Representing Agency in Popular Culture

Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen and In-Between addresses the intersection of children’s and youth’s agency and popular culture. As scholars in childhood studies and beyond seek to expand understandings of agency, power, and voice in children’s lives, this book places popular culture and representation as central to this endeavor. Core themes of family, gender, temporality, politics, education, technology, disability, conflict, identity, ethnicity, and friendship traverse across the chapters, framed through various film, television, literature, and virtual media sources. Here, childhood is considered far from homogeneous and the dominance of neoliberal models of agency is questioned by intersectional and intergenerational analyses. This book posits there is vast power in popular culture representations of children’s agency, and interrogation of these themes through interdisciplinary lenses is vital to furthering knowledge and understanding about children’s lives and within childhood studies.

This book is an important contribution to the debate ‘for’ and ‘against’ agency. , This edited collection significantly expands the conversation on children’s agency by focusing on how such agency is represented in diverse popular culture texts. The analytically rich chapters are each an accessible invitation to explore a different aspect of this key concept. Rather than trying to resolve the concept’s meaning, the volume productively highlights the multiple theories, debates, and implications surrounding the figure of the agentic child, making it a very useful resource for both scholarship and classroom discussions., A timely and highly innovative addition to theory and research on children's agency. The scholarship and insights of Representing Agency in Popular Culture shine through across a range of diverse areas of children's media and wider popular culture. A major contribution to sociological studies of children and youth.

Ingrid E. Castro is professor of sociology and director of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.Jessica Clark is senior lecturer in sociology and childhood studies at the University of Suffolk.