Children’s and Young People’s Citizenship

The concept of citizenship before the twentieth century, although highly contested, broadly referred to a geographical context. This could range from a citizen of the Roman Empire to one of a specific and boundaried city, such as the city states of the Low Countries in the seventeenth century where citizens could number in the hundreds. From the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, a sense of citizenship developed alongside natural rights theories. These ‘civil rights’ included the freedom to own property and to make contracts. This enabled the exchange of goods, services and labour to participate in a market economy. This burgeoning of citizenship also involved concepts of the state , nation and transnationalism as European countries expanded across the globe and consolidated their governance in their home territories. European countries colonised other parts of the globe, assuming a terra nullius of local indigenous peoples. The imperialist project involved a migration of people out of Europe, into Europe and people transferred across the various European powers’ global spheres of influence through trade, slavery and the free movement of workers and their families. Today the processes of European state consolidation, the movement of people across the globe, the assertions of citizen identities and governmentality continue to concern scholars today. Sociologists of childhood, including those in this collection, also engage with these long-running themes of citizenship.

In Europe, at the time of writing, there are a number of ’crises’ affecting governance and citizenship. There is the crisis of the European Union (EU) project after the UK’s Brexit vote in June 2016; the continuing refugee ‘crisis’ as Southern Europe is beset with migrants (including children) entering the continent by boat and overland from Syria, North Africa and other troubled parts of the globe; the rise of nationalistic and populist political parties across Europe; and the continuing economic debt ‘crisis’ of Greece and other Eurozone states . Such crises are not new; Europe has had a long and troubled history of moments of unity (albeit relatively brief) and fragmentation; economic crises, immigration and emigration; and rampant nationalism. However, scholarship today has engaged with children’s experiences within these processes amid other theoretical responses to understanding children and young people.

It is perhaps too early to forecast the political consequences of the Brexit crisis for Europe. At the time of writing, relatively simple agreements about EU citizens’ residency in the UK and British citizens’ residency rights in the EU are yet to be determined. Children’s place in these negotiations has to date been largely overlooked because adult workers and the health needs of the elderly are at the top of the list. The repercussions on children of the 2008 economic crisis receive little conventional coverage. The few studies to have taken place from a European perspective have demonstrated the negative consequences on the provision of children’s services, decreasing levels of financial support to families with children, and the impediments this has posed to children’s participation in play, leisure , and formal and informal education (Ruxton, 2012). There are rising levels of child poverty among 28% of Europe’s children (Eurochild, 2014), and young people as a generation continue to lag behind older age groups (Olk, 2009).

A growing body of research is concerned with children’s migratory experiences and how they need to be untangled from adult migration issues (Dobson, 2009). There are studies of migrant children’s own experience in host countries and their concomitant struggles for citizenship recognition (Crawley, 2010; Dorling & Hurrell, 2012). The important element of the sociology of childhood is to untangle children’s own definitions of their citizenship identity, separate from that of their parents, or to see them as ‘victims’ of the migration process. This raises the issue of children’s agency , one to be returned to later in this introduction. For now it is necessary to note the ambiguity of many migrant children in the process and to acknowledge the spectrum of migration experiences. These range from victims of ‘child trafficking’ and the suffering of children by immigration policies and their enforcement (O’Connell Davidson, 2011; for a further study across Europe, see Mougne, 2010) to the children of highly skilled workers (Hatfield, 2010). It is clear that it is important to retrieve the perspective of children’s experiences in their everyday worlds to capture their suffering, identity formation or enjoyment of their new lives in a new country (Crawley, 2010; Den Besten, 2010). The long history of migration has also turned a focus onto the experiences of second- and third-generation ‘ethnic minority’ experiences of children (Crul & Vermeulen, 2003). The experiences of migrant children’s identity formation brings into focus issues of their multidimensional citizenship because they are active constructors of identities utilising their identities from the host culture, those of their parents and their own constructions of citizenship as a generational experience (O’Reilly, 2012). These complexities have given rise to concepts of ‘partial’ citizenship (Salazar Parrenas, 2001) and hybrid citizenship status (Stasiulis, 2004).

