Project Details
Projekt
tAnGENCY. Childhood in Welfare Organisations
Applicant
Professor Dr. Florian Eßer
Subject Area
Education Systems and Educational Institutions
Term
from 2014 to 2015
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 265460838
In Childhood Studies empirical research "from the perspective" of children is very popular in order to address children as actors. In doing so children's agency is often simply taken for granted and/or conceptualized as an individual child's capacity. In social theory however relational understandings of agency are developed recently. Unlike substantialist notions, relational approaches to agency do not presume pre-social capacities: "[C]hild's agency is not the property of a subject, but rather is derived from a distributed network of subjects, bodies, materials, texts and technologies" (Turmel 2008: 34). However, relational approaches to agency have been barely grounded empirically. Against this background as part of a postdoctoral research a relational approach to agency for Childhood Studies will be both explored theoretically and tested empirically with respect to childhood in welfare organisations. A particular challenge will be to meet the corporality of agency, which still is a theoretical and empirical desideratum. