Theme 4 – Childhood and youth

Thanks to you all for a terrific session – lively and informative even as mediated through Zoom. I really appreciated the range of projects, approaches, re-definitions, and push backs I heard you all discuss. I especially appreciated the critical engagement with the recent AHR issue that, I would agree, did not really represent much of the best or most recent work in this arena. This discussion was especially timely for me as I am co-teaching (with an economist) a course on child labor and all the debates that has generated across disciplines and policy realms.

I enjoyed this panel debate very much. Stephanie did a wonderful job of hosting the panel. I found Simon Sleight’s talk particularly lucid. In my PhD I am looking at the lived experience of urban children. The agency of children in where they choose to play is something which I am interested in discussing. However, following discussion on Mona Gleeson’s ‘agency trap’, I will give this subject more consideration as I write. Thank you all.

Thank you, a very interesting 2 hours discussing agency, experience, emotions, and dealing with the individual with the collective. From my research on religious hybridity or synergy, the children can choose to identify/ function with one religious tradition or the other, or both, and or the hybrid community. This brings to my mind that agency is more like a verb, a path of actions, dealing with nouns, structures. The nouns bring up behaviourist structure, which in prominent and normative forms, colonizes and marginalizes: setting the boundaries for those in, and establishing the prejudicial and discriminatory boundaries for those who are out. This of course causes social and individual stress, anxiety and fears (phobias). The alternative, therefore, is post-structural, post-modern, post-colonial desires for freedom, individual agency: personal religion, personal nationalism, or multiple complexities of ‘lived’ religion and other structures. Yet, it appears in this humanistic relativistic direction, this can also cause stress – chaos, disorder, lack of clarity, loss of ‘truth’, divisive groupings and also, as these two hours have proven, a struggle for common linguistics and concepts. So, in New Religious Movements research (CESNUR), people react to relativism by seeking extreme authoritarian structures – a part of our modern times. I liked Ishita Panda’s comments in this regard and the ethical journeying thoughts from Saba Mahmood. The individual, the child, learns to negotiate structures. They interpret and act, causing new hermeneutics and forms. Yes, this is individual, but also as we are social beings, and we invest a lot into social interactions and status, especially with family, it is also a collective journey. Therefore, I am wondering what is the middle ground between structure and total free agency? Is it social constructivism? but that leads to a lack of conceptual words to use to describe it. If I use nouns, the discussion becomes about categories and structures, and hence, divisive boxes, that enforce the divisive aspect of multiculturalism (divided mono-culturalism). If I focus on verbs, then that gives us ‘experience,’ yet, it may not help us in securing religious freedom because what exactly is being legally protected? ‘Spirituality’ could be useful, but it can lead to shopping around commercially for products to serve the ego – i-zation, which could be pure agency? Episteme and worldviews are discussed but this is so culturally Western – intellectualised. That brings up a dilemma can the academy be the place to understand social constructivist processes. It has to be, otherwise, how can we inform democratic processes. This then brings up other aspects: memory, people, family, social process, identity journeying; and these are something, which yes can be “consented and accepted,” but also contributed to. Perhaps then the true essence of agency is being part of something that one can negotiate, benefit from, but also contribute to. The problem with structure is that it assumes that “the individual has nothing to say,” whereas we all do have something to say and even something to innovate, which with collective consent, can even shape the collective destiny. This is risky, but risk causes from my data, social bonding to deal with risk. Perhaps, the problem is modern clarifications of structures that are done in order to remove risk, and so to remove individual agency. We, therefore, need a move away from acculturation, that is conforming the individual to structures, and instead towards engaging proculturation. To do this without necessarily being destructive through forms of agency formed by emotions of frustration and injustice: revolution, rebellion, resistance. To be progressive but without dogmatic structural progressives. Meaning to allow greater diversity in the agency, towards the common collective, rather than trying to force frictionally new prominent normative discourses. One person’s rebellion is an imposed structure for another. Thank you, I think your discussions have helped me along in my reflective process.

Thank you to Dr. Olsen and to all of the panelists for this fascinating conversation about the problems and possibilities of agency and experience in the field of childhood and youth history! The discussion of experience and the risk of neglecting power was particularly insightful (and very interesting to me as a PhD student examining girls in juvenile justice contexts).

Thank you for a great panel. It was very interesting to learn about how all of you have come to terms with the concept of agency – in ways that widen and deepen our engagement with it…but also in ways that makes “agency” unnecessary or harmful. I take away many things: eigensinn (!), moving beyond “providing” agency to youth, agency as still relevant if deployed more thoughtfully, as nuanced and changing, and many more ideas. Excellent panel – thank you for this!

Fine. Thanks!