptions and arguments in favor of research by children, not to
dismiss it as a tool for knowledge production but rather to situate it in
a critical context which recognizes its limits. In this section, I extend
178
S. Spyrou
this argument suggesting that a more explicit focus on the dynamics of

knowledge production as practice may contribute towards a more crit-
ical understanding of children’s participation in research. Work from
STS has done much to problematize the scientific production of knowl-
edge though this literature has only tangentially influenced work in
childhood studies. I turn to some of the STS insights to illustrate their
potential for elaborating a more critical understanding of children’s par-
ticipation in research.
Drawing on the pioneering work of Latour and Woolgar (1986),
Law argues that particular realities and forms of knowledge are enacted
through scientific practices with the use of inscription devices or appa-
ratuses which transform material substances from a non-trace-like form
to a trace-like form and ultimately into authoritative texts. The key term
here is enactment. As Woolgar explains, “Enactment is a general term
for all those processes variously described as constituting, construct-
ing, creating, or performing, so that ontological enactment brings into
being the nature and existence of relevant objects, and entities” (2012:
38–39). Objects and entities come into being out of this ontological
enactment which is rooted in the knowledge practices which take place
at particular sites; they do not preexist their entanglement.3
In her study of atherosclerosis in a Danish hospital, Mol (2002) pro-
vides a very powerful illustration of this argument. Mol makes a case for
ontological multiplicity—of how the disease (atherosclerosis) and the
sick body are enacted differently in the pathology lab and the outpa-
tient clinic. The knowledge practices in each of these sites, Mol shows,
are different which makes their objects of concern acquire a different
ontological reality. What appears to be singular (the body, the disease)
is in fact multiple when one attends to the knowledge practices which
go into its making. But though the object of concern is multiple it is
still less than many, Mol argues, because what appears to be independ-
ent (i.e., a separate ontology) is in fact interdependent and partially
connected to other realities: ontologies are not mutually exclusive but
intersect one another. The different enactments of atherosclerosis hold
together through the co-ordination work which allows the various
enactments of the disease to cohere.
179
Voiced-based participation often enacts a particular ontology of the

participating child—the competent, knowledgeable and self-reflexive
child who can produce knowledge (mainly through speech) which is
different and unique from the knowledge which adults produce about
children. The interest here is the knowledge produced rather than the
process by which it is produced—in what than in how; the goal is to
find the best methods to extract the most authentic account of chil-
dren’s knowledge through their participation in research. A praxio-
graphic approach, along the lines advocated by Mol (2002) and other
STS scholars, strives to elucidate how entities, including the child
who participates, come into being as particular subjects, a key under-
standing, as we have seen in Chapter 5, of relational ontologies. From
within this theoretical formulation, the child possesses no essential iden-
tity; there is no participating child as such but merely the possibility
that such a child may come into being under particular circumstances
which allow for such participating capacities to emerge. In that sense,
closer attention to the knowledge practices at work inevitably refocuses
our attention to the messy business of practice which takes place in the
spaces of children’s participation producing particular affects.
This point is well-illustrated by Samuelsson et al. (2015) who show
how “the active, competent child capable of autonomous action” is
enacted through the methodological choices made during research (par-
ticipant observation in their case), from the way the field as such was
approached by the researcher to the way the interactions between the
adult researcher and the child research participant unfolded during the
course of the research. They illustrate how the kind of child which is
enacted through participant observation is the outcome of the interac-
tion between the child, the adult researcher, various material artefacts
implicated, and the institutional setting. In much the same way, it could
be argued that the competent, participating child who is capable of
being a reflexive, social actor who can contribute to knowledge produc-
tion through her own voice, is enacted through an encounter between
the child with other children, the adult facilitator(s) or researchers, the
various materials and the apparatuses used in the participatory pro-
cess (e.g., paper, pencils, audio or video recorders, etc.), the spaces of
180
S. Spyrou
participation, as well as the participatory discourses and any political

agendas which legitimize this particular enactment. The participating
child, in this sense, does not pre-exist her enactment; s/he becomes
real as a result of the participatory method and practice put in place to
enable her to emerge as a competent participating child. The putative
independence and autonomy that she exhibits is in fact the outcome of
a network of relations and dependencies and is likely to change as the
various components of the participatory assemblage shift to form new
relations.
Attending to the knowledge practices at work highlights the role
of method in enacting the social. As Law explains, while reality often
appears as singular, independent and definite, it is in fact the conse-
quence of method assemblage or the process through which presences
and absences are enacted in research—different method assemblages
produce different objects and different realities.4 But interestingly, he
argues, this transformative process which includes instruments, assump-
tions and skills gets erased along the way (Law 2004: 20–55); the bias
of Euro-American method in favor of product rather than process
clearly contributes to this form of backgrounding (Law 2004: 152).
Why is this absenting significant? Because, while research is a messy
process and reality is often heterogeneous, vague, uncertain, ephemeral,
elusive and incoherent, what we end up doing, as researchers, is pro-
vide a clean, coherent, and intelligible narrative, a knowledge product of
sorts. The mess of research practice becomes “out-thereness”, rendered
an absence and hence inconsequential to knowledge production (Law
2004; see also Davidson 2017; Ergler 2017).
Let us take a closer look at participation as process and the mess it
produces through a specific research project I was involved with. The
project (carried out in four countries—Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria and
the UK—during the period 2009–2011) aimed at identifying good
practice for children’s participation in research, policy and practice
developments to prevent and combat violence against children. The
research team in each country organized a series of workshops with chil-
dren who had experienced violence (or belonged to high-risk groups) in
order to collect data that would illuminate children’s own views on their
181
participation in research. Each participatory activity was developed to

encourage children to express their views on participation as freely as
possible. Thus, one activity asked the children to redesign Hart’s lad-
der of participation (Hart 1992) based on their own understanding
of each step’s relative importance, another asked them to draw a good
and a bad (adult) facilitator in a participatory project and to identify
their attributes, while a third activity asked children to construct a safe
space of participation. Each workshop facilitator was instructed to keep
notes and reflect on the very process of participation for each activity
as they experienced it, identifying any problems and challenges they
encountered in their interactions with children. Reviewing the facil-
itators’ notes one finds several comments which provide insight into
participation as a messy process—participation-as-practice rather than
participation-as-product.
For instance, some of the facilitators’ comments focus on the shift-
ing power dynamics among children resulting from interferences (both
from inside and outside the group) by other children:
We had a lot of coordination problems. Some of the children bothered

other children who wanted to discuss and express their opinions and this
created a reaction. Also, some children who did not participate entered
the activity area interrupting the children who participated in the activity
making them lose their train of thought.
Other comments focused on children’s lack of interest, tiredness and

boredom:
There were a lot of problems with the implementation of this activity

due to the fact that there was lack of interest by most children. They did
not find the specific topic interesting and so they ended up responding
quickly with one word or being unwilling to respond altogether.
Towards the end of the activity the children started getting tired and
bored.
In some cases, the comments reflected children’s resistance to the format

and plan of the activity they were invited to participate in:
182
S. Spyrou
In this activity, children felt more comfortable writing their responses

instead of talking. The difficult part was when the children did not wish
to share their ideas. They did not want to read their responses aloud so
that the activity did not develop as planned.
They found it difficult and boring to write their responses to this activity
and so we proceeded to discuss it verbally.
And, in yet other comments, the facilitators pointed out the particulari-
ties of individual children and how they related to the group as a whole:
One child suggested to the rest how they should all think about the issue
discussed and everyone agreed.
One of the five children in the group had a hard time participating dur-
ing the activity.
Though she seemed to be interested, she ended up sitting all the time and
not participating at all.
In this activity, both girls seemed obviously tired. One decided to take a
break, the other wanted to continue.
The facilitators’ comments on the participatory process provide another

layer of information which complicates the picture of participation as
the unproblematic, democratic and empowering production of knowl-
edge by children. Interruptions and interferences, lack of interest, tired-
ness and boredom, or even outright resistance by children—none of
which is ideally supposed to happen if the end result is to be trusted
as authentic and true—all suggest that participation-as-practice is much
more dynamic and fluid than voiced-based approaches would have us
think. One could say that what happens beyond voice provides another
layer of data, which often however fails to make it into the finished
product. Researchers often find that despite their good intentions (and
the example of the project provided here is clearly such a case), these
kinds of issues do arise during the participatory process.
From the very limited data provided about the participatory activi-
ties described above, it becomes obvious that a praxiographic approach
may yield a different ontology of the participating child. While the
quiet, reserved, bored, uninterested child may become an absence in
183
voiced-based participation it becomes a presence in a praxiographic

instantiation of participation which seeks to provide ethnographic
insight into knowledge practices. While in the former case, what counts
as knowledge is what is said, in the latter the focus shifts to what is
done. Exclusions matter not because they can ever be avoided but
because of their political and ethical implications as forms of interven-
tion in knowledge production.
Indeed, power is central to knowledge production and children’s par-
ticipation in research could not be understood outside of the unfolding
power relations of participation. Striving to reduce power differences
between children and adults or among children may be worthwhile
but because all human activity is infused with power it is important
to account for its effects whether these are repressive and constrain-
ing or enabling and empowering. A number of childhood studies’
scholars have turned to Foucault (see, for instance, Gallagher 2008b;
MacNaughton 2005; McNamee 2000) for insights into processes
of power/knowledge practices in research with children. Gallagher
(2008a, b) brings Foucault’s insights into the power/knowledge nexus to
discuss how power is exercised during the participatory process while he
critiques the a priori and simplified assumption that adults hold power
while children do not; if power is not a possession of the individual,
he argues, what is important is how it is exercised and what effects it
has on those participating—without denying that there is an asym-
metrical power relationship between adults and children, we are also
made keenly aware that power may be exercised in different ways by
both adults and children with varying effects and outcomes (Gallagher
2008a; see also Mannion 2007: 417). For participatory processes, this
might mean that what matters is what actually happens during the
participatory encounter not just between children and adults but also
between the children who participate. Gallagher (2008a: 145–146)
points to De Certau’s notion of ‘tactics’ or the art of ‘making do’ (De
Certau 1988) as helpful means for understanding the limits of domi-
nation and the power of the ‘dominated’ to resist their oppression. The
unstable, fluctuating and shifting power relations which unfold during
the participatory process suggest not only a need to reconsider what
184
S. Spyrou
participation means but also what it implies about the production of

knowledge:
It might be useful to make a distinction between discourse – what is said

or written about participation – and practice – what is done under the
auspices of participation – how those involved in the project act, the
techniques they use to influence one another, or to resist or evade such
influence, and what effects all of these actions have. (Gallagher 2008b:
400–401)
Returning to the facilitators’ notes on the participatory experience

described above, we might then ask: What does children’s lack of inter-
est, their expressed feelings of boredom and their resistance to the par-
ticipatory process or their one-word responses and their decision to
write their views rather than talk about them mean for the knowledge
produced? Whether such observations about the participatory process
are recorded and become an important part of the data generated and
analyzed is partly a question of method and the micropolitical decisions
on how to handle the mess of the participatory process.
As researchers are beginning to focus on participatory processes as
dynamic, shifting and unstable we will likely see more accounts about
the participatory mess which results from a full engagement with what
happens on the ground. Consider, for instance, the following excerpt
from a recently published article which illustrates this reflexive mode in
relation to a participatory project with young people:
Others took delight from resisting, rebelling and subverting the research
process. During one mapping activity, two boys—Tommy and Bobby—
sneaked off with my pens. Disappearing upstairs, they spent the time
scribbling offensive comments on the youth club walls, an act especially
telling given our activity that evening focused on ‘graffiti as a form of
antisocial behavior’. (Davidson 2017: 233)
Or, consider the recent call by Ergler (2017) to acknowledge the messy
reality of children’s participation in research as both becomings (i.e.,
researchers adopting an adult like role) and beings (as children who also
have a need to play at the same time) which might characterize child
185
researchers’ resistance to adult-imposed researcher roles and their own

attempts to redefine such roles in practice.
This kind of reflexive engagement with the reality of children’s par-
ticipation in research can offer a critical understanding of method, its
performative capacities and the consequent political and ethical impli-
cations for knowledge production that come from its use.5 What new
realities may become visible, for instance, when we adopt methods and
devices which track what children do (e.g., digital devices) rather than
what children are able to say or reflect on (Law and Ruppert 2013:
239)? Or perhaps, methods which track what children do not do in the
context of a participatory activity—a means of recording non-activity?
What ethical considerations emerge through a critical consideration of
method and its performative work? Which children, for instance, might
a voiced-based participatory project privilege/silence/exclude? What
political agendas might gain support from such a project? At what cost
and for whom?
This is not just about what gets erased along the way (what we have
called here ‘the mess’); it is also about what is amplified as a result (Law
2004: 116) and how it ends up being represented. A focus on voice-
based participatory methods can emphasize speech at the expense of
other modes of knowledge production such as, for instance, affect or
movement. A theoretical preoccupation with the individual child as
a humanist, liberal, autonomous subject and a methodological con-
cern with capturing this subject through voice may inadvertently also
increase the likelihood, as Mazzei suggests, that researcher agendas may
collude with the agendas of research participants to produce clarity and
hide the mess:
As researchers, we desire to maintain equilibrium, control, and a clear

sense of self as articulated through easily discernable and transparent
speech-acts–evidence to support our claims. Such desire is also shared by
our research participants, and so we are complicit in the production of a
narrative that tells a neat story…. (Mazzei 2010: 520–521)
This kind of cleaning up (e.g., excluding contradictions and provid-

ing coherence or omitting the mess of the participatory process and
186
S. Spyrou
focusing on its outcomes) constitutes a certain kind of reductionism—

data, that is, is reduced to that which is uttered and often not just to
that which is uttered but furthermore to that which is seen as agentic,
reflexive, and thoughtful.
Irrespective and given that in most participatory initiatives (including
those where children are assumed to have a leading role) adult research-
ers are implicated one way or another, our role and the power which
comes with that role acquires particular significance. We are very much
a part of the worlds we study, we do not observe them from a distance,
but are in an entangled relationship with them, shaping and being
shaped by them (Barad 2008: 146). The research assemblages we partic-
ipate in are critical for knowledge production in this sense.
As Fox and Alldred (2015: 400) explain, a research assemblage “com-
prises the bodies, things and abstractions that get caught up in social
inquiry, including the events that are studied, the tools, models and
precepts of research, and the researchers”. Fox and Alldred (2015: 406)
illustrate how the micropolitics of research assemblages often operate to
produce simplicity out of complexity, definition out of indeterminacy,
or evenness out of variability (Fox and Alldred 2015: 406); engaging
with the micropolitics of the research assemblage, they argue, provides
“opportunities to shape the relationship between researchers, events, the
tools of inquiry and audiences” (e.g., by de-territorializing and disaggre-
gating data to counter aggregations) (Fox and Alldred 2015: 411).
How we choose to interfere in data analysis, for example, impacts on
the knowledge we produce—it is an interference of sorts which trans-
forms the possibilities of knowledge, not a neutral engagement which
performs an objective task (see also my discussion of diffractive think-
ing and ontological politics in Chapters 2 and 7). In the context of our
discussion on participation, one could then ask: What kinds of data are
generated through children’s participation in research? What is absented
along the way? How is the data generated analyzed? What aggregations
take place? Being able to ask these questions constitutes a first step
towards recognizing the politics of knowledge production and a move
to rethink children’s participation in research as a critical tool for knowl-
edge production.
187
Conclusion
As we have seen in Chapter 4, the search for the child’s authentic voice
is futile if by that we mean the search for an unmediated voice which
speaks the truth of the child’s ‘inner’ self. Attempts to free the child
from all kinds of influences that mediate her presence and understand-
ing of the world (whether in the context of an interview or, more gen-
erally, a participatory activity) are not only unrealistic and impossible
but are also complicit in disguising the very practices which produce her
voice. We have seen that the same problematic may surface in participa-
tory research with children.
In this chapter, I offered a critical review of children’s participation
in research, focusing in particular on ‘research by children’, the most
promising among participatory approaches for its potential to produce
knowledge that is qualitatively better. Though there is no doubt, that
‘research by children’ can and should have a place in childhood scholar-
ship, I have argued that we need to situate it within a critical discussion
which recognizes both its potential and limits as a tool for knowledge
production.
As a situated practice, children’s participation in research is, of course,
neither good nor bad and need not be celebrated or damned. Just
because an initiative is labelled as ‘participatory’ it does not necessar-
ily mean that it is empowering and productive for all the children who
participate in it. The relations which develop within the participatory
activity and the power dynamics which unfold offer better guidance
about the outcomes of participation rather than the rhetoric which sur-
rounds it. Turning to participation as a knowledge practice rather than
product or discourse provides a more balanced means of evaluating it in
terms of what it does to all those involved in the process and the knowl-
edge which results from it. Participation-as-process then becomes a tool
not only for producing different kinds of knowledge but also for criti-
cally understanding the very practices through which such knowledge is
produced.
Different styles and settings of participation can enact different iden-
tities among the children participating and produce, along the way,
188
S. Spyrou
different kinds of knowledge. A focus on ontological enactment can

help us question the naturalized assumptions about the status and char-
acteristics of the participating child and consider instead how such a
child is made possible in practice (see Woolgar 2012: 49–50).
As I have shown, the research assemblages at work including our
methods of choice, contribute towards enacting our objects of inquiry,
disclosing certain childhoods rather than others. As interventions with
underlying political and ethical implications, our practices and their
consequent enactments—the kinds of childhoods we disclose along the
way—should be assessed for the effects they have on children’s lives.
Only then, can we offer childhood studies critical tools for assessing its
knowledge productions, an issue which I explore more fully in the last
chapter of the book.
Notes
1. Pells (2012: 437) has also distinguished between ‘performed partici-
pation’ (i.e., participation as an extraordinary event in children’s lives
which involves some kind of consultation) versus ‘lived participation’
(i.e., the participation of children in the ongoing daily activities of their
lives).
2. See also the discussion on children’s voices in Chapter 4.
3. For the use of the concept in childhood studies see, for example,
Lindgren et al. (2015), Sparrman (2014), and Esser (2017).
4. In making an argument about the partiality of knowledge produced
through research (rather than about multiple realities and ontological
multiplicity), Nightingale (2003: 80) illustrates another dimension of
this thinking by arguing for the use of triangulation in research, not as
a means of cross-checking the consistency of results and validating them,
but rather as a way of identifying the silences, discrepancies, and incom-
patibilities that exist between different data sets collected through diverse
approaches. “Mixing methods”, according to Nightingale can reveal the
partiality of knowledge. What is important about Nightingale’s argu-
ment is that it is not about questioning the validity of the methods used
but rather about recognizing the fragmented nature of the knowledge
produced: “When different kinds of knowledges are taken seriously and
189
all are critically interrogated, richer results are generated, new interpreta-
tions emerge and the supremacy of any one kind of knowledge is chal-
lenged” (Nightingale 2003: 86–87).
5. For a childhood studies’ example of how a research method enacts its
objects of research see Samuelsson et al. (2015).
References
Alderson, P. (2001). Research by children. International Journal of Social
Alderson, P. (2004). Children as researchers: The effects of participation
rights on research methodology. In P. Christensen & A. James (Eds.),
Research with children: Perspectives and practices (pp. 241–257). New York:
RoutledgeFalmer.
Brownlie, J., Anderson, S., & Ormston, R. (2006). Children as researchers.
Scotland: Social Research, Education Department, Scottish Executive Social
Research.
Cahill, C. (2007). Doing research with young people: Participatory research
and the rituals of collective work. Children’s Geographies, 5(3), 297–312.
Cheney, K. (2011). Children as ethnographers: Reflections on the importance
of participatory research in assessing orphans’ needs. Childhood, 18(2),
166–179.
Cheney, K. (forthcoming). Decolonizing childhood studies: Overcoming patri-
archy and prejudice in child-related research and practice. In S. Spyrou,
R. Rosen, & D. Cook (Eds.), Reimagining Childhood Studies. London:
Bloomsbury.
University Press.
Christensen, P., & Prout, A. (2002). Working with ethical symmetry in social
research with children. Childhood, 9(4), 477–497.
Clark, A., & Moss, P. (2001). Listening to young children: The mosaic approach.
London: National Children’s Bureau.
190
S. Spyrou
Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (2001). Participation: The new tyranny? London:

Zed Books.
Coppock, V. (2011). Children as peer researchers: Reflections on a journey of
mutual discovery. Children and Society, 25(6), 435–446.
Davidson, E. (2017). Saying it like it is? Power, participation and research
involving young people. Social Inclusion, 5(3), 228–239.
Davis, J. (2009). Involving children. In E. K. M. Tisdall, J. M. Davis, & M.
Gallagher (Eds.), Research with children and young people: Research design,
methods and analysis (pp. 154–167). London: Sage.
De Certau, M. (1988). The practice of everyday life. Berkley: University of
California Press.
Dockett, S., Einarsdottir, J., & Perry, B. (2009). Researching with children:
Ethical tensions. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 7(3), 283–298.
Dyson, A., & Meagher, N. (2001). Reflections on the case studies: Towards a
rationale for participation? In J. Clark, A. Dyson, N. Meagher, E. Robson,
& M. Wootten (Eds.), Young people as researchers: Possibilities, problems and
politics. Leicester: Youth Work Press.
Ergler, C. R. (2017). Advocating for a more relational and dynamic model of
participation for child researchers. Social Inclusion, 5(3), 240–250.
Esser, F. (2017). Enacting the overweight body in residential child care: Eating
and agency beyond the nature-culture divide. Childhood, 24(3), 286–299.
Fox, N. J., & Alldred, P. (2015). New materialist social inquiry: Designs,
Franks, M. (2011). Pockets of participation: Revisiting child-centered partici-
pation research. Children and Society, 25(1), 15–25.
Fraser, S., Lewis, V., Ding, S., Kellett, M., & Robinson, C. (Eds.). (2004).
Doing research with children and young people. London: Sage.
Gallagher, M. (2008a). ‘Power is not evil’: Rethinking power in participatory
methods. Children’s Geographies, 6(2), 137–150.
Gallagher, M. (2008b). Foucault, power and participation. The International
Journal of Children’s Rights, 16(3), 395–406.
Gallacher, L.-A., & Gallagher, M. (2008). Methodological immaturity in
childhood research? Thinking through ‘participatory methods’. Childhood,
15(4), 499–516.
Graham, A., & Fitzgerald, R. (2010). Progressing children’s participation:
Exploring the potential of a dialogic turn. Childhood, 17(3), 343–359.
191

Childhood 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568216631399.
Hampshire, K., Porter, G., Owusu, S., Mariwah, S., Abane, A., Robson, E.,
et al. (2012). Taking the long view: Temporal considerations in the eth-
ics of children’s research activity and knowledge production. Children’s
Geographies, 10(2), 219–232.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism
and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599.
Hart, R. (1992). Children’s participation from tokenism to citizenship. Florence:
UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre.
Hill, M. (2006). Children’s voices on ways of having a voice: Children’s and
young people’s perspectives on methods used in research and consultation.
Childhood, 13(1), 69–89.
Holland, S., Renold, E., Ross, N. J., & Hillman, A. (2010). Power, agency and
participatory agendas: A critical exploration of young people’s engagement
in participative qualitative research. Childhood, 17(3), 360–375.
Horgan, D., Forde, C., Martin, S., & Parkes, A. (2017). Children’s participa-
tion: Moving from the performative to the social. Children’s Geographies,
15(3), 274–288.
Polity Press.
Falmer Press.
Jones, A. (2004). Involving children and young people as researchers. In S.
Fraser, V. Lewis, S. Ding, M. Kellett, & C. Robinson (Eds.), Doing research
with children and young people (pp. 113–130). London: Sage.
Kellett, M. (2005a). How to develop children as researchers: A step by step guide to
Kellett, M. (2005b). Children as active researchers: A new research paradigm for
the 21st century? ESRC National Centre for Research Methods. NCRM
Methods Review Papers, NCRM/003.
192
S. Spyrou

Kellett, M. (2011). Children’s perspectives on integrated services: Every child mat-
ters in policy and practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kellett, M., Forrest, R. (aged ten), Dent, N. (aged ten), & Ward, S. (aged ten)
(2004). Just teach us the skills please, we’ll do the rest: Empowering ten-
year-olds as active researchers. Children & Society, 18(5), 329–343.
Kim, C.-Y. (2016). Why research ‘by’ children? Rethinking the assumptions
underlying the facilitation of children as researchers. Children and Society,
30(3), 230–240.
Kirby, P. (1999). Involving young researchers: How to enable young people to
design and conduct research. York: York Publishing Services.
Lansdown, G. (2010). The realization of children’s participation rights: Critical
reflections. In B. Percy-Smith & N. Thomas (Eds.), A handbook of children
and young people’s participation: Perspectives from theory and practice (pp.
11–23). London and New York: Routledge.
Langhout, R. D., & Thomas, E. (2010). Imagining participatory action
research in collaboration with children: An introduction. American Journal
of Community Psychology, 46, 60–66.
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific
facts (2nd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
York: Routledge.
Law, J., & Ruppert, E. (2013). The social life of methods: Devices. Journal of
Cultural Economy, 6(3), 229–240.
458–481.
Lindgren, A., Sparrman, A., Samuelsson, T., & Cardell, D. (2015). Enacting
(real) fiction: Materializing childhoods in a theme park. Childhood, 22(2),
171–186.
MacNaughton, G. (2005). Doing Foucault in early childhood studies: Applying
post-structural ideas. New York: Routledge.
Malone, K., & Hartung, C. (2010). Challenges of participatory practice with
children. In B. Percy-Smith & N. Thomas (Eds.), A handbook of children
and young people’s participation: Perspectives from theory and practice (pp.
24–38). London and New York: Routledge.
Mannion, G. (2007). Going spatial, going relational: Why “listening to chil-
dren” and children’s participation needs reframing. Discourse: Studies in the
Cultural Politics of Education, 28(3), 405–420.
193
Marcus, G. E. (2008). The end(s) of ethnography: Social/cultural anthropolo-

gy’s signature of producing knowledge in transition. Cultural Anthropology,
23(1), 1–14.
Matthews, H. (2001). Power games and moral territories: Ethical dilem-
mas when working with children and young people. Ethics, Place and
Environment, 4(2), 117–178.
Mazzei, L. A. (2010). Thinking data with Deleuze. International Journal of
Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 511–523.
McCarry, M. (2012). Who benefits? A critical reflection of children and young
people’s participation in sensitive research. International Journal of Social
McNamee, S. (2000). Foucault’s heterotopia and children’s everyday lives.
Childhood, 7(4), 479–492.
Nightingale, A. (2003). A feminist in the forest: Situated knowledges and
mixing methods in natural resource management. ACME: An International
E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2(1), 77–90.
Nolas, S.-M. (2011). Reflections on the enactment of children’s participa-
tion rights through research: Between transactional and relational spaces.
Children and Youth Services Review, 33, 1196–1202.
Pells, K. (2012). ‘Rights are everything we don’t have’: Clashing conceptions of
vulnerability and agency in the daily lives of Rwandan children and youth.
Children’s Geographies, 10(4), 427–440.
Percy-Smith, B. (2010). Councils, consultations and community: Rethinking
the spaces for children and young people’s participation. Children’s
Percy-Smith, B., & Thomas, N. (Eds.). (2010). A handbook of children and
young people’s participation: Perspectives from theory and practice. London and
New York: Routledge.
Porter, G., Hampshire, K., Bourdillon, M., Robson, E., Munthali, A., Abane,
A. (2010). Children as research collaborators: Issues and reflections from
a mobility study in sub-Saharan Africa. American Journal of Community
Psychology, 46(1–2), 215–227.
Porter, G., Townsend, J., & Hampshire, K. (2012). Children and young peo-
ple as producers of knowledge. Children’s Geographies, 10(2), 131–134.
194
S. Spyrou
Powell, M. A., & Smith, A. (2009). Children’s participation rights in research.

Childhood, 16(1), 124–142.
Raby, R. (2014). Children’s participation as neo-liberal governance? Discourse:
Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35(1), 77–89.
Samuelsson, T., Sparrman, A., Cardell, D., & Lindgren, A. (2015). The active,
competent child, capable of autonomous action: An inherent quality or the
outcome of a research process? AnthropoChildren, 5, 1–19.
Schafer, N., & Yarwood, R. (2008). Involving young people as researchers:
Uncovering multiple power relations among youths. Children’s Geographies,
6(2), 121–135.
Shier, H. (2015). Children as researchers in Nicaragua: Children’s consultancy
to transformative research. Global Studies of Childhood, 5(2), 206–219.
Smith, R., Monaghan, M., & Broad, B. (2002). Involving young people as
co-researchers: Facing up to the methodological issues. Qualitative Social
Work, 1(2), 191–207.
Sparrman, A. (2014). Access and gatekeeping in researching children’s sexual-
ity: Mess in ethics and methods. Sexuality & Culture, 18, 291–309.
Theis, J. (2001). Participatory research with children in Vietnam. In H.
Schwartzman (Ed.), Children and anthropology: Perspectives for the twen-
ty-first century (pp. 99–109). Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.
Thomas, N. (2007a). Towards a theory of children’s participation. The
International Journal of Children’s Rights, 15(2), 199–218.
Thomas, N. (2017b). Turning the tables: Children as researchers. In P.
Christensen & A. James (Eds.), Research with children: Perspectives and prac-
tices (3rd ed.). London, UK: Routledge.
Tisdall, E. K. M. (2013). The transformation of participation? Exploring the
potential of ‘transformative participation’ for theory and practices around
children and young people’s participation. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(2),
183–193.
Tisdall, E. K. M., Gadda, A. M., & Butler, U. M. (Eds.). (2014). Children
and young people’s participation and its transformative potential: Learning from
across countries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Todd, L. (2012). Critical dialogue, critical methodology: Bridging the research
gap to young people’s participation in evaluating children’s services.
Children’s Geographies, 10(2), 187–200.
Twum-Danso, A. (2009). Situating participatory methodologies in context:
The impact of culture on adult-child interactions in research and other pro-
jects. Children’s Geographies, 7(4), 379–389.
195

London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage.
Warming, H. (2011). Children’s participation and citizenship in a global age:
Empowerment, tokenism or discriminatory disciplining? Social Work and
Society, 9(1), 119–134.
Warren, S. (2000). Let’s do it properly: Inviting children to be researchers. In
A. Lewis & G. Lindsay (Eds.), Researching children’s perspectives (pp. 122–
134). Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.
West, A. (1999). Children’s own research: Street children and care in Britain
and Bangladesh. Childhood, 6(1), 145–155.
Woodhead, M., & Faulkner, D. (2000). Subjects, objects or participants?
Dilemmas of psychological research with children. In P. Christensen &
A. James (Eds.), Research with children: Perspectives and practice. London:
Falmer Press.
Woolgar, S. (2012). Ontological child consumption. In A. Sparrman, B.
Sandin, & J. Sjoberg (Eds.), Situating child consumption: Rethinking values
and notions of children, childhood and consumption (pp. 9–31). Lund: Nordic
Academic Press.
Wyness, M. (2012). Children’s participation and inter-generational dialogue:
Bringing adults back into the analysis. Childhood, 20(4), 429–442.
7
The Ethics and Politics of Knowledge
Production in Childhood Studies
Introduction
This book reflects my ongoing concerns about childhood studies as a
field. To the extent that it is a critique, it is one which aims to contrib-
ute, in however small a way, towards developing a more critical child-
hood studies which remains current, restless and uncomfortable while
producing knowledge that matters. My underlying attempt through-
out this effort was to problematize knowledge production, not simply
by deconstructing the field’s knowledge practices but also by suggest-
ing other, alternative, and potentially more productive and ethical ways
of producing knowledge. I have argued and illustrated through my
engagement with some of childhood’s most central concepts that to
engage critically with knowledge production the field needs to reflect
on knowledge as process and practice and not merely as product and
outcome (Knorr Cetina 2007: 364), which can be done through an
ongoing and relentless scrutiny of the ways through which knowledge
happens. To problematize knowledge production in this way is to also
open up the field to new ways of knowing or in St. Pierre’s (1997: 175)
words, “to produce different knowledge and to produce knowledge

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47904-4_7
198
S. Spyrou
differently”, not for the sake of doing so but as a politically and ethically
responsible act.
In the first two chapters, I lay out ways of thinking about knowl-
edge production in childhood studies to suggest that the field can ben-
efit from more systematic engagement with theoretical developments in
the social sciences at large while in the third chapter I attempt a critical
review of the field to reflect on its historical trajectory, its current con-
cerns and the challenges it faces as it seeks to carve out a rightful place
for itself in the wider world of knowledge and scholarship. In Chapters
4, 5 and 6, I explore respectively three of the field’s fundamental con-
cepts—voice, agency, and participation—to illustrate what their critical
rethinking might entail for knowledge production in childhood studies.
These concepts have clearly been at the forefront of theoretical discus-
sions in childhood studies and will likely continue to serve the field’s
explorations in the years to come; hence the need to maintain an ongo-
ing dialogue which scrutinizes both their potential and limits.
Throughout the book I also explore a number of theoretical issues
which, when taken together, pinpoint the value of a relational, decen-
tered lens through which to see children and childhood. I have argued
that following this emerging momentum of the field may yield new
questions and paths which could help overcome the current reproduc-
tive tendencies and move childhood studies foreword in more produc-
tive ways. In this concluding chapter, I return to some of these core
issues to reflect further on their potential contributions towards the
development of a more critical childhood studies. I first turn my atten-
tion to the question of authenticity and the challenge it poses for the
subsequent development of the field as a critical practice.
Beyond Authenticity
Childhood studies’ fixation with the unitary subject and the search for
its authentic core has foreclosed a more serious engagement with some
of the most critical insights of poststructuralist thinking. One of these
insights concerns the very processes through which knowledge is pro-
duced, naturalized and represented which poststructuralism seeks to
7 The Ethics and Politics of Knowledge Production …
199
make transparent. In Chapter 4, I argue that childhood studies’ search

for the authentic child comes at the cost of essentializing, concretizing
and rendering the child (and our knowledge about the child) non-con-
tingent. Certainly, in a world where children are seen as being powerless
and oppressed, there is an allure to finding the authentic child; research-
ers hope that the search for the authentic child provides childhood
research with a political and ethical commitment to truth. What is at
stake is children’s ontological independence, the argument being that
children can only be true to themselves when adults refrain from exercising
their power and influence upon children. Nevertheless, the argument goes,
there is always a risk that this might prove to be untenable due to adult
influence and mediation. So, the authentic child—even among those
who valorize it—is recognized in most cases as an ideal, a goal to strive
for in research.
In her description of the phenomenological approach to child
research, for example, Grover (2004: 86) refers to ‘raw data’ and
‘authentic data’ which are however at risk of being ‘contaminated’ by
children themselves who might interpret them in socially expected
ways (Grover 2004: 86–87). What becomes critical for the researcher
then is to build trust with the child ‘if authentic data are to be gathered’
(Grover 2004: 87). The significance of this understanding is that the
problem of authenticity is framed as a methodological one, hence one
which can be addressed—sometimes with more, sometimes with less,
success, but nevertheless a problem which can be tackled.
However, as we have seen in Chapter 4, all voices—both children’s
and adults’—are mediated; neither children nor adults are complete and
mature to offer a centered, uncontaminated understanding of the world
(Lee 2001). To search for children’s authentic self and for their unmed-
iated voice which can be captured through the proper use of the right
methods—participatory methods often considered as particularly suited
for this task—is unproductive, unless one insists on an understanding
of the unified, knowing and transparent subject. Subjectivities, post-
structuralists have told us, are fragmented, contradictory, ambiguous
and shifting and in that sense they defy closure. Our accounts of chil-
dren are mediated through language—both their language (as revealed
through their voices) and our language (as produced through our
200
S. Spyrou
accounts of their voices). In that sense, the search for the authentic child
is futile to say the least and largely uncritical as a knowledge practice.
De-stabilizing the identity category of the child by attending to differ-
ent subject positions allows for a poststructuralist critique of the fantasy
of the unitary, fixed, stable and internally coherent subject who is trans-
parent and decipherable (Alldred 1998). Moving beyond the ‘authentic
child’ means forsaking notions of clarity and attending to the mess and
complexity of children’s subjectivities and lives.
Embracing Mess
Though mess is a condition which characterizes our social research
methods more generally (Law 2004), in Chapter 6, I discuss more spe-
cifically the significance of attending to mess in participatory research
with children. In a broad sense, mess may suggest (among others) dis-
order, disarray, disorganization, confusion, uncertainty, ambiguity, com-
plication, and entanglement. My intended use of the term in this book
alludes as well to an unwillingness to reduce and essentialize the rich-
ness which characterizes children’s worlds and lives.
Ever since ‘the crisis of representation’, a number of scholars have
called for the need to attend to the messiness of the social world and
to reflect it in our scholarly writing and representations. Marcus (1998:
187–188), for instance, has argued that attending to our objects of
study in terms of analytic categories (e.g., childhood, age, play and the
like) limits our inquiry because it often creates bounded texts which
keep the mess of the social world outside. For Marcus (1998: 189),
messy texts provide the possibility for ‘unexpected connections’ and ‘new
descriptions of old realities’ at a time when our old representations no
longer seem to be adequate:
Messy texts are messy because they insist on their own open-endedness,
incompleteness, and uncertainty about how to draw a text/analysis to a
close. Such open-endedness often marks a concern with an ethics of dia-
logue and partial knowledge, a sense that a work is incomplete without
critical, and differently positioned, responses to it by its (ideally) varied
readers. (Marcus 1998: 189)
201
More recently, Pillow (2010: 193) has reiterated the value of integrating
the messy in our research accounts as part of ongoing reflexive practice:
The qualitative research arena would benefit from more “messy” exam-
ples, examples that may not always be successful, examples that do not
seek a comfortable, transcendent end-point but leave us in the uncom-
fortable realities of doing engaged qualitative research.
In childhood studies, a few scholars have also argued in favor of attend-

ing to the messiness of children’s lives and worlds in ways that would
allow for their complexity and richness to come forth. Alldred and
Burman, for example, have pinpointed the value of attending to the
messiness of data which are often cleaned up when processed and ana-
lyzed by researchers:
Including such ‘messiness’ might appear to further children’s ‘otherness’

from the idealized subject. But deliberately framed to do so, this helps
challenge the normativity of this sanitized area. A researcher might decide
that taking the research dynamics as their focus for analysis serves chil-
dren better by showing their insight and reflexivity, claiming for them a
place within the conventional model of subjectivity. (2005: 181)
Likewise, Eldén (2013: 78) has elaborated on the value of ‘inviting the
messy’ of children’s voices which provides for a more complex picture of
the child as social actor, as “simultaneously competent, agentic, vulner-
able and dependent” while Tisdall and Punch (2012: 259) have argued
more generally that childhood studies needs to focus more “on the intri-
cacies, complexities, tensions, ambiguities and ambivalences of children
and young people’s lives”.
Our research conventions have a tendency to hide the mess of the
social world, sometimes intentionally in order to highlight certain ‘find-
ings’ rather than others, and sometimes unintentionally through the
mere ‘inherited wisdom’ for how one properly does research whether
this involves research design, data collection and analysis or interpre-
tation. Indeed, as Fox and Alldred (2015: 406) argue, “Most research-
assemblages and machines aim to produce simplicity where there was
complexity, definition in place of indeterminacy, and evenness where
202
S. Spyrou
there was variability, and tend to shift control of events studied firmly
toward the researcher”. Qualitative research in general and ethnographic
approaches to research in particular have guided much of the work in
childhood studies during the last three decades. These approaches are
well-suited as ways of learning about, and exposing, the messiness that
characterizes the social world and the means through which we produce
knowledge about it (Law 2004: 18) and should continue to form the
critical backbone of knowledge production in childhood studies. The
extent to which we can highlight and explore the messiness of children’s
worlds and lives exceeds our methodological choices and rests, to a great
extent also, on researchers’ sensitivities and readiness to do so.
This messiness which invites critical inquiry provides then an oppor-
tunity to open up childhood studies to new and potentially more ethical
(because they are more attuned to the complexities and nuances of life
and hence allow us to disclose otherwise unacknowledged childhoods)
ways of producing knowledge about children and childhood. Thrift
(2008: 170) has argued for the ethical value of attending to the prin-
ciple of messiness in research: “The world should be kept untidy”, he
argues. The exclusion of mess is by definition a political act and hence
an accountable act, an issue I return to further down.
Espousing Relationality and Materiality

Beyond the insights of a poststructuralist decentering of the subject
which serve as a starting point for a more relational understanding of
subjectivity and knowledge production, I also argue in this book that
the ontological turn in the social sciences may provide childhood studies
with additional critical resources for a reimagining of its central theoreti-
cal assumptions (see Spyrou et al., forthcoming). Not only can relational
ontologies decenter the field’s very object of inquiry—the child—but
they can also provide childhood studies with an expanded conceptual
and empirical territory for research with opportunities to connect the
field’s focused concerns on children and childhood with wider social
concerns which lie beyond (see Spyrou 2017).1 A move from an epis-
temological concern with how humans interact with one another and
203
with how meaning is created to an onto-epistemological concern with

how categories (human, non-human, technological) become delineated
as a result of their entanglement (Barad 2007) offers a way out from the
field’s tendency to ontologize the child in essentialist ways which pre-
clude alternative formulations and visions.
As we have seen in Chapter 5, a view of children as interdependent
and relationally constituted becomings shifts one of the fundamental
questions of the field from What capacities do children possess? to What
capacities emerge out of children’s relational encounters with other entities?
A relational view which recognizes ontological multiplicity challenges
essentialist understandings of the child to bring forth the previously
unacknowledged, absent or ‘non-existent’:
As a sort of reverse deconstruction, the ontological turn performs its

interventions, not by making the world less real by taking it apart and
thus exposing the processes that made it into what it is, but by adding to
it – taking it ‘too seriously’ – and thereby making it ‘more’ or differently
real. (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017: 294)
The possibility of making the world ‘differently real’ constitutes an

acknowledgement of the ontological effects of our knowledge practices
in light of the material world’s own disclosures to us. How the child
comes into being and with what capacities—how she manifests her
beingness as a becoming—is both theoretically and empirically a much
more compelling and nuanced question to answer than any essentialized
notion of the child (however politically empowering it may be) would
afford.
The entanglement between material and discursive forces is what is
at stake here. However, it is not that children’s bodies need to be added
to the mix or that the things of childhood are an essential ingredient
to understanding the childhood phenomenon, or that the discourses of
childhood circulating at any particular time enable and constrain chil-
dren’s activities and rights in the world, or that the state or law inter-
fere in children’s lives through education and other means. Rather, as
Hekman (2010: 25–26) points out, it is the realization that all these—
the ‘mangle’ in Pickering’s (1995) formulation—are in a state of flux,
204
S. Spyrou
they interact with one another, and cannot be examined in isolation,

nor can we, as researchers, with our own theoretical and methodolog-
ical tools, with our own ethics and politics, stand outside the mangle
and observe. Though presented here as a child-question, the ontological
issue is much broader and pinpoints towards our particular philosophi-
cal understanding of the world and our place in it.
Pickering (2008) offers two contrasting ontologies of being in the
world. The first ontology is one of a detached and passive material world
which we, as humans, dominate. The second one is an open-ended ontol-
ogy—an ontology of becoming—whereby we, as humans, are in a consti-
tutive and much more symmetric relationship and engagement with both
the human and non-human world. While the first ontology erases time,
the second one entails a fully temporal engagement of becoming. For
Pickering it is the second ontology of becoming which reflects the truth
of the world as is (in contrast to scientific knowledge which attempts to
step outside the flow of life) which offers a particular view of the world,
a view that veils its constant becoming. Pickering argues that the aim
should not be so much to do away with the first ontology, including sci-
entific production, but rather to reveal and make explicit that such an
ontology is just one way of being in the world; the world can be remade
both materially and representationally. An ontology of decentred human
and non-human becoming offers another way of viewing the world and
another ontological politics which rests on the open-ended possibilities
offered by a world in motion and flux which invites experimentation and
the imagination.
Moving from a purely discursive understanding of child-subjectivity
to a material-semiotic one which embraces the materiality of the child
and of childhood but without privileging either matter or discourse
allows for a reimagining of the child as a becoming. From within this
malleable ontology, the aim is “to understand the child as emergent in a
relational field, where non-human forces are equally at play in constitut-
ing children’s becomings” (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010: 525) and
to acknowledge children’s dependency whereby we take “dependence to
mean an inevitable and positive dependence on other bodies and matter
in the child’s ongoing and specific style of becoming human” (Hultman
and Lenz Taguchi 2010: 531).
205
Focusing on child-matter intra-actions, for example, allows us to

overcome the need for teleological explanations about the instrumen-
tal meaning of things in children’s activity and “to focus on the kind of
knowing and being that is produced in the moment, the kind which is
always original, yet not to be rendered romantically somehow authentic
or non-contaminated” (Rautio 2014: 471–472). By paying attention to
the work that things do in their intra-activity with children we can see
how entangled relations produce children’s subjectivities in particular
ways. As I have shown in Chapter 5, while in themselves things may
do nothing, in their entangled relations with other things and children,
they can produce or reproduce subjects in distinct ways.
In a recently published article, Watson et al. (2015) turn to ANT to
illustrate how ‘special’ non-human actors or material objects such as
the wrist band, the lock and the scooter board found in an ‘inclusive’
early childhood classroom help to constitute what is considered ‘normal’
and to regulate both children and their educators. In this instance, the
materiality of children’s worlds, including the things of childhood, are
not mere accessories which are implicated in children’s lives one way or
another as distinct and separate elements with which children interact.
In their entanglement with children, these things are constituted by,
and constitute children’s subjectivities in specific ways so that one could
not be separated from the other. This is not to suggest that the lock or
the scooter board do not exist as distinct material elements for they do.
It is rather to say that any identity—human or non-human—is crafted
out of the ongoing encounters of matter, bodies, things, ideas, theo-
ries, with one another, that is, out of an encounter of the material with
the discursive. Watson et al. (2015: 274) illustrate this point vividly
through their discussion of the ‘special’ lock on the door whose purpose
is to keep Sam (a special needs boy) in the space of the classroom:
there is a relationship between the non-human actor and a child’s sub-

jectivity. It emerges ‘organically’ in the multiple encounters and inter-
relations they have. Sam is contained and produced as a subject marked
by the large white lock on the door to the outside. As a non-human
actor, the lock powerfully contributes to discursive practices in the class-
room. Sam’s loud struggle to get away and move outside does not hold
the unmarked children’s attention for long. The large group of children
206
S. Spyrou
playing play dough at the table look briefly to Sam as he cries out and
tries to get away from the teacher’s hold. His noises and actions are
ignored as the unmarked children enact their category boundary work
maintaining the ‘normal’. (Watson et al. 2015: 272–273)
For childhood studies, this is an invitation to pay closer attention to

children’s materiality—their bodily, material constitution—but also to
their relations with things which materialize children as much as chil-
dren materialize them. As Tuana (2008: 189) has argued, the kind of
knowledge that we lack is that which is in-between people and things
or bodies and experiences. Materiality acquires significance in this sense
not as an added ingredient in the mix of the social but as a constitutive,
relational force which does ontological work and always in an entangled
relation with discourse.
A relational ontology of childhood can help de-privilege the assumed
centrality of the child’s substance and move both theoretical and empir-
ical investigations into the material-semiotic sphere where the child-
entity constitutes and is constituted by the phenomena in which s/he
participates. As Rautio (2014: 462) aptly put it, “It is no longer the
independent child who responds to, develops with, learns from and
consumes inert or powerless objects; rather it is the engagement of the
child and ‘things’ that produces diverse ‘children’ and equally diverse
‘things’”. It is precisely this engagement which offers an opportunity for
investigating more critically children’s intra-action with the world and
their ontological becoming. It is also an invitation for childhood studies
to open up for innovation in methods that will allow us to disclose chil-
dren and childhood in new ways (Oswell 2016: 28–30). In the next sec-
tion, I consider how relational ontologies and politics come to inform
knowledge production in childhood studies.
Ontological Politics in Childhood Studies

Despite claims and pretensions to the contrary by those who still cling
to value-free science, the political is ever-present in scientific knowl-
edge production. In her discussion of Pickering’s concept of the mangle
207
(see Pickering 1995), Hekman points out both the impossibility and
undesirability of separating politics from science:
[The mangle] includes the political/social context of science as an integral

and unavoidable element of scientific practice. The mangle acknowledges
and accepts that science exists in a political/social context and that pol-
itics exist in a scientific context. This interaction and interpenetration is
not an aberration or distortion but rather the way things are, the way the
world is. The mangle teaches us that we should not be appalled that pol-
itics and science are inseparable but should incorporate this interaction
into our understanding of the world. The separation of science and pol-
itics that was the center of the modernist settlement was an illusion. We
need to recognize it as such and develop an alternative conception that
presumes their interpenetration. (Hekman 2010: 24)
To acknowledge and attend to the political (and by extension the eth-

ical) in science is then not to merely bracket it off or account for its
undesirable impact on knowledge production but to engage with it
more decisively and creatively through the choices we make about
the worlds we enact, and the politics and ethics surrounding our
choices.2
In her book Ethics and Politics After Poststructuralism, Fagan (2013)
makes a persuasive case for how the ethical is also political. Discussions
about ethics in childhood studies are often exhausted with references
to ethical protocols and guidelines while broader critical discussions
related to the production of knowledge and the politics of representa-
tion are much more limited. I take this to be, in many ways, a failure
to address questions of responsibility in childhood studies more sys-
tematically (Barad 2007: 58; see also Law 2004). Denzin’s (2008: 100)
proclamation—“We change the world by changing the way we make it
visible”—is especially pertinent here in terms of highlighting our role as
researchers in the world’s becoming. Granted, it is not all up to us for
the world in which we are entangled, as researchers, also plays a role,
but still to quote Barad again, “We need to meet the universe halfway,
to take responsibility for the role that we play in the world’s differential
becoming” (2007: 396).
208
S. Spyrou
Hammersley (2016) has recently discussed one of the well-known

tensions in childhood studies, that is the tension between claims to
sameness and claims to difference in relation to children and adults. On
the one hand, Hammersley argues, childhood studies downplays dif-
ferences between children and adults in an attempt to overcome defi-
cit views which see children as inferior to adults. On the other hand, it
emphasizes differences between children and adults in an effort to estab-
lish itself as a distinct field of studies (2016: 4–5). One obvious instance
in which the latter manifests itself is in the development of child-
centered and child-friendly methodologies, that is methodologies which
are specifically developed or adapted for use with children.
What this tension shows, apart from the contradictory assumptions
it exposes, is that children are always constituted ontologically-speaking
in diverse ways to serve diverse interests and agendas. On the surface,
this suggests a problem for the field, namely, that it is not clear about
children’s ontological status. But this could also be suggestive of how
ontology and politics are intertwined even when their entanglement is
not addressed as such.
Mol (1999, 2002; see also Law 2004) refers to this intertwining as
‘ontological politics’. Elaborating her argument about ontological mul-
tiplicity (see Chapter 6), Mol suggests that the ontological (or the real)
when combined with the political offers options:
… reality does not precede the mundane practices in which we interact

with it, but is rather shaped within these practices. So the term politics
works to underline this active mode, this process of shaping, and the fact
that its character is both open and contested. (Mol 1999: 75; emphasis in
the original)
Mol (1999) distinguishes her claim for multiple realities and ontologi-
cal politics by differentiating it from both perspectivalism (viewing the
same reality from different perspectives or standpoints) and construc-
tivism (the social crafting or construction of a specific version of truth).
Ontological politics rather suggests that reality is manipulated and
enacted out of social practices.
Knowledge production as ‘intervention’ rather than ‘discovery’ inserts
researchers squarely in the process itself endowing them with a certain
209
degree of power and control to shape the relationship between them-

selves, the events they study, the research tools they use and their target
audiences (Fox and Alldred 2015: 411). Through their knowledge prac-
tices researchers are invited to take responsibility for intervening in the
world the way they do:
Particular possibilities for acting exist at every moment, and these chang-
ing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becom-
ing, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from
mattering. (Barad 2008: 144)3
From this perspective, intervening in scientific knowledge production

is viewed not as a problem but as a responsible act, both politically
and ethically. In her critique of anthropology, Nancy Scheper-Hughes
argues against cultural relativism and for the primacy of the ethical
which precedes and makes culture possible: “responsibility, account-
ability, answerability to ‘the other’—the ethical as I would define it—
is precultural to the extent that our human existence as social beings
presupposes the presence of the other” (Scheper-Hughes 2014: 319).
For Scheper-Hughes (2014: 318), anthropology (but the same could
be argued for childhood studies) needs to become more politically and
morally engaged—more “womanly”—and more concerned with how
people behave toward each other and not just with what they think.
The anthropologist needs to become from a mere ‘spectator’ to a ‘wit-
ness’ (Scheper-Hughes 2014: 319) and the ethnographic task a form of
engagement:
Seeing, listening, touching, recording can be, if done with care and sen-
sitivity, acts of solidarity. Not to look, not to touch, not to record can
be the hostile act, and act of indifference and of turning away. (Scheper-
Hughes 2014: 317)
A move towards a critical childhood studies which is mindful of its

knowledge practices necessitates an acute awareness on the part of
researchers about the constituent components of the research assem-
blages they participate in and the respective roles of these compo-
nents in knowledge production. As knowledge producers, childhood
210
S. Spyrou
researchers territorialize understandings of childhood in all sorts of

ways, not least through their theoretical and methodological choices
and “the highly ritualised conventions of academic research writing
and publishing that transform multi-register event-assemblages into
the unidimensional medium of written text” (Fox and Alldred 2015:
410). Whether that is a theoretical concern with the child as social actor
and childhood as a social construction or whether it is a methodolog-
ical concern with capturing children’s perspectives through participa-
tory methods, the otherwise complex and messy social worlds in which
children live and childhood finds a space, become organized, catego-
rized and rendered intelligible. The process is clearly transformative—
empirical reality is transformed into knowledge—irrespective of
whether it is made transparent or backgrounded for the sake of clar-
ity. Reflecting on this transformation offers an opportunity to rethink
knowledge production as a practice.
To account for our own role as researchers in the production of
knowledge we need, first and foremost, to recognize that “Scientific
inquiry is not neutral: every research design, method or theory is an
‘agential cut’ that reflects a particular power-laden effort to create
‘knowledge’” (Barad 2007: 19–20). The way we decide to render an
‘agential cut’ makes a difference. In a relational and ontologically mal-
leable world where various entities and forces come together to produce
capacities, our interventions give shape and form to that dynamism,
‘freezing it’ (even if temporarily) in order to describe and make it intel-
ligible. This is why we need to remind ourselves that “we have produced
rather than found distinct objects, that we have artificially reduced com-
plexity and not mastered it” (Frost 2011: 80) which is not to suggest, of
course, that empirical reality—the world itself—does not have a signifi-
cant say in this.
The capacity to intervene in a research assemblage in order to cre-
ate new possibilities and capacities and ultimately to produce different
knowledge does not only allow for new forms of engagement and exper-
imentation but also encourages a more politically and ethically mindful
positioning in relation to our knowledge practices to achieve preferred
effects:
211
We can, if we so wish, design and re-engineer research-assemblages and

machines (the data collection machine, the validity machine, the analysis
machine and so on) to include or exclude specified aggregative and terri-
torializing effects, and thereby innovate creative research-assemblages that
produce specific capacities in researchers, data and the events studied.
(Fox and Alldred 2017: 168)
When seeing knowledge production as an intervention, and a purpose-

ful one at that, research becomes a much more critical tool for change.
What might we fail to see when we aggregate, for instance, children’s
bodies in categories (e.g., childhood; special needs; age grades, etc.) and
how might some form of dis-aggregation allow us to see children differ-
ently and to produce different knowledge about them? And on the con-
trary: What sorts of aggregations might we use to illustrate, for instance,
common generational experiences among children or to make a more
powerful and politically convincing argument of the need to attend to
children as a category? Providing answers to these questions necessitates
taking an ethical and political position towards knowledge production
and its intended audiences. Who is this knowledge intended for? What
do we hope to achieve? How will this audience likely receive this knowl-
edge? What might they do with it? With what likely effects?
Which Ontologies, for Whom?

If ontology is malleable as Mol (2002) argues, then one may enter-
tain the possibility that different research practices may enact different
ontologies for different audiences and different purposes. On the sur-
face, this might sound dis-ingenious; but it would only be such, if we
adhere to a world where there is only a single possible reality to be dis-
covered and made known. If multiple realities co-exist in the world,
then which one is brought forth at any particular time and for which
purposes is a political and ethical question and not merely a scientific
or epistemological one. In his reflections on political ontology, and in
order to make this point in particular, Blaser recounts the words of an
Yshiro teacher and mentor who told him:
212
S. Spyrou
… not all stories (or accounts) are to be told or enacted just anywhere;
every situation requires its own story. Telling just any story without
attending to what the situation requires is sheer recklessness. (Blaser
2014)
Deciding what knowledge to bring forth, for whom and for what pur-
poses, highlights the ethics and politics of knowledge production.
Alldred (1998) asks whether we should have a more open mind when
it comes to how we present our research findings bearing in mind the
political stakes, so that in some cases we can present the mess and com-
plexity of children’s worlds and our methodological dilemmas when
the audience and purpose allows for that (e.g., in a scholarly journal)
but refrain from doing so (i.e., by intentionally avoiding to deconstruct
knowledge) when targeting another kind of audience where knowledge
claims need to come attached with authority (e.g., when targeting the
public, policy-makers, etc.). To raise doubts about the ‘authenticity’ of
the knowledge produced by emphasizing its contingency and situated-
ness is unlikely to go far in a policy context. Academic audiences might
be more amenable and receptive to the kind of ontological work dis-
cussed in this book which is characterized by complexity, fluidity and
ambiguity while policy makers might need a more clear, delineated and
unambiguous form of knowledge which serves their needs for imple-
menting policy though an attempt to do away with the mess of social
life (e.g., preparing a research report with clear policy recommenda-
tions) should always be held in check by the need to be sensitive to het-
erogeneity (Law 2014: 16). In the next section, I use the example of
children’s agency to illustrate how ontological politics may manifest in
childhood studies.
The Ontological Politics of Children’s Agency

As I pointed out earlier, concern with children’s agency in childhood
studies might have been originally at least as much a concern with the
political significance of rethinking children’s ontology and their place
in the world—children as beings and not as mere becomings—as with
213
the more academic concern with acknowledging children’s agency in

the social world. Thus, far from being a purely epistemological pursuit,
the larger concern with children’s agency (which escapes the narrow
confines of the academy to include public bodies, international organ-
izations, and practitioners, to name just a few), acquires a political and
moral significance with strategic (though rarely acknowledged) under-
lying motivations. In recent years, childhood studies scholars have been
more willing to discuss this often unacknowledged dimension of the
preoccupation with children’s agency.
In his research with street children in Cape Verde, for example,
Bordonaro problematizes uses of the notion of children’s agency when
street children’s behavior fails to conform with current understandings
of morality. Bordonaro shows how social interventions aimed to pro-
tect children also aim to correct their agency by bringing it in line with
morally approved goals; a recognition which necessitates that we move
our attention from acknowledging children’s agency to considering the
kinds of agency that are seen as appropriate for children (Bordonaro
2012: 423). Bordonaro’s analysis points towards the ‘politics of children’s
agency’—away from seeing agency as self-possession and as necessarily
positive—and towards seeing children’s agency “as a political and social
notion, whose definition itself is never disjoint from local assumptions
about rights, citizenship and morality” (Bordonaro 2012: 422).
In a similar vein, ongoing debates over child labor illustrate this polit-
ical use of children’s agency at an international level through its denial.
Quoting Liebel (2007), Wyness argues that working children’s voices are
often absent from international discussions on child labour because the
International Labor Organization prefers to retain a more straightfor-
ward narrative that seeks the elimination of child labor rather than risk
complicating the discourse with the inclusion of children’s perspectives
which might run contrary to this stated objective. In this context, chil-
dren’s agency is denied in order to serve a larger political agenda which
is controlled and sustained by adults (2015: 91).
The moral complexities of children’s lives necessitate more nuanced
discussions which account for the political without reducing such com-
plexities to either/or attributions which do little to inform our under-
standing of children and childhood beyond acknowledging current
214
S. Spyrou
political trends and commitments. Rosen (2007) provides an interest-

ing discussion of the ‘politics of representation in childhood’ as this
relates to the larger theoretical discussion about children’s agency. He
shows how “child soldiers” who participate in the military and engage
in violence are often denied by humanitarian organizations and inter-
national law their agency and considered to be simply victims who are
coerced into participating. This is so, Rosen argues, even when both the
historical and anthropological evidence on children’s participation in
the military suggests otherwise, that is, that children often participate
in the military willingly and do so with a sense of pride. Such narratives
which are often morally too strong to overcome, depict child soldiers
as emotional, irrational, dependent and powerless so that, even when it
appears that they are volunteering to participate, they are in fact coerced
into doing so as a result of multiple pressures, be it economic, social,
political or cultural (Rosen 2007: 299). Rosen concludes by problema-
tizing the political implications of recognizing child soldiers’ agency or
denying them of agency and treating them simply as victims of their
circumstances:
It is not a ‘new’ phenomenon as some would claim; neither is it driven

by the peculiar nature of modern warfare. Nonetheless, the issue remains
that today there are thousands of children and youth caught up in armed
warfare who are committing horrible crimes. How should we see them:
as innocent victims of political circumstance who should be protected
and forgiven, or as moral agents who should be held responsible for their
actions? Humanitarian law, discourse and practice demand a single uni-
versal resolution to these questions for which none is available. (Rosen
2007: 304)
As Denov (2012) has illustrated, the experiences of child soldiers often

defy the extreme media portrayals surrounding their lives (i.e., as either
victims or perpetrators) which tend to be quite a bit more ambiguous
and paradoxical. However, the ease with which their agency is strate-
gically called for or denied illustrates the politics of children’s agency
which becomes readily apparent when agency intersects with sensitive
moral questions.4 Indeed, as Rosen and Bluebond-Langner (2009)
215
argue, the notion of agency may be used selectively to serve larger moral
agendas with agency attributed to children in some contexts but denied
to them in others. As they explain, during the last two decades the crim-
inal justice system in the US has begun to treat juveniles as adults as far
as the law is concerned. In other words, the criminal justice system is
ascribing agency to children as a means of controlling and punishing
them while at the same time this same legal system does not grant the
same children agency in other areas of life such as drinking and voting.
Moreover, as the authors show, children are today increasingly ascribed
agency when it comes to decisions about medical care and treatment
or participation in medical research and this, even when the children
themselves often prefer to defer the decision to their own parents who
they feel are more capable to make them. In short, Rosen and Bluebond
Langner’s analysis shows how ascribed agency takes different forms in
different institutional settings so that it can be respected and empha-
sized in one setting or in relation to one issue but denied in relation to
another.
Adding a strategic dimension to questions of representation allows
us to consider the use of children’s agency for political ends. Claims to
agency can be as essentialist as claims to its contrary, that is, the lack of
agency. However, as Herzfeld (2005: 26) reminds us, it is important to
recognize that such essentialist claims can be strategic serving particu-
lar agendas and thus we should be careful not to essentialize essential-
isms (Herzfeld 2005: 27). Quoting Prout (2000), Komulainen (2007:
26) points out that children might be both vulnerable and competent
at the same time so that what we need to reflect on is how, as adults and
researchers, we end up positioning them one way or the other (see also
Bluebond-Langner and Korbin 2007; Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi 2013).
Recognizing this essentialist positioning offers a deeper understanding
of the strategic significance of children’s agency as a political position
and claim reminiscent of Spivak’s widely-known notion of ‘strategic
essentialism’.
It is in this sense that a concern with children’s agency in childhood
studies goes beyond the mere acknowledgement and recording through
empirical research of children’s activity and role in transforming their
216
S. Spyrou
worlds. It is also, at the same time, and above all, a claim to a particular
ontological status for children in the larger world.
Each enactment as a knowledge practice ontologizes the children in
question differently: differently (equally real) children emerge out of
each enactment. The vulnerable child soldiers who are victims of their
circumstances as minors are, ontologically speaking, different from the
agentic, self-reflexive child soldiers who participate in wars freely. Each
enactment discloses a different child who comes into being through the
entanglement of diverse material and discursive forces which include
bodies, material conditions of existence, institutions, discourses and
representations to name but the most obvious ones.
Acknowledging the politics of ontology implicates knowledge pro-
duction in another related way—through the choice of scale—an issue
which I briefly touch on in the next section. Scale is one of childhood
studies’ insufficiently problematized assumptions which directly links to
the kind of knowledge the field ends up producing, hence the need to
reflect on its contributing role.
Ontology and Scale-Making
As we have seen, with the establishment and the subsequent develop-
ment of the ‘new paradigm’ in childhood studies, the scale of choice
was clearly the local, micro context of children’s everyday activity. With
few exceptions, childhood researchers went out to document and make
sense of children’s social worlds and cultures, to elucidate their experi-
ences by highlighting their voices, and to provide proof for their agency.
The focus on the competent, agentic child offered childhood studies a
welcomed and clear path to pursue its intellectual and political project.
The preferred approach was ethnography and more generally qualita-
tive methodologies which allowed for a more intimate look at children’s
experiences as they unfolded in the local contexts of everyday life (James
and Prout 1990). This new orientation and the plethora of small-scale,
local studies of children it inspired was in many ways a scale-making
project, based on particular ontological and epistemological assump-
tions which largely remained unexamined by the field in a climate of
217
intellectual euphoria. Its emphasis on, and search for, the agentic child
who is capable of independent thought and action, for instance, meant
that only certain kinds of children would become subjects of research:
mainly those who had a voice which could clearly articulate the know-
ing, reflexive and agentic capacity of the child (see Chapter 4). Very
young children who cannot speak in those terms, children who are
shy or prefer not to speak, and more generally children who are una-
ble to exercise a recognizable form of agency as individuals were largely
excluded (see Oswell, forthcoming).
It is in this sense that the choice of scale in childhood studies fore-
grounds particular perspectives, precludes others, and serves certain
interests at the expense of others. A focus on the local of children’s
lives may ignore forces which impact on children’s lives in significant
ways but happen beyond the micro contexts of children’s everyday life.
Such a focus may also, unintentionally, result in the downplaying of the
knowledge produced which is seen as too limited and parochial; indeed,
this bias in favor of agency and the local has undoubtedly precluded the
creation of a more structuralist and globalist agenda for the field (Ansell
2009: 191–192; see also Bessell 2011).
In sum, the choice of scale enables and constraints knowledge pro-
duction in different ways and in that sense it does matter what a field’s
preferred scale is. The social constructionist orientation of childhood
studies has enabled the field to offer critical insights into knowledge
production by problematizing particular constructions of childhood.
However, relativizing knowledge as we have also seen has highlighted a
problem for the field and its political and ethical commitments: how do
we choose from among the alternatives?
Beyond Relativism
New materialist thinking offers theoretical tools to overcome the lim-
its of cultural relativism and to consider the ethical implications of
our practices in ways that discursive approaches cannot (Alaimo and
Hekman 2008: 7–8). Ontological multiplicity does not render our
claims to reality relativist: the world is real but ‘multiply’ rather than
218
S. Spyrou
‘singularly’ real. This implicates our earlier discussion on diffractive

thinking (see Chapter 2) and the possibilities for intervening in knowl-
edge production to achieve preferred outcomes. An ethics which allows
us to compare the material consequences of our political positions also
allows us to consider positions that are more favorable to those, humans
or non-humans, involved. Moreover, by focusing on ethical practices
rather than ethical principles a material ethics can take into considera-
tion both the expected and unexpected consequences which may result
in particular contexts which of course is not to say, as Sparrman (2014)
reminds us, that ethical issues are devoid of mess and complexity.
For instance, Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010: 539–540) argue
that relational materialism might “increase our attentiveness to chil-
dren’s strong relations to the things, artefacts and spaces in pre-schools
and schools that are often overlooked in favor of the social or interper-
sonal relations” and hence result in more ethical research practices. This
new awareness (instigated through a diffractive analysis which is mind-
ful and strategic about the kinds of interferences it exercises in knowl-
edge production) as Lenz Taguchi argues elsewhere, constitutes an
ethical and responsible engagement:
It implies a resistance against foundational, anthropocentric and privileg-

ing points of view, to acknowledge our interdependence and co-existence
with other bodies in the world. What is produced as knowing in the dif-
fractive analysis is thus a material- discursive reality where that which has
been considered passive and minor is now seen as active and forceful in
its intra-activities with other bodies. Diffractive analysis makes us aware
of our embodied involvement in the materiality of the event of analyzing
data. (Lenz Taguchi 2012: 277–278)
A critical childhood studies will have to rethink its social construction-

ist and relativist take by making more explicit its choices for knowledge
production bearing in mind the material effects of its interventions in
children’s lives. Deciding how to intervene on the basis of preferred out-
comes is unlikely to convince everyone (see Hekman 2008: 112); how-
ever, taking into account the material effects of knowledge on children’s
lives offers opportunities for critical interventions which are mindful of
219
their consequences. What are the likely material effects on child soldiers
if research enacts an ontology of these children as knowledgeable and
reflexive agents who are fully aware of what they are doing and willingly
join the military versus enacting an ontology of these children as vul-
nerable victims of oppressive, structural realities which force them into
becoming child soldiers? What privileges, rights, supports, resources or
lack thereof, are afforded to different child identities or subject positions
which are enacted in the course of research?
To illustrate the significance of assessing the material effects of our
disclosures, I turn to the ongoing debate about children and work (see,
for example, Bourdillon et al. 2010). An attempt is made currently by
a group of academics and child rights practitioners to pressure interna-
tional bodies to acknowledge that not all children’s work is detrimen-
tal to their development and to avoid applying universal minimum age
standards to employment and abolitionist measures to child work. In
their letter to the members of the United Nations Committee on the
Convention of the Rights of the Child (see https://www.opendemo-
cracy.net/beyondslavery/open-essay-better-approach-to-child-work;
accessed January 3, 2018), the group acknowledges, based on the accu-
mulated evidence from research, that indeed some forms of child work
can harm children and therefore adults need to intervene in those cases
on children’s behalf but at the same time, the group argues that work
can also be beneficial to children’s social development and critical to
their own well-being and the well-being of their families, especially in
contexts of severe poverty where schooling does not provide tangible
benefits. The group’s argument is that criminalizing and restricting chil-
dren’s participation to work does not serve children well; instead, effort
should be devoted to addressing the structural, economic and political
factors which place children at risk of exploitative and harmful work.
The group in question seeks to disclose a different kind of knowl-
edge and understanding of children and childhood in the context of
work than that which often surfaces in the protectionist rhetoric of
international organizations seeking to remove children from work.
What they bring forth—the ontological realities which they attempt
to disclose based on their accumulated knowledge—seeks to ontolo-
gize children differently: not as victims or not necessarily as victims but
220
S. Spyrou
also as highly interdependent beings who actively participate in their

worlds and in the work force and contribute to their own well-being
and the well-being of their families. There is no denying that children
are vulnerable and in need of protection but, at the same time, they are
not simply seen as that. They are also seen as agents who participate in
work in order to support themselves and their families in the face of
sharp structural inequalities. Yet, this is a somewhat different kind of
ontologizing than that which is enacted in relation to child soldiers (see
earlier discussion). These working children are not seen as independ-
ent and autonomous social actors but rather as highly interdependent
beings whose actions and choices are directly linked with the worlds
and well-being of others, their parents, siblings, their families and com-
munities at large.
The arguments put forth to support the group’s position attempt to
convince, not by resorting to abstract, universal values, ideas or ethi-
cal standards but by pinpointing the material consequences of work on
children, namely the positive effects of work and the detrimental effects
of applying minimum age prohibitions. Below is a selective list of the
arguments they put forth to support their position, a position which is
clearly political and ethical but rests on a materialist understanding of
the potential effects of the alternatives in question:
• “When minimum age standards are incorporated into legislation,

younger children who are no longer able to work legally can be
pushed into illegal, invisible or more harmful forms of work, leaving
them with no protective system.
• Participation in household and economic work is often a powerful
socializing force that brings children resilience and resources through
full membership of their families and communities.
• Through work, children can learn technical and social skills that
improve their self-confidence and well-being in the present and their
life chances in the future.
• Work has economic benefits, important not only for the nutrition
and school expenses of children from poor families, but also in the
future.
221
• The Minimum Age Convention offers no alternative protection to

those who by force of circumstances need income for livelihood,
and very often for schooling. Indeed, by making formal employment
illegal to them, the Convention drives children’s work (including
domestic work) underground and makes exploitative work situations
more likely and considerably harder to control.
• The evidence suggests that a general minimum age for employment
actually does not protect children from work abuse, but may deprive
them of the benefits of work. In that way, it does more harm than
good.
• Raising household income (such as through conditional cash trans-
fers) may in poverty settings both increase school attendance and
reduce the amount of time children devote to work, without nec-
essarily removing them from work altogether” (Open Democracy
2016; https://www.opendemocracy.net/open-letter-better-approach-
to-child-work; accessed January 3, 2018).
There is clearly no objective claim to absolute truth which can be made

to argue this or any intervention. However, new materialism offers us
critical tools for understanding knowledge production as an entangled
relation which is complex and in flux, yet one which can be assessed in
terms of its material effects. Which realities we disclose in that sense,
does matter.
My theoretical explorations in this book have focused mainly on
three concepts: voice, agency, and participation. These are clearly cen-
tral concerns for childhood studies but I have used them here mainly
for illustrative purposes and to argue a more general point which can
be applied to other theoretical concepts and concerns and also, as
I have shown above, to different empirical investigations of the field.
This more general point—that our knowledge practices disclose dif-
ferent childhoods and that these disclosures carry varied political
and ethical commitments with subsequent material consequences
on children’s lives—provides a framework, though not the only one,
which can help childhood studies develop productively its critical
proclivities.
222
S. Spyrou
The Irreducible Child: Towards a Critically Open