The processes of globalisation are today the subject of huge academic attention. In citizenship studies, these have progressed into debates around global governance and global citizenship, perhaps encapsulated in ideas of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and cosmopolitan citizenship in contrast to national citizenship identities (Delanty, 2006). There are of course positive aspects of this, such as the ‘structure of feeling’ (Nava, 2002) of a symbolic allure of cultural differences in art, fashion and consumption goods from across the globe. The development of global cities, with a diverse set of communities from across the planet and the prospect of global travel, allows for a beneficial sense of ‘global citizenship’ for everyone to enjoy. However, cosmopolitanism has also shown up recurring tensions around citizenship identity formation, in particular the competition and contrasting experiences of urban and rural dimensions. These tensions have been identified in the recent EU referendum in the UK with urban centres tending to vote remain in Europe and displaying their embrace of international and cosmopolitan ideals, in contrast to more rural locations voting to leave the EU, citing concerns about immigration, among others. The open-minded ideas around cosmopolitanism have their alter image of xenophobic racism and nationalism also touching the lives of children, especially those from immigrant and Muslim backgrounds (Gillborn, 2012).

Much contemporary theorising focuses on the processes of the construction of citizenship identities. For children this has taken the form of a focus on the deficits that children have in relation to adults. Here children lack full citizenship, are unable to make contracts and have problems participating in equivocal terms as adults (Cockburn, 2013). Scholars, such as Lister (2007), thus tend to outline moves for a more inclusive form of citizenship. Following on from this, theorists of childhood critique the unitary, individual model of the citizen in contrast with one that emphasises the interconnected nature of human experience (Cockburn, 1998, 2013). The interconnected nature of citizens is illustrated in models of citizenship based on principles of redistribution outlined by Marshall’s classic conception and updated by Nancy Fraser for a politics of redistribution. Thus notions of poverty and class and how they link with children’s lived citizenship experiences become important. The attention to the assertion of identities is reflected in the wider debates around recognitive struggles (Isin, 2015) for citizenship identities.

It is necessary to move away from traditional views of citizenship that view the citizen as an individual being processed within a bundle of rights, responsibilities, entitlements , duties, inclusion and exclusion , towards one that emphasises voice , difference and social justice (Delanty, 2000). This approach implies inclusion of more and more groups as well as a turn from a pure ‘rights’ (and duties) approach towards lived citizenship, and from which social justice through sameness develops towards acknowledgement of difference (Lister, 2007; Warming, 2015). The notion of lived citizenship implies a more nuanced and process-driven focus on citizenship as positioning and identity-shaping, and valorises subjective experience, difference and symbolic power relations (Stasiulis, 2004; Moosa-Mitha, 2005). Here citizens develop cognitive, symbolic and social competence through a series of negotiations and positionings in everyday interactions across different institutional contexts. Thus identity is a process rather than a static given.

It is also necessary to acknowledge that lived citizenship does involve disciplinary aspects (Delanty, 2003). The learning of citizenship processes may be disciplinary based on certain norms for the ‘right citizen’ or ‘the deserving recipient’, giving rise to distinctions between those who live up to these norms and those who fail to do so (Lister, 2007). Nikolas Rose (1990) identifies that citizenship is constructed through flows of surveillance, regulation, information and communication , of which children form one of the most intense targets for disciplinary discourses. Drawing on Foucault (1979), he highlights power to be exercised in a capillary-like circular fashion, altering and influencing subjectivities in a constant flow of re/action. This gives rise to a complex series of citizenship constructions as individuals intersect with a series of power relations across different social contexts. As Devine (2011) argues in applying this disciplinary model, together with a more lived, fluid and dynamic theory of citizenship to children’s education , citizenship identities are ‘learned’ in systems and institutions which frame this learning through cultural norms and practices .

Children’s and Young People’s Rights

The ambiguity of children’s citizenship is mirrored when considering children’s rights . The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, calls for ‘every organ of society’ to engage with human rights. While it is imprecisely worded, it has great symbolic value, represents a common universal standard to be achieved and can help guide people toward human rights compliance. However, scholarly consensus is fragmented on the meaning, interpretation and application of human rights. Like citizenship, that is premised on the liberal humanist position on rights, human rights assume a sovereign and rational human subject with a shared series of human goals and conditions; these assumptions place children in an ‘incomplete’ paradigm, as they are considered dependent and irrational (Cockburn, 2013). These assumptions place children in an ‘incomplete’ paradigm.

However, notions of human rights have been radically contested. These include critiques that see the operation of human rights as a means of enforcing liberal democracy but at the cost of ‘free trade’ that favours the more powerful global economies (Dean, 2008). Critiques challenge simple dichotomies of perpetrators and victims to a view of rights that emphasise the complexity of local context (Freeman, 2002). Also, liberal human rights operate by reinforcing existing power relationships rather than radically transforming the operation of power (Goodhart, 2008). Furthermore, Latour (1991/3) notes that human rights have lost their ability to transform lives and provide a vision for the future.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), ratified in 1989, outlines a broad menu of rights for children. Freeman (2007) has classically summarised these articles into the ‘three Ps’: provision, protection and participation. Provision refers to those elements of the UNCRC that concern a child’s basic life, sustenance and services, notably education . Protection refers to those articles concerned with protecting and safeguarding children from harm, exploitation and abuse. Participation is concerned with a child’s right to have their opinions taken into due consideration over decisions that concern their lives. While recognising the importance of all three of these aspects, scholars associated with the sociological study of childhood are concerned with analysing the tensions within these articles and even the rights project as a whole. First, children are excluded from universalised human rights frameworks and instead have their own children’s convention, thus emphasising and reinforcing the difference between adults and children (Cockburn, 2013). Second, rights are often given conditionally, and if we see the context in which they are deployed they are often advanced conditionally on a series of concomitant responsibilities. For instance, the right to participation in education is premised on good behaviour (Crick, 1998) and has elements of governmentality attached to it (Rose, 1990). Thus, as Warming (2011) notes, responsibilities rather than rights become the objective. Third, rights can maintain exclusivity, as they are premised on the ability to be able to claim equal rights (Honneth, 1995), or once rights are claimed they can exclude other children from their own rights or apply extra burdens on women (Mendus, 1995).

The sociology of childhood recently, as contributions to this collection add to, apply analytic focus on the social contexts in which rights are claimed, contested and interpreted. Thus Hanson and Poretti (2012) focus on children’s interpretations of rights. Legal rights are exercised in specific contexts, so where children engage with children’s rights it is important to attend to the deployment of the law, a child’s interpretation and a recognition of the realities of the social context. Therefore Hanson and Poretti (2012) apply the concept of children’s living rights. Along these lines a ‘right to protection from labour’ is different for child workers in the ‘Global South’ where ‘protection’ can be deployed in an arbitrary way with serious consequences for the lives of children (Liebel, 2008). Thus sociologists, rather than taking universal rights at face value , are interested in the particular contexts in which they are exercised. Those children who are most marginalised in society tend to have their own interests out-trumped by hegemonic and political interests. For instance, the right to freedom of conscience and religion tends to be overridden by the wishes of parents and the wider community’.

Alanen (2009) looks on the diet of rights in the UNCRC as a normative process through which researchers need to reflexively explore the norms and values underlying each right. She calls for attention to the social context of children claiming rights but to do so in a way that is both reflexive on the researcher’s own values , processes and logics and also understanding about the exercising of children’s agency in which they achieve and affirm specific rights. This may be by going beyond the agency/protection divide where the primary responsibility of adult organisations is to be ‘risk averse’ and to focus on the child’s right to protection at the possible expense of their right to choose and participate. It is also necessary to explore rights in the political context of their own lives: are the rights to education there to provide children with an agentic understanding of their rights or are they being disciplined into obedience? How do children define their own rights? How do children wish to have their rights expressed? How and in what ways do children respect other people’s rights, as well as their own? Are expressions of rights by marginalised children the same as those of more privileged children? These are all important questions that the chapters in this collection seek to ask. It is clear that we need to be clear about what the precise meaning is of children’s participation as rights holders and rights enactors. This brings to the fore important questions about children’s agency and what this means to adults, practitioners, professionals , policy-makers and academics.

Children’s and Young People’s Participation and Agency

The Sociology of Childhood has long recognised the importance of children’s participation (Prout & James, 1990) and children’s agency (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998). The interest in children’s participation was originally inspired by the approval of the UNCRC in 1989. As we have seen, this includes the right for children to have their opinions and participation taken into consideration. However, the importance of children’s participation has been considered previously, as part of the reflexive process which has been enhanced in modern Western society (Prout, Simmons, & Birchall, 2006 ). Reflexivity means the ability to monitor social action and therefore social processes (Giddens, 1984). It is a reaction to the increasing uncertainty and risk in a highly complex society. Reflexivity allows the examination of risks and the planning of ways to reduce the consequences of the uncertainty that follows. Participation equivocates to reflexivity because it introduces flexibility and responsiveness in cases of problematic action. In the twentieth century, the importance of children’s participation has been high on the policy agenda, so that it may be represented as ‘the age of children’s agency’ (Oswell, 2013, p. 3). These assumptions about the origins and importance of children’s participation and agency are controversial, as we shall see later in this chapter. However, it cannot be denied that in the first part of the twenty-first century the importance of children’s participation and agency has been increasingly emphasised. Therefore it is not surprising that most contributions to this collection deal with these topics, linking them to the issues of citizenship and rights.

Most studies of children’s participation and agency have focused on institutional settings in Western societies (e.g. Thomas, 2007; Wyness, 2009). Recently , however, the analysis has been extended to new social contexts, such as sports teams (Cockburn, 2017), and has focused on new perspectives on institutions , such as domestic violence in families (Katz, 2015), and above all new areas of global society (André & Godin, 2014; Bühler-Niederberger & Schwittek, 2014; Clemensen, 2016; Percy-Smith & Thomas, 2010). The analysis of children’s participation and agency has highlighted the importance of children’s social action in local contexts and global society, and the awareness that children are social actors (Stoecklin, 2013) and not simply the recipients of adults’ socialisation and education .

Agency in particular is conceived of as children’s ability to act autonomously from external conditions (James & James, 2008), and this also means that children’s actions are not determined by adults’ actions (Baraldi, 2014). This definition implies that participation (and social action) should be distinguished from agency. Agency is a specific form of participation, which enhances social change (James & James, 2004). It is based on children’s availability of choices of action, which can open different possible courses of action (Baraldi, 2014): it is a form of participation that shows the availability of choices of action, enhancing changes in their own social contexts. In other words, agency is a transformative form of participation (Mayall, 2002). In this sense, agency is at the core of children’s lived citizenship and active construction of identities in social contexts. This peculiarity of children’s agency is highlighted through the distinction between participation as ‘having a say’, or consultation, on the one hand, and participation in decision-making on the other (Clark & Percy-Smith, 2006; Hill , Davis, Prout , & Tisdall , 2004). Participation in decision-making is frequently considered to be the most complete form of participation because it makes children’s choices of action and participation in social change evident. Therefore children’s agency can be associated with their participation in decision-making.

However, this straightforward distinction between forms of participation is not shared in all work on children’s participation. Some of studies propose more nuanced classifications, highlighting different levels and forms of participation, such as consultative, collaborative and child-led participation (Lansdown, 2010); participation as acceptance of asymmetrical power, challenges to power relations and requests for more support (Kaukko & Wernesjö, 2017). These categorisations show that children’s participation, and in particular children’s participation in social change, are interpreted and assessed in a variety of ways. According to Lansdown (2010), for instance, all the conditions of consultative, collaborative and child-led participation may be relevant, depending on the social context. The theoretical foundation of this less straightforward type of classification is that, at a basic level, all children’s actions can modify social processes . Giddens (1984, p. 58) defines this level as ‘simple agency’—that is, as a contribution that changes a sequence of events. Conversation analysis, as applied to children’s participation, confirms that all children’s actions change the trajectory of interactions (Hutchby, 2007). In an analysis of interaction , the difficulty of distinguishing levels of agency is shown by the distinction made between a thick form of agency, like questioning and commenting, and a thin form of agency, like minimal signals and responses (Muftee, 2015). While it seems clear that thin agency is simple agency, it is not clear what thick agency implies in terms of participation in social change. Simple agency may explain children’s widespread participation that is subordinated to adults’ authority, as well as children’s active cooperation in the social reproduction of social order—for instance, in ‘collectivistic’ contexts, where hierarchical arrangements and strong obligations towards the collective prevail (André & Godin, 2014; Bühler-Niederberger & Schwitteck, 2014; Clemensen, 2016). Subordination and cooperation do not show the availability of choices of action because they imply that children accept the existing social and cultural orientations. The observation of various forms of simple agency, above all in global society, has raised questions about the Western ‘voice-based global standard’ of children’s participation and agency (Wyness, 2013b). Moreover, this recognition may raise some doubts about the meanings of children’s lived citizenship and rights —that is, if they are universally based either on the form of agency as autonomous choice or on the more basic form of simple agency.

Against this background, an important question concerns the boundary between children’s simple agency, associated with subordination to or cooperation with adults representing the existing social and cultural order, on the one hand, and children’s agency, associated with autonomous choice of actions and an engine of social change, on the other. This question is particularly important in relation to children suffering disadvantage, such as migrant children and those living in poverty . In these cases, children’s opportunities to choose actions and change their social context may be limited. The question is if in these cases simple agency is sufficient to guarantee the respect of children’s rights .

It seems clear that children’s participation and agency must be observed in the specific social and cultural contexts of children’s life. This observation raises the issues of power relations and the underrepresentation of children and young people, on the one hand, and support of children’s and young people’s choices of action and participation in decision-making, on the other.

The Social Conditions of Children’s Participation and Agency

The social conditions of children’s participation and agency may be seen from two points of view: on the one hand, participation and agency are enacted in social relations, as implied in the concept of children as social actors; on the other hand, participation and agency are influenced by social and cultural contexts, as shown by several studies on global society.

First, children exercise their agency ‘by actively using their resources and abilities in their relations with others in both positive and negative ways’ (Bjerke, 2011, p. 94). The different forms of children’s participation are associated with their ‘lived’ social relations (Percy-Smith, 2010). In these lived social relations, participation as agency is visible as children and young people’s negotiation of meanings, actions and power, as several contributions in this collection highlight. Therefore the analysis of children’s participation and agency reflects neither the liberal conception of individual rationality and choice (Valentine, 2011), nor the modernist view of the subject as protagonist in society (Prout, 2005). Rather, the combination of individual and collective factors is important to understanding children’s participation (Prout et al., 2006). On the one hand, both individual (motivational) incentives and collective incentives, such as providing resources and opportunities, can enhance children’s participation. On the other hand, the benefits of children’s participation may be considered as both individual, in terms of children’s empowerment , and access to information and new skills, and collective, in terms of better services, improved decision-making and democracy (Cockburn, 2013; Oswell, 2013).

Second, the social conditions of children’s agency are the conditions of ‘children’s embeddedness in the social and their connectedness’ (James, 2013, p. 15). Children’s participation is seen as relationally constrained and structured. In particular, it is conditioned by a hierarchical, although dynamic, generational order of relations. A generational order ‘is a structured network of relations between generational categories that are positioned in and act within necessary interrelations with each other’ (Alanen, 2009, pp. 161–162). A generational order implies the capillary exercise of power in adult–children relations and the discipline of children’s lived citizenship. The tension between individual autonomy and dependence on social conditions is one of the most important aspects of children’s agency.

The understanding of the effects of hierarchical structures and power relations is important to explaining the conditions of children’s participation and agency. Hierarchical structures require children’s participation as simple agency—for instance, children’s responses to adults’ questions and obedience to adults’ dispositions at school and in the family. Hierarchical structures are constraints that block children’s choices of action, without blocking children’s participation, as children’s social action is an unavoidable component of social life. Children actively participate in social relations in which they are asked to demonstrate learning and compliance. In these social relations, hierarchical structures ‘only’ block the consequences of children’s participation in terms of social change. In particular, education is the most important social context of children’s participation and a block to children’s contribution to social change. Education introduces children into society, determining ‘how, as adults, they will find their place within it’ (James & James, 2004, p. 123). Education is therefore a context in which only simple agency is allowed.

The prevalence of hierarchical structures has triggered a widespread dissatisfaction with the practice of children and young people’s participation (Thomas, 2007). This dissatisfaction seems to contradict both the importance assigned to children’s participation as a form of societal reflexivity , and the importance of children’s simple agency. The institutional discourse on children’s and young people’s participation is criticised as incomplete, instrumental or not applied. Children’s empowerment and emancipation from adult control, in fact taken as synonyms of agency, are impeded by ‘unresolved tensions, ambiguities and social power relations’ (Fitzgerald , Graham , Smith , & Taylor , 2010, p. 293). Critical views mainly focus on two aspects. First, not all children and young people are involved in institutional participatory initiatives. Disadvantaged groups of children and young people, in Western societies and, above all, in the ‘rest‘ of global world, are neither consulted, nor involved in decision-making. Second, and more radically, the promotion of children’s participation is always subordinated to forms of adult control. Children’s participation is seen as an instrument for the smooth functioning of institutions , therefore control over children overwhelms their participation (Hill et al., 2004). Participation seems to benefit institutions much more than children. However, the institutional instrumental approach denies any social benefit from children’s participation, as it denies their agency. Against this background, participation may be seen as genuine and effective only if it is not institutionalised—that is, if it involves children and young people in their ‘everyday life arenas and practices’ (Percy-Smith, 2010, p. 118), and if it is accorded to children’s personal lives (James, 2013).

However, it is also important to recognise that the range of children’s possible actions can never be completely predefined by social structures and relational constraints. The concept of generagency (Leonard, 2016) explains that, while children’s agency is based on a generational order, children’s availability of choices is also an important condition of intergenerational relations. Thus the concept of generagency stresses a paradoxical meaning assigned to children’s agency, which includes both autonomy of action and dependence on social constraint. This paradoxical meaning has been observed in child counselling (Hutchby, 2007) in two forms. First, counsellors’ support of children’s expression of feelings and opinions is based on adult-driven interactions . Second, in fact this support enhances children’s resistance to the requested self-expression . This case shows both the ambivalence and the unpredictability of the attempts to break the hierarchical structures through adult support of children’s agency. It shows that the interplay between children’s participation and social structures does not necessarily produce a predefined order but, rather, unpredictable outcomes. A possible interpretation of this paradox is that, as participation is only possible in communication processes, it is both conditioned by the structures of these processes, generally based on adults’ interventions, and made unpredictable by the production of these processes, which cannot be controlled by any participant, including adults (Baraldi, 2014).

In any case, recognition and achievement of children’s agency are conditioned by adult–child relations and forms of communication . This highlights the importance of understanding the roles of adults and the forms of their partnership as a presupposition of children’s participation (Wyness, 2013a). This consideration has guided the analysis of the ways in which adults effectively support children’s and young people’s participation and agency. This analysis shows that the conditions of children’s agency are nuanced and that agency as choice of action continues to be the aim of supporters of children’s emancipation. For instance, one interesting classification of forms of adult support (Shier, 2001) includes, in order of increasing positive impact on children’s participation, (1) active listening; (2) encouragement of personal expression; (3) dialogue (taking into account children’s perspectives; (4) involvement in decision-making (consultation, joint planning, co-construction of decisions); and (5) power-sharing and empowerment (full responsibility fore decisions). Another analysis, concerning the social forms emerging from adult support (Matthews, 2003), includes (1) dialogue (listening and consulting); (2) development (adults working for the benefit of young people); (3) participation in a proper sense (young people working within the community); and (4) integration (young people working with the community). Experiences in non-Western countries have revised the possible ways of supporting children’s participation (Shier, 2010). However, while these experiences show that the social contexts and the empowering strategies are differentiated, they also show that the necessity of empowering children’s participation, recognising children’s competence and autonomy, and enhancing children’s influence through decision-making is considered universal .

This highlights the high level of universalisation of the Western form of children’s agency, despite the observation of different forms of this agency in different social and cultural conditions. This universalisation includes the following assumptions: (1) children’s participation is linked to adults’ ways of acting; (2) children’s participation ranges from low levels to high levels of influence on the social context; (3) different levels of participation indicate different levels of children’s agency; and (4) enhancement of children’s participation enables children to be involved in decisions concerning their own lives—that is, it enables children’s agency because it offers availability of choice of actions to children. The abovementioned distinction between consultation and participation in decision-making may be taken as a continuum. Consultation offers children the opportunity to increase their capacity for personal expression and to build trust in their relations with adults. Participation in decision-making makes children feel influential. The combination of children’s participation in decision-making and initiatives taken by children is the clearest way of promoting their agency (Holland & O’Neill, 2006).

This promotion of children’s agency requires the recognition that adults are ‘facilitators rather than technicians’ and that ‘both children and adults are co-constructors of knowledge and expertise’ (Hill et al., 2004, p. 84). In other terms, adults should leave aside their typical role of experts in adult–children relations. An important, although differently valued, aspect of facilitation of children’s agency is the construction of effective dialogue between adults and children (Baraldi, 2012; Wyness, 2013a, 2013b). Dialogue is the basic element of collaboration between adults and children, which takes children’s views into account. There may be different ways of enhancing dialogue, but all of them are based on ‘mutual interdependence , recognition and respect for children and their views and experiences’ (Fitzgerald et al., 2010, p. 300). Dialogue is a combination of orientation to understanding and inclusion, recognition, empathy, non-intrusive support of self-expression, shared responsibilities and decision-making, and sharing of power .

The empirical meaning of the dialogic conditions of children’s agency has been analysed in some educational settings (Baraldi, 2012, 2014; Baraldi & Iervese, 2014). This analysis has highlighted the importance of some adults’ dialogic actions, such as forms of questioning; minimal signals of active listening and recognition; and explication, development and summary of the gist of children’s contributions. This analysis shows that dialogue depends on the empowerment of participants’ actions and equal conditions of participation, and that dialogue can replace hierarchical structures and promote children’s agency in educational settings. It therefore aims to show that the hierarchical generational order is a historically based and contingent way of dealing with children’s participation rather than a generalised condition. Moreover, this analysis confirms the paradoxical meaning of children’s agency because it depends on adults’ dialogic actions. However, it also shows that, although paradoxical, the chain of adults’ dialogic actions and children’s choices of action can create the conditions for children’s contribution to structural change in the interaction , and potentially in wider social systems, such as the education system .

This type of analysis highlights what lived citizenship may mean in specific and important social interactions involving children. This type of social interaction—for example, in classrooms, families, and formal and informal groups—makes the interplay of social structures and children’s participation particularly evident, but it does not exhaust the forms of this interplay, which involves the importance of children and young people’s use of the new media (Lundmark & Evaldsson, 2017). The description and explanation of the interplay between social structures and forms of participation and agency are still open to research questions. The open question continues to be: ‘To what extent do—and can—children contribute to social change?’ (James & James, 2008, p. 11). This collection aims to contribute to the exploration of possible answers to this question, from a theoretical as well as an applied perspective.