Childhood Studies
Since its emergence as an interdisciplinary field, childhood studies has
tried to stay away from essentialisms and reductionisms. However, as
I have argued, much of the work produced has followed a mostly repro-
ductive mode. To reassert and enhance its presence in contemporary
scholarship, childhood studies needs to rethink its future trajectory in
new and more productive ways which challenge dominant theoretical
frames and connect it with wider developments in the social sciences.
This kind of reimagining should seek to avoid closure and leave the
child-question open (see Spyrou et al., forthcoming).
The tendency to explain away the child—to reduce her to a set of
capacities—might contribute more towards caricaturing the child rather
than elucidating her. Relational ontologies alert us about the irreduci-
bility of the child and that any agential cut we enact on the world is pre-
cisely that: a cut in an entangled world in order to delineate particular
categories and understandings of the child which speak not for what the
child as a category is but how she comes into being in time and space
exhibiting particular capacities which could be otherwise within another
set of assembled relations. Acknowledging the ontological irreducibility
of the child and the partiality, situatedness, and limits of knowing as
well as the politics of representation which produce certain understand-
ings of children rather than others, is as I’Anson (2013: 104) reminds
us an ethical imperative. But it is not merely an ethical imperative
because there is (or should be) responsibility attached to any attempt
at representing others—children included. It is also an ethical impera-
tive because as Oswell (2016: 30) points out, we have a responsibility
to consider the irreducible (and that which lacks transparency) as ‘soci-
ologically interesting’ rather than simply reducing complexity for the
sake of transparency and political clarity (though as I have argued, there
might be times when we opt for a certain degree of aggregation as a
strategic option bearing in mind the political and ethical stakes and the
anticipated material effects on children’s lives).
In this book, I advocate a ‘critically open’ childhood studies. By ‘crit-
ically open’ I mean a childhood studies which neither denies the real,
223
material conditions of children’s lives and the structural realities which

shape them nor rests on naïve and simplistic understandings which
conflate ‘good’ research with the authentic representation of children’s
worlds. It is critical because the knowledge it seeks to produce is not
relativistic but politically and ethically committed and responsible.
Yet, at the same time, it seeks to remain open, to invite ‘trouble’ and
to produce knowledge differently by pushing research, data and theory
to their exhaustion (Jackson and Mazzei 2012: 7). In research practice
this might mean tackling certain kinds of difficult data—the “uncoda-
ble, excessive, out-of-control, out-of-category” data which St. Pierre
(1997: 179) talks about or the difficult-to-make sense-of data that
Rosen (2015) and Schnoor (2013) come across in their respective stud-
ies, or the not-so-obvious data I have discussed in Chapter 4, in relation
to children’s silences. Or, it might mean, applying different theoretical
perspectives to the same sets of data to produce new understandings and
possibilities for knowing (e.g., Jackson and Mazzei 2012).
A critically open childhood studies recognizes the situatedness and
limits of its own conceptual apparatus and knowledge practices and
avoids all sorts of closure. The very concepts we use in childhood stud-
ies—whether it is agency, voice, or participation—come with a history
of engagement and are loaded with meanings and assumptions. They
have appeared, developed and acquired legitimacy within a particular
epoch and as I have shown they are slowly but steadily confronted with
their limits. I have argued for the value of rethinking such foundational
concepts of the field in ways which allow us to produce knowledge that
is critical but open and non-reductive. Nevertheless, there might be a
point when these concepts no longer serve our purposes—when they
become more constraining than enabling—and at that point it might be
wise to discard and replace them.
In the introductory chapter of this book, I cited an excerpt from the
preface of Kidd’s (1906) Savage Childhood:
It is safe to say that in a hundred years’ time people will be wondering why
we, with all our boasted love, for knowledge and with all our professed
sympathy for our subject races, allowed our priceless opportunity to slip
by unheeded. I have, therefore, been more anxious to record the facts than
to indicate their bearing on current anthropological theory. (ix–x)
224
S. Spyrou
Kidd’s claim that he was merely recording the facts is anything but con-
vincing a hundred or more years later. Not only have the times changed
and the assumed givens of Kidd’s era have come to pass, but social
inquiry has also developed more critical and reflexive tools for con-
fronting its knowledge productions. Chances are that what we profess
today—the assumptions we hold about the social world and the kind
of knowledge that we produce—will come to pass as well, as too inad-
equate, too limited, or perhaps too narrow-minded and unimaginative
despite our current convictions to the contrary. However, this should
not mean that we have to resort back to a sense of putative neutrality
and objectivity. To the extent that the knowledge we produce does mat-
ter we have a responsibility to position ourselves, though this kind of
positioning should always retain a sense of humility; this is important
not only because the ethics and politics of knowledge production are
always situated but also because we should let the empirical worlds we
study to surprise us with the new and the unexpected. Taking child-
hood to be a conceptually dense phenomenon which defies simplis-
tic understandings opens up its exploration to a world of relationality,
interdependence, ambiguity, multiplicity and complexity. Maintaining a
certain sense of ongoing discomfort with the knowledge we produce as
well as a sense of epistemic humility requires that we recognize the lim-
its of knowledge. Not everything is potentially knowable, at least, with
the use of our research methods. As Frost has eloquently put it, “we
must learn to incorporate the possibility of an impossibility of knowing
into our epistemologies that is not indexed to the limits of perception or
to the development of technology but rather intrinsic to the complexity
of objects or processes themselves” (2011: 79). Yet, despite the limits
to our knowing and the sense of humility which should come hand-in-
hand with our knowledge practices, there is much work which needs
to be done towards disclosing childhoods that we have so far failed to
bring forth—childhoods whose disclosure will enrich our understand-
ing of the human condition—and producing knowledge about children
and childhood that is significant and meaningful for our times and the
worlds we live in (see Spyrou et al., forthcoming). The challenge for
childhood studies is to exercise a kind of critique which does not simply
lament children’s realities in the present or predicts a dim future but one
225
which considers alternative ontologies and disclosures which can denote

different and more viable material realities for children (Hekman 2010:
128). This entails a sense of commitment, responsibility, and account-
ability for the field as a whole, and above all a sense of conviction that
the knowledge we bring forth does matter, even if not always suffi-
ciently so.
Notes
1. See Philo’s (2016: 624) call for a non- or less-child-centric children’s
geographies which looks out from (rather than in at) children’s lifeworlds
to the wider world.
2. For an excellent analysis of how politics and science are intertwined, see
Barad’s (1998) analysis of the sonogram and how it helps materialize the
fetus by allowing it to be seen.
3. Despite its appeal, as Hage (2014) points out, the “pursuit of ontological
multiplicity and the highlighting of existing dominated and overshad-
owed modes of existence” does not necessarily mean that one can chal-
lenge effectively the structural and hegemonic forces in place.
4. See also Hammersley’s (2016: 8–9) discussion of the tension in child-
hood studies between recognizing children’s agency and recognizing
children’s responsibility. Hammersley argues that the responsibility that
goes with being an autonomous agent is often ignored when attributing
agency to children in childhood studies.
References
Alaimo, S., & Hekman, S. (2008). Introduction: Emerging models of materi-
ality in feminist theory. In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material femi-
nisms (pp. 1–19). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Alldred, P., & Burman, E. (2005). Analysing children’s accounts using dis-
course analysis. In S. Greene & D. Hogan (Eds.), Researching children’s
226
S. Spyrou
experience: Approaches and methods (pp. 175–198). London, Thousand

Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage.
Ansell, N. (2009). Childhood and the politics of scale: Descaling children’s
geographies? Progress in Human Geography, 33(2), 190–209.
Barad, K. (1998). Getting real: Technoscientific practices and the materiali-
zation of reality. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 10(2),
87–128.
Bessell, S. (2011). Influencing international child labour policy: The potential
and limits of children-centred research. Children and Youth Services Review,
33(4), 564–568.
Blaser, M. (2014, January 13). The political ontology of doing difference …
and sameness. Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology [website].
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/474-the-political-ontology-of-doing-differ-
ence-and-sameness. Accessed on January 21, 2018.
ties in the Anthropology of childhoods: An introduction to children, child-
Bordonaro, L. I. (2012). Agency does not mean freedom: Cape Verdean street
children and the politics of children’s agency. Children’s Geographies, 10(4),
413–426.
Bourdillon, M., Levison, B., Myers, W., & White, B. (2010). Rights and
wrongs of children’s work. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Denov, M. (2012). Child soldiers and iconography: Portrayals and (mis)rep-
resentations. Children and Society, 26(4), 280–292.
Denzin, N. (2008). Confronting ethnography’s crisis of representation. In
P. Atkinson & S. Delamont (Eds.), Representing ethnography, volume 2,
reading qualitative research. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and
Singapore: Sage.
Eldén, S. (2013). Inviting the messy: Drawing methods and ‘children’s voices’.
Childhood, 20(1), 66–81.
Fagan, M. (2013). Ethics and politics after poststructuralism: Levinas, Derrida
and Nancy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
227
Fox, N. J., & Alldred, P. (2015). New materialist social inquiry: Designs,
Frost, S. (2011). The implications of the new materialisms for feminist epis-
temology. In H. E. Grasswick (Ed.), Feminist epistemology and philosophy of
science: Power in knowledge (pp. 69–83). Dordrecht: Springer.
Grover, S. (2004). Why won’t they listen to us? On giving power and voice to
children participating in social research. Childhood, 11(1), 81–93.
Hage, G. (2014, January 13). Critical anthropology as a permanent state of
first contact. Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology [website].
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/473-critical-anthropology-as-a-permanent-
state-of-first-contact. Accessed on January 21, 2018.
Childhood 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568216631399.
Hekman, S. (2008). Constructing the ballast: An ontology for feminism.
In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 85–119).
Herzfeld, M. (2005). Cultural intimacy: Social poetics in the nation-state. New
York: Routledge.
Holbraad, M., & Pedersen, M. A. (2017). The ontological turn: An anthropolog-
ical exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
23(5), 525–542.
I’Anson, J. (2013). Beyond the child’s voice: Towards an ethics of children’s
participation rights. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(2), 104–114.
Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative
research: Using epistemological frameworks in the production of meaning.
London: Routledge.
James, A., & Prout, A. (Eds.). (1990). Constructing and reconstructing child-
Falmer Press.
228
S. Spyrou
Kidd, D. (1906). Savage childhood: A study of Kafir children. London: Adam

and Charles Black.
Knorr Cetina, K. (2007). Culture in global knowledge societies: Knowledge
cultures and epistemic cultures. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 32(4),
361–375.
Komulainen, S. (2007). The ambiguity of the child’s ‘voice’ in social research.
Childhood, 14(1), 11–28.
York: Routledge.
Law, J. (2014). Working well with wickedness. CRESC Working Paper 135,
1–22.
Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University.
Lenz Taguchi, H. (2012). A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing
interview data. Feminist Theory, 13(3), 265–281.
Liebel, M. (2007). Opinion, dialogue, review: The new ILO report on child
labour—A success story, or the ILO still at a loss? Childhood, 14(2),
279–284.
Marcus, G. E. (1998). Ethnography through thick & thin. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Mizen, P., & Ofosu-Kusi, Y. (2013). Agency as vulnerability: Accounting for
children’s movement to the streets of Accra. The Sociological Review, 61,
363–382.
Mol, A. (1999). Ontological politics: A word and some questions. In J. Law
& J. Hassard (Eds.), Actor network theory and after (pp. 74–89). Oxford:
Blackwell.
Open Democracy. (2016). Open letter: A better approach to child work. https://
www.opendemocracy.net/open-letter-better-approach-to-child-work.
Accessed on January 3, 2018.
Oswell, D. (2016). Re-aligning children’s agency and re-socializing children
in childhood studies. In F. Esser, M. S. Baader, T. Betz, & B. Hungerland
Oswell, D. (forthcoming). What space for a children’s politics? Rethinking
infancy in childhood studies. In S. Spyrou, R. Rosen, & D. Cook (Eds.),
229
Philo, C. (2016). Childhood is measured out by sounds and sights and smells,
before the dark of reason grows: Children’s geographies at 12. Children’s
Geographies, 14(6), 623–640.
Pickering, A. (2008). New ontologies. In A. Pickering & K. Guzik (Eds.), The
mangle in practice: Science, society and becoming (pp. 1–14). Durham, NC:
Pillow, W. (2010). Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflex-
ivity as methodological power in qualitative research. International Journal
of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(2), 175–196.
Prout, A. (2000). Childhood bodies: Construction, agency and hybridity. In
A. Prout (Ed.), The body, childhood and society (pp. 1–18). Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Rautio, P. (2014). Mingling and imitating in producing spaces for know-
ing and being: Insights from a Finnish study of child-matter intra-action.
Childhood, 21(4), 461–474.
Rosen, D. (2007). Child soldiers, international humanitarian law, and the glo-
balization of childhood. American Anthropologist, 109(2), 296–306.
Rosen, R. (2015). ‘The scream’: Meanings and excesses in early childhood set-
tings. Childhood, 22(1), 39–52.
Rosen, D., & Bluebond-Langner, M. (2009, December 2–6). The agency of
children: Political and ethical dimensions of the new childhood. Paper pre-
sented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.
Scheper-Hughes, N. (2014). The primacy of the ethical. In D. Fassin & S.
Leze (Eds.), Moral anthropology: A critical reader (pp. 313–320). London
and New York: Routledge.
Schnoor, O. (2013). Early childhood studies as vocal studies: Examining the
social practices of ‘giving voice to children’s voices’ in a crèche. Childhood,
20(4), 458–471.
Sparrman, A. (2014). Access and gatekeeping in researching children’s sexual-
ity: Mess in ethics and methods. Sexuality and Culture, 18(2), 291–309.
433–437.
Spyrou, S., Rosen, R., & Cook, D. (Eds.). (forthcoming). Reimagining child-
hood studies. London: Bloomsbury.
St. Pierre, E. A. (1997). Methodology in the fold and the irruption of trans-
gressive data. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(2),
175–189.
230
S. Spyrou
Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational theory: Space/politics/affect. London and