Lived Citizenship, Rights and Participation: Chapters in the Book

The overall theme of this book is the importance of an analytical attention to the lived lives of children, be that lived citizenship, living rights , lived social relations or agency in their social participation. Attention to these lived aspects and the theoretical and empirical issues they identify will be revisited in the conclusion. For now it is worth recapping on the importance of close attention to the social contexts of children and the complex webs of meaning, relations and power in which they find themselves. The contributors to this collection provide some different contexts and tools to understand the lived citizenship, rights and participation of children in Europe today.

The theme of the chapters focuses on Europe and, as identified above, this masks the crucial contributions and insights into lived citizenship, rights and participation by theorists focusing on the majority world and other parts of the ‘developed’ world. However, Warming (Chap. 2) theorises children’s lives from a lived citizenship and sociospatial approach. She argues that children’s citizenship rights, participation and identity are an outcome of conditioned, everyday interactions and practices , and she explores these through the tensions and binary positions of agency /structure , the local/global and particularism/universalism. She argues for the development of a context-sensitive, dynamic lens that enables an insight into how globalisation in particular constitutes an essential force in the shaping of children’s citizenship as practised and experienced. She explores the tensions between the processes of globalisation and local discursive practices and how these tensions shape the ‘generational order’, in particular around constructions of children’s intimate identities and processes of trust and recognition.

Wyness (Chap. 3) focuses on lived citizenship, rights and participation by summarising the different narratives of participation, dividing them in non-mutually exclusive forms. These forms are dominant narratives , concerning discursive and developmental modes of participation based on adult regulation; critical narratives concerning analytical features of these modes of participation; and emergent narratives concerning multidimensional , diverse and relational forms of participation. Here narratives and meanings of discourse on children’s participation are explored through an analysis of children’s lived ‘voice’ and lived ‘agency’, and how these narratives and meanings of discourse enable, constrain or distort the participation of children. Applying a Rawlesian framework to these narratives of children’s participation, the chapter concentrates more on the emergent narrative of embedded, relational and material forms of participation in a similar vein to the lived approach we adopt in the book.

Thomas and Stoecklin (Chap. 4) explore aspects of children’s lived citizenship , rights and participation in society by using a framework that combines two theoretical models: recognition theory (Honneth, 1995) and capability theory (Sen, 1999). They suggest some new directions for theorising through combining elements of both models, attending to the processes that enable children or impede them in realising their potential value as members of society. They show that children must demonstrate that they share a specific community of value before their cognitive ability is recognised as mature enough to actively participate in legal relations. From the point of view of capability theory, then, esteem /solidarity as expressed in recognition theory may be seen as a ‘conversion factor’ that enables children to exercise in reality the rights that they already have in law. The authors use the actor’s system model (Stoecklin, 2013) to examine the relationships between activities, relations, values, images of self and motivations. Of these, values are seen as a key element in the processes whereby recognition is achieved or denied, and capacities converted into capabilities. Thus they reject the ‘becoming’ label of children and establish the importance of looking at children’s capabilities and ‘being’ at the current moment .

Eßer (Chap. 5) takes a relational approach to agency as his starting point in order to systematise some approaches to reconceptualising the body in childhood studies . Starting from the observation that the field has long had difficulty with the theorisation of the body, he highlights some empirical studies approaching the child’s body from the perspective of science and technology studies, practice theory and phenomenology. The author’s thesis is that the yield of a theorisation of the body helps to overcome common dichotomies in childhood studies between childhood as a social construct and children as actors. These can be resolved in favour of a concept of childhood that is both material and social.

Poretti (Chap. 6) returns to pragmatism as a critique of the agentless, Bourdieu-influenced , social theory. He acknowledges the importance of the complexities of children’s lived lives in today’s world and the requirement to adjust our tools to engage with this diversity . He develops the metaphor of the bricoleur and the need to bring an expanded theoretical toolbox with us into the research field. He elides the propensity of theorists to general and abstract frameworks to one based on critical and pragmatic sociology to reveal both the microlevel and the social and material conditions through which children’s rights are initiated and critically represented by adult experts. Drawing on a research project among participation specialists in Switzerland, and adopting a critical and pragmatic approach, the author shows the potential and the contradictions in the specialists’ ways of conceiving the meaning of enhancing children’s and young people’s participation.

Sarmento , Marchi and Trevisan (Chap. 7) call for close attention to spaces and places of children’s participation. They critique normative conceptions of modern childhood that remain a taken-for-granted and underlying subject of much theoretical work. Childhood has been implicitly assumed as a generational group under adult control and children as social actors who build their life trajectories in institutional settings such as the family and compulsory schooling that administer their rights and duties. Nevertheless, there are ‘children at the margins’ of this modern normative process: street children, children outside school, working children, children outside social protection systems, ethnic-minority children of non-Western societies and children from the Global South. Such children are understood in very different terms to ‘modern’ (Western) children because their active bodies, their movement and the form of their learning act as a threat to the more commonly held view of the child as ‘naturally’ placid, controlled and schooled.