New York: Routledge.
Tuana, N. (2008). Viscous porosity: Witnessing Katrina. In S. Alaimo & S.
Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 188–213). Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Watson, K., Millei, Z., & Petersen, E. B. (2015). ‘Special’ non-human actors
in the ‘inclusive’ early childhood classroom: The wrist-band, the lock and
the scooter board. Global Studies of Childhood, 5(3), 266–278.
Index
A Agentic child 5, 17, 18, 27, 28, 60, 91,

Abebe, T. 123 119, 121, 129, 160, 216, 217
Accountability 9, 39, 209, 225 Agents 9, 28, 38, 67, 75, 107,
Actants 67, 129 119–121, 125, 128, 138, 141,
Actor-network-theory 25, 26, 148, 149, 214, 219, 220, 225
66, 129 Aggregation 222
Adulthood 16, 24, 58, 61, 69, 124, Aitken, S.C. 143
125, 131, 162 Alaimo, S. 25, 132, 133, 149, 217
Affect 6, 7, 40, 140, 142, 143, 145, Alanen, L. 16, 17, 24, 29, 58, 63, 64,
147, 185 71, 72
Agency 7, 11, 12, 16, 18, 21, 25–27, Alcoff, L. 107
36, 37, 57, 61, 62, 66, 67, 70, Alderson P. 22, 27, 91, 149, 160,
76, 77, 103, 109, 117–135, 162, 169
138, 140, 141, 143–150, 174, Alldred, P. 7, 24, 26, 34, 35, 69, 106,
186, 198, 201, 212–217, 221, 107, 137, 140, 143, 145, 147,
223, 225 186, 200, 201, 209–212
Agency as self-possession 67, 121, Alvesson, M. 33, 34, 63, 64, 108
122, 130–132, 134, 213 Ambiguous agency 126, 149
Agential cut 138, 210, 222 Anderson, S. 162, 166, 167, 169,
Agential realism 133–135 170, 173
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 231

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47904-4
232
Index
Ansell, N. 123, 145, 146, 217 C

Archard, D. 56 Cahill, C. 158, 162, 166, 168
Assemblage theory 25, 130, 146 Callon, M. 66
Assemblages 5, 7, 26, 36, 37, 40, 70, Castaneda, C. 7
77, 129, 137, 138, 140–148, Child-led research 160, 161, 170,
180, 186, 188, 201, 209–211 171
Authentic child 199, 200 Cheney, K. 162, 168, 172, 175, 176
Authenticity 11, 21, 28, 31, 85–88, Child-centeredness 23, 29, 41, 58,
102, 172, 174, 198, 199, 212 76, 165, 208
Child ethnographer 159
Child-focus 58, 162
B Child-focused research 88
Bakhtin, M. 11, 86, 87, 105 Child-friendly methodologies 208
Balagopalan, S. 150 Childhood studies 4, 5, 8, 10–12,
Barad, K. 6, 9, 24, 25, 36–39, 41, 15–18, 21–35, 37, 39–42, 53,
133–135, 137, 138, 149, 186, 54, 60, 62–64, 68, 70–72,
203, 207, 209, 210, 225 74–76, 85–87, 90, 107, 109,
Beauvais, C. 121 117, 118, 120–122, 124, 126,
Becomings, children as 15, 16, 26, 128, 130, 132–134, 143–149,
57, 58, 61, 69, 70, 118, 131, 157–159, 162–165, 167, 174,
138, 184, 203, 204, 212 178, 183, 188, 189, 197–199,
Beings, children as 15, 58, 61, 118, 201, 202, 206–209, 212, 213,
131, 184, 212 215–217, 221–225
Bessell, S. 217 Childhood vs childhoods 62
Best, A. 31, 35, 42, 90 Children as co-researchers 92, 160
Blaser, M. 211, 212 Children as primary researchers 92,
Bluebond-Langner, M. 54, 55, 95, 161
122, 123, 214, 215 Children’s bodies 66, 77, 140, 150,
Bordonaro, L. 126 203, 211
Boundary-making 39 Children’s experiences 22, 56, 76, 89,
Bozalek, V. 38, 39 95, 105, 119, 130, 135, 159,
Bragg, S. 43, 89, 90, 107 164, 216
Braidotti, R. 25, 133 Children’s participation 12, 17, 107,
Brownlie, J. 162, 166, 167, 121, 125, 129, 157–159, 167,
169, 170 168, 172, 174, 175, 177–179,
Buckingham, D. 43, 89, 90, 107 187, 214, 219
Burman, E. 34, 35, 56, 106, 107, Children’s participation in research
201 12, 157–159, 166–168, 172,
Butler, J. 20 177, 178, 180, 183–187
Index
233
Children’s perspectives 23, 28, 96, Critical childhood studies 5, 9, 12,

104, 106, 119, 157, 164, 172, 37, 41, 86, 122, 144, 145, 147,
173, 210, 213 148, 197, 198, 209, 218
Children’s standpoint 23, 106, 163, Critically open childhood studies
164, 173, 174 222, 223
Children’s subjectivities 11, 21, 86, Critical reflexivity 29, 33–35, 73
142, 200, 205 Curtis, P. 76
Children’s voices 11, 23, 28, 31, 58,
62, 64, 86–89, 92–97, 103–
109, 119, 158, 168, 177, 188, D
201, 213 Dahlberg G. 70
Child researcher 159, 169, 173 Davis, J. 162
Child soldiers 214, 216, 219, 220 Decentering 10, 11, 23, 25, 28, 41,
Chin, E. 22, 91, 160, 162, 163, 166, 75, 85, 86, 108, 109,
177 129, 202
Christensen, P. 22, 31, 58, 89, 90, Decentering the child 26, 148
159, 175, 176 Decentering the subject 11, 18, 21,
Christou, M. 97, 135, 140 28, 75, 129, 202
Clifford, J. 18, 20, 31 De Certau, M. 183
Cockburn, T. 43 Deconstruction 23, 203
Coffey, J. 126, 127, 148 Deconstructive critique 11, 42
Complexity 8, 18, 26, 43, 61, 62, 72, Deconstructive logic 8
76, 95, 97, 103, 144, 146, 186, Delanda, M. 130, 145
200, 201, 210, 212, 218, 222, Deleuze, G. 68, 78, 129, 130, 137,
224 142, 143, 149
Connolly, P. 32 Deleuzian perspectives 69
Cook, D. 72, 122, 125, 147, 202, Denzin, N. 20, 21, 207
222, 224 Deterritorialization 143, 186
Coole, D. 25, 26, 132, 133 Development, theory of/developmen-
Coppock, V. 172 tal psychology/developmental-
Co-production of knowledge 160, ism/developmental paradigm
174 21, 23, 39, 54–57, 68, 105,
Cordero Arce, M. 150 165
Co-researcher 159, 160 Diffraction/diffractive thinking/dif-
Corporeality/corporeal 5, 60, 65, 77, fractive methodology/diffractive
139, 140 analysis 10, 27, 37–40, 186,
Corsaro, W. 21, 91 218
Crisis of representation 18, 31, 200 Disaggregation 186
234
Index
Disciplinary knowledge/disciplinar- Esser, F. 68, 123, 128, 149, 150, 188

ity/disciplines 54, 70–75 Ethical symmetry 176
Disclosure 6–9, 13, 28, 39, 40, 63, Ethics/ethical 3, 4, 6, 8, 10–12,
100, 101, 148, 188, 202, 206, 16–18, 20, 28, 30, 31, 34, 35,
219, 221, 224 37, 39–43, 86, 87, 108, 109,
Discourse/discursive 5–7, 9, 11, 25, 147, 159, 174, 176, 183, 185,
26, 38, 61, 65, 66, 75, 77, 86, 188, 197, 199, 200, 202, 204,
88, 101, 104–108, 129, 130, 207, 209, 211, 212, 217, 218,
132–135, 138–142, 144, 158, 220–222, 224
159, 184, 187, 203–206, 213, Ethnography/ethnographic
214, 216–218 approaches 1, 3, 4, 16, 20, 35,
Discursive forms of participation 158 57, 59, 161, 202, 216
Distributed agency 131 Everyday agency 127, 128
Dolphijn, R. 26, 133 Experimentation 5, 11, 39, 54, 72,
Dualisms/dualistic thinking 19, 26, 74, 76, 121, 132, 147, 204, 210
28, 38, 59–62, 65, 68, 76, 133,
134
F
Fagan, M. 207
E Farrugia, D. 126, 127, 148
Eldén, S. 201 Feminism/feminist 10, 18, 19,
Elwood, S. 144 21–23, 33, 39, 42, 43, 78, 132,
Emergent paradigm 15, 55, 59 149, 161, 163
Enactment 6, 7, 28, 37, 39, 40, 67, Feminist social epistemology 22
70, 134, 135, 140, 141, 178, Fine, G.A. 21, 31, 91
180, 187, 188, 206, 207, 211, Fischer, M. 18, 20, 31
216, 222 Flat ontology 26, 145
Entanglement 6, 7, 26, 38, 40, 117, Foucault, M. 9, 73, 74, 183
134, 137, 138, 141, 159, 178, Fox, N.J. 7, 24, 26, 69, 137, 140,
186, 200, 203, 205–208, 216, 143, 145, 147, 186, 201,
221, 222 209–211
Epistemes 9, 74 ‘Friend’ role 21
Epistemic culture 9 Frost, S. 26, 132, 133, 210, 224
Epistemology 4, 6–8, 10, 16–18, 26,
29, 35, 39, 53, 74, 76, 90, 102,
125, 134, 144, 149, 162, 166, G
171, 202, 203, 211, 213, 216 Gallacher, L.-A. 27, 167, 172
Ergler, C.R. 170, 175, 180, 184 Gallagher, M. 21, 27, 167, 172, 183,
Escobar, A. 146, 147 184
Index
235
Generagency 123, 124 Hybridity 61, 66–68, 75–77

Generation 16, 123, 124, 164
Generational order 8, 24, 123, 164
Generational position 16 I
Generational relations 42, 61 Individual voices 104
Giddens, A. 25, 119, 121 Innovation/innovative 5, 23, 27, 34,
Gittins, D. 65 35, 54, 59, 72–74, 103, 121,
Greene, S. 17, 22, 31, 71, 89, 90 148, 206
Grosz, E. 133 Insider knowledge 163, 168, 176
Grover, S. 199 Insider perspective 12, 162
Guattari, F. 68, 78, 129, 130, 137, Interdependency 128
142, 143 Interdisciplinarity/interdisciplinary
11, 15, 31, 54, 61, 70–73, 76,
87, 222
H Intergeneragency 124
Hammersley, M. 20, 64, 170, 208, International Labor Organization
225 (ILO) 213
Hanson, K. 77 Intervention 7, 183, 208, 211, 221
Haraway, D. 20, 22, 37, 132, 173 Intra-action 38, 39, 41, 134, 135,
Harding, S. 22 141, 142, 206
Hardman, C. 54 Intrageneragency 124
Hart, R. 181 Irreducibility 222
Heidegger, M. 13, 24 Irreducible child 222
Hekman, S. 6, 7, 9, 13, 25, 132, 133,
149, 203, 207, 217, 218, 225
Heterogeneous materials 5, 65, 66, J
70, 129 James, A. 12, 15–17, 23, 27, 31,
Hill, M. 88, 89, 168 55–59, 64, 71, 76, 87, 89, 92,
Hogan, D. 22, 31, 90, 97 95, 119, 126, 131, 165, 168,
Holbraad, M. 24, 38, 40, 203 174, 216
Honig, M.-S. 69 James, Adrian 17, 27, 62, 122
Hopkins, P. 42 Jenks, C. 8, 12, 15, 27, 54, 55, 58,
Horton, J. 28, 150 64, 69, 174
Huijsmans, R. 42 Johansson, B. 69
Hultman, K. 38, 134, 204, 218 Jones, A. 162
236
Index
K Lee, N. 16, 27, 61, 66–69, 87, 106,

Kellett, M. 22, 91, 92, 160, 162, 128–131, 174, 199
163, 165, 166, 169, 171, 173, Leitch, R. 90
177 Lenzer, G. 55
Kidd, D. 1, 3, 4, 223 Lenz Taguchi, H. 38, 39, 134, 204,
King, M. 121, 148 218
Kirby, P. 162, 163, 166, 167, 172 Leonard, M. 93, 123, 124
Kjørholt, A.T. 123 Liebel, M. 213
Klocker, N. 123 Limits of children’s voices 85, 86, 88,
Knorr Cetina, K. 9, 197 90, 95
Knowledge practices 4–7, 9–12, 21, Littleton, K.S. 88, 93
28, 29, 36–38, 40, 42, 74, 86, Livesey, G. 137
145, 147, 157, 159, 177–180,
183, 197, 200, 203, 209, 210,
216, 221, 223, 224 M
Knowledge production 4, 5, 7–12, MacLure, M. 88, 97, 102
17, 19–23, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, MacNaughton, G. 183
34–37, 39, 41–43, 63, 72, 73, Malone, K. 134, 159
76, 109, 145, 146, 159–162, Mandell, N. 21, 91
171, 174, 176–180, 182–188, Mannion, G. 183
197, 198, 202, 206–211, Marcus, G.E. 18, 20, 31, 161, 200
216–218, 221, 224 Material 5–7, 9, 25, 34, 36, 38, 40,
Komulainen, S. 87, 90, 97, 104, 215 65–67, 108, 124, 132–135,
Kontovourki, S. 108 138–141, 143, 144, 178, 179,
Korbin, J.E. 27, 71, 95, 122, 215 203–206, 216, 218, 223, 225
Kraftl, P. 28, 60, 68, Material consequences/material
128, 150 effects 7, 9, 12, 218–222
Material forms of participation 158
Materiality 5, 6, 9, 24, 75, 77, 109,
L 130, 139–141, 144, 149, 202,
Lansdown, G. 158 204–206, 218
Lather, P.A. 20 Materialization 38, 133
Latour, B. 36, 66, 67, 74, 129, 135, Material-semiotic 5, 6, 37, 54, 70,
141, 145, 146, 149, 178 133, 140, 148, 204, 206
Law, J. 7, 9, 36, 37, 40, 41, 66, 178, Matter 25, 26, 38, 39, 75, 108, 133,
180, 185, 200, 202, 207, 208, 134, 140, 142, 204, 205, 217
212 Mayall, B. 16, 21, 23, 24, 58, 78, 91,
‘Least adult’ role 21, 91 108, 120, 121, 164
Index
237
Mayes, E. 40, 69 New wave of childhood studies 60,

Mazzei, L.A. 39, 88, 95–99, 102, 68
185, 223 Non-human actors 67, 129, 205
Mellor, D. 69, 70 Non-normative voices 97
Mess/messiness 8, 36, 75, 108, 180,
184, 185, 200–202, 212, 218
Messy texts 20, 200 O
Method assemblage 180 Objectivity 19, 20, 107, 224
Methodology/methodological 5, 8, Ofosu-Kusi, Y. 125, 215
11, 12, 17, 20, 22, 23, 29, 30, Ontological multiplicity 6, 147, 178,
33, 38, 39, 41, 55, 59, 60, 75, 188, 203, 208, 217, 225
88, 162, 165, 175, 179, 185, Ontological politics 37, 43, 186, 204,
199, 202, 204, 210, 212 206, 208, 212
Millei, Z. 140, 205, 206 Ontological turn 5, 19, 23, 24, 28,
Mitchell, K. 38, 105, 144 60, 202, 203
Mizen, P. 125, 215 Ontology/ontological 6–8, 18, 24,
Modernist sociology 18, 26, 61, 66 26, 27, 38, 60, 69, 70, 75, 109,
Mol, A. 36, 147, 178, 208, 211 118, 119, 131–133, 145, 149,
Moran-Ellis, J. 5 178, 179, 182, 204, 206, 208,
Morrow, V. 89 211, 212, 216, 219
Multiplicity 42, 65, 68, 69, 130, 137, Ormston, R. 162, 166, 167, 169,
224 170, 173
Oswell, D. 21, 25, 27, 67, 118, 120,
122, 126, 128, 130, 132, 206,
N 217, 222
Network 25, 26, 66, 67, 129, 141,
180
Networked agency 12, 129, 130, 146 P
New materialism 5, 7, 12, 18, 25, 26, Pain, R. 73
118, 132, 133, 135, 137, 140, Paradigm shift 10, 42, 54, 55, 75, 77,
143–145, 217, 221 85, 118, 119
New paradigm 11, 16, 17, 26, Partiality of knowledge 188
55–60, 132, 216 Participating child 158, 179, 180,
New social studies of childhood 10, 182, 188
21, 54, 56, 60–62, 70, 76, 87, Participation 8, 11, 12, 16, 17, 22,
117, 118, 157, 160, 165 27, 37, 76, 90, 107, 109,
238
Index
121, 125, 129, 146, 157–159, Posthumanism/posthumanist/posthu-

161, 162, 166–168, 172, 174, man 8, 10, 18, 19, 23–28, 42,
175, 177–188, 198, 214, 215, 53, 60, 70, 133
219–221, 223 Postmodernism/postmodernist/post-
Participation as a knowledge practice/ modern 18, 34, 133
Participation-as-practice 12, Poststructuralism/poststructuralist/
159, 178, 179, 181–183, 187 poststructural 8, 10, 11, 18–21,
Participatory approaches 162, 168, 23, 25, 28, 41, 42, 53, 60, 70,
187 85, 86, 108, 109, 198–200,
Participatory research 161, 172, 177, 202
187, 200 Powell, M.A. 88, 162
Participatory research methods 167 Power 6, 9, 19–24, 30–32, 35, 42,
Payne, R. 126, 127 58, 63, 70, 73, 86, 87, 90, 92,
Pedersen, M.A. 24, 38, 40, 203 94, 104, 106, 108, 119, 122,
Peer culture research 90, 91 124, 126, 128–130, 135, 139,
Peer research/peer researcher 159– 141, 144, 147, 159, 162, 164,
161, 169, 173 165, 169, 171–173, 176, 177,
Percy-Smith, B. 157, 158 181, 183, 186, 187, 199, 209,
Performative agency 21, 36 210
Performativity of knowledge 36, 37 Power/knowledge 22, 73, 183
Performativity/performative 7, 11, Power relations 19, 20, 22, 31, 40,
21, 36, 37, 86, 96, 102, 185 88, 183
Petersen, E.B. 140, 205, 206 Praxiographic approach 179, 182
Philo, C. 29 Prendergast, S. 77
Piaget, J. 56 Prout, A. 12, 15–18, 23, 26, 27, 31,
Pickering, A. 36, 37, 133, 149, 203, 55–61, 64–67, 69, 71, 72, 77,
204, 206 119, 122, 128, 129, 159, 165,
Pillow, W. 34, 201 174–176, 216
Place, B. 77 Punch, S. 27, 62, 93, 201
Politics/political 6, 8, 10, 17, 20,
28, 30, 34, 35, 37, 39–42, 59,
63, 68, 87, 96, 102, 108, 117, Q
118, 121, 127, 141, 144, 147, Qvortrup, J. 15, 16, 58
159, 162, 164, 166, 180, 183,
185, 188, 199, 202, 206–208,
211–222 R
Politics of children’s agency 212–214 Raby, B. 21, 91, 172
Porter, G. 167, 168, 176 Rautio, P. 134, 205, 206
Positionality 3, 18, 21, 30–32 Reconstructive critique 11
Index
239
Reconstructive logic 34 Sandin, B. 28

Reflection 4–6, 10, 20, 29, 30, 37, Sandstrom, K. 21, 31, 91
38, 59, 63, 76, 87, 97, 99, 105, Savage childhood 1–4, 223
108, 141, 145, 181, 197, 198, Scale 12, 59, 67, 144–147, 216, 217
200, 215, 216 Scale-making 12, 118, 145, 147, 216
Reflexive turn 18, 29 Schafer, N. 162, 166, 168, 169, 172
Reflexivity/reflexive 18, 19, 29, 30, Scheper-Hughes, N. 209
33–35, 37, 38, 73, 99, 201 Schnoor, O. 96, 223
Regimes of truth 9 Science and technology studies (STS)
Relational approaches 12, 24, 117, 24, 36, 159, 178, 179
128, 132, 149, 174 Self-reflexive actor 85
Relationality/relational 7, 24, 25, 39, Seymour, C. 149
43, 60, 69, 75, 86, 126, 144, Shier, H. 162
147, 175, 202, 224 Silence 11, 75, 86, 96–103, 185
Relational ontologies 10, 24, 25, 28, Singularity 6, 8, 42, 69
60, 69, 128, 129, 148, 149, Situated knowledge 22
179, 202, 206, 222 Skoldberg, K. 33, 34, 63, 64, 108
Relativism/relativist 7, 10, 209, 217, Smith, A. 88, 162
218 Social actors 54, 59, 119–121, 149,
Renold, E. 69, 70 160, 220
Representation 3, 11, 18–20, 30, 31, Social agents 31, 118–121, 124, 130,
33, 35, 42, 72, 85–90, 92, 106, 131
158, 168, 170, 172, 200, 207, Social construction/social construc-
214, 215, 222, 223 tionism 10, 15, 24, 27, 53, 55,
Research assemblage 6, 40, 138, 186, 57–59, 62–66, 70, 75, 77, 119,
210 133, 210, 217, 218
Research by children 12, 159–163, Socialization theory 21, 55, 68
165–169, 171, 177, 187 Socially constructed child 28, 59
Responsibility 4, 6, 8, 9, 39, 41, Social theory 10, 17, 18, 55, 61, 67,
42, 198, 207, 209, 214, 218, 132, 147
222–225 Sociology of childhood 8, 17, 18, 21,
Rosen, D. 123, 214, 215 54, 55, 61, 77, 119, 131, 148,
Rosen, R. 96, 223 174
Ryan, K.W. 60, 68 Sparrman, A. 28, 188, 218
Ryan, P.J. 77, 118 Spyrou, S. 29, 75, 85, 93, 94, 96, 97,
127, 136, 139, 140, 147, 150,
202, 222, 224
S St. Pierre, E.A. 197, 223
Sánchez-Eppler, K. 144 Stainton-Rogers, R. 5, 77
240
Index
Stainton-Rogers, W. 5, 77 Tuana, N. 143, 149, 206

Standpoint 20, 23, 106, 119, 128, Twamley, K. 78
163, 164, 173, 174 Twum-Danso, A. 168
Standpoint epistemologies 22
Standpoint research 108, 161
Standpoint theories 23, 173 U
Structural constraints 31, 119, 123 Unacknowledged childhoods 202
Structural position 8, 18, 127 Uncomfortable reflexivity 34
Structuration theory 119, 120 Undisciplining childhood studies
Structure/structural 8, 16, 18, 23, 31, 73–75
58, 59, 61, 62, 71, 119, 123, Undomesticated voices 95, 97, 103
124, 127, 134, 144, 219, 220, United Nations Convention on the
223, 225 Rights of the Child 16, 55,
Structure-agency 123, 132, 145 121, 162
Uprichard, E. 77
T
Taylor, A. 13, 66, 69, 77, 134 V
Territorialization/territorializing 142, Valentine, K. 124, 126, 128
144, 211 var der Tuin, I. 26, 133
Textual turn 20 Veale, A. 22, 89, 92, 160
Theis, J. 22, 92, 160 Viscosity 143
Theodorou, E. 108 Viscous porosity 143
Theory/theoretical 2–5, 8, 10–12, Visual methods 88, 90
15, 17, 18, 20–23, 25–28, 30, Voiced-based forms of participation
39, 41, 53, 55, 56, 58–61, 64, 158
66–70, 72, 74–78, 85, 87, 102, Vulnerability 88, 125, 128, 160, 201,
105, 107, 117–123, 128–133, 215, 216, 219, 220
145–149, 162, 163, 165, 179,
185, 198, 202, 204, 206, 210,
214, 217, 221–223 W
Thin and thick agency 123 Walkerdine, V. 55
Thomson, P. 31, 89, 91 Warming, H. 89, 167
Thorne, B. 21, 91 Watson, K. 140, 205, 206
Thrift, N. 202 Wavering silences 100
Tisdall, E.K.M. 27, 62, 157, 162, Wertsch, J. 105
167, 201 West, A. 162
Transdisciplinarity 72 Westcott, H. 88, 93
Index
241
Willis, P. 126 Y
Woodhead, M. 55, 56, 72, 165 Yarwood, R. 162, 166
Woolgar, S. 24, 36, 178, 188
Wyness, M. 61, 64, 72, 89, 120, 122,
128, 129, 158, Z
174, 213 Zembylas, M. 38, 39

2018 Book DisclosingChildhoods

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

2018 Book DisclosingChildhoods

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

2018 Book DisclosingChildhoods

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

studies in childhood and youth

More information about this series at

Studies in Childhood and Youth

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936586

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: © ImageZoo/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This book is dedicated to my parents—for their unparalleled kindness

to Alexia Panayiotou, Miranda Christou, Eleni Theodorou, and

2 Towards a Decentering of ‘The Child’ 15

3 Knowledge Production in Childhood Studies 53

4 The Production of Children’s Voices 85

5 What Kind of Agency for Children? 117

6 Children’s Participation in Research

7 The Ethics and Politics of Knowledge Production

We cannot fully understand the structure of an animal until we study the

It is safe to say that in a hundred years’ time people will be wondering

© The Author(s) 2018 1

to slip by unheeded. I have, therefore, been more anxious to record the

In the book’s first chapter, Kidd proceeds to describe Kafir children as

No one can look at a number of little naked Kafir children sprawling on

Yet, these animal-like children, as he continues to tell us, appear to be

in these brief passages than simply recognizing their underlying racist

production has helped us rethink children and childhood by bringing

It is this move away from the purely discursive to the material-­

Academic work is performative. It is always an intervention. It’s just that

Though this could be argued in relation to any social category, ‘the

which in turn reflect our commitments to, and preoccupations with,

through research, in practice only a limited number of these childhoods

of course, does not rest on an a priori prescriptive understanding of a

The Rest of the Book

interdisciplinary engagements in the field as a way towards tackling its

and the ongoing attempts to transform the concept in more fruit-

2. The notion of ‘disclosure’ has also been discussed by other philosophers

© The Author(s) 2018 15

from children’s own perspectives by highlighting their voices in research

highlighting their voices (see Chapter 4) while also putting forth a

Broader Engagements with Social Theory

In its insistence on documenting and celebrating its modernist insights

knowledge production, a point I take up both in this chapter and sub-

Poststructuralist critiques have played a crucial role in destabilizing

As a result of these poststructuralist critiques, the authority of the

theory- or value-free knowledge. The days of naïve realism and naïve

In parallel to poststructuralist developments, the work of feminist schol-

in research. Feminist social epistemology (see Anderson 2017), for

Posthumanism, the Ontological Turn and Beyond

Beyond poststructuralist and feminist critiques of knowledge pro-

issues—an ontological turn of sorts—concerned primarily with the

More recently, and drawing on current debates about relational

and knowledge production. The work of Priscilla Alderson (see in par-

How to Know in Childhood Studies

The limited theoretical innovation in childhood studies may be partly

categorical concerns, it will soon be confronted with its own limits as

Does the researcher’s commitment to reflexivity make it [i.e., childhood

There is no single, commonly-shared understanding of what being

they propose could be equally applicable to any qualitative approach

knowledge, reflexive researchers, it is hoped, may be able to produce

An acknowledgement of the imbalance of power in research requires care-

There are, no doubt, exemplary accounts of critically reflexive work in

D-reflexivity is mainly associated with the postmodern turn and focuses

It is this move away from the purely discursive to the material-

The Rest of the Book

Broader Engagements with Social Theory

Posthumanism, the Ontological Turn and Beyond

How to Know in Childhood Studies

relations in development. Kustatscher et al. (2016) provide a useful dis-

The Emergence of Contemporary Childhood

Emerging Critiques of the Field: The Limits of

The Appeal of Relational Ontologies

Disciplinarity and Interdisciplinarity in Childhood

Voice Research in Childhood Studies

From Interview Methods to Visual Methods

Participant Observation and Peer Culture

Rapport, Layers of Meaning and the Problem

The Non-normative and the Undomesticated

Silence as an Example of Undomesticated Voice

Spyros: o you think Cypriots treat foreigners well?