The critical approach to participation and the attempt to elaborate on an emergent narrative of participation is exemplified by the contribution of Percy-Smith (Chap. 8). His chapter discusses how the participation literature is more concerned with how to embed participation into practice and ensuring children’s participation brings about an impact . It draws on a European-wide evaluation project involving each country mapping children’s participation with regard to legislation , structures, impact , effectiveness, barriers and good practice. This evaluation concludes that in spite of increasing provisions for children’s participation in legislation , there are significant challenges in realising meaningful participation in practice. The chapter offers critical reflections on the ‘state of the art’ in children’s participation, in particular the limitations of instrumental interpretations of participation as ‘voice’ or representation in decision-making, and instead it argues for the need to understand ‘participation’ as a contextualised practice rooted in cultural values , social relationships and regimes of power framed by professional and policy discourses, and integrated into public sector organisational systems for learning and development. Following the theme of lived citizenship, rights and participation, the author outlines a more elaborate framework for understanding participation as an active process of collaborative learning and change involving young people and adults within the context of everyday settings, relationships and professional practices.

The critical approach to developmental narratives of children’s participation and agency in British education is the theme of Farini’s contribution (Chap. 9). The chapter analyses citizenship discourse in the 2015 Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) statutory framework that confirms the adult-led, learning , teacher-centred approach, exemplified by the idea of education’s place in core British values. In the new EYFS, cooperation, freedom and responsibility are social skills to be learnt. An alternative perspective, looking at the core values of citizenship as a social form to be co-constructed by children and adults in everyday interactions , does not find any room in the English school curricula. The author argues that the EYFS lends itself as a case study for the cultural implications of the ‘being/not yet being’ binary, which suggests the distinction between the developed individual and the not-yet-developed individual structures the semantics of intergenerational communication in all social systems. This encourages the distinctions between trust /distrust and risk taking/risk avoidance that construct the meaning of children’s active citizenship and rights. The chapter challenges the assumption that citizenship can, and must, be transmitted from teacher to children in a unidirectional way, manufacturing compliant yet active citizens. The author instead argues that citizenship is experienced and articulated as a practice embedded within the lived day-to-day reality of children and adults that militates against the binary assumptions.

Pechtelidis (Chap. 10) explores an alternative view of education , active citizenship and children’s participation in crisis -ridden Greece. He observes a shift of interest from the private and public space to the shared ownership of social resources, such as knowledge and education . He utilises the concept of ‘heterotopia’ to analyse social and cultural spaces that have emerged, aiming for more participatory education and citizenship. According to the heterotopian imaginary, assymetrical power relations can be minimised but not cancelled. Hence the heterotopia is not a place that can be reached but an ongoing process of becoming. It is a critical attitude towards the present and a commitment to experiments in redefining and transfiguring the limits of chidhood, education and citizenship. Adopting this perspective, the author describes the everyday lives of two pedagogical communities in order to critically discuss both their dynamics and their limitations, and the consequences for the participants (children, parents and teachers). The chapter unveils the rituals, practices and mentalities produced by the participants in the heterotopic cultural spaces to understand how new children’s subjectivities come into being. In so doing it draws from different theoretical contributions, such as commons theory, heterotopian studies, the children’s rights movement, sociology of childhood and emancipation theory.

Finally, Amadasi and Iervese (Chap. 11) propose an analysis of participation and agency in lived interactions as a way of making children’s rights visible. They present a complex approach that includes concepts from different theories regarding structures and products of social interactions, such as narrative theory and positioning theory, and a methodological approach adapted from conversation analysis. They explore how theorising children in sociology has moved beyond mere interest in children’s ‘voices’ to one where children actually practise agency, as a lived form of citizenship, and specifically contribute to the structuring of social interactions. They do this by exploring the positioning and identity constructions of children with migration backgrounds regarding their transnational experiences during facilitated group conversations. The authors utilise the analysis of facilitated conversations among children to show the ways in which children’s narratives become cultural resources for framing, scripting and revising their positioning and identities , and managing the conflicts in the interaction. The authors demonstrate a close interdependence of participants’ positioning , narratives and identity construction. Here, children’s rights and citizenship, as well as their agency, can be discerned through their positioning in the interactional construction of narratives.

All of the chapters show that theorising children’s lived citizenship, rights and participation involves a multiperspective approach reflecting the complexities of the nature and context of children’s lived lives . The editors offer some concluding thoughts on possible future directions for theoretical work in the light of recognising children’s lived citizenship, rights and participation.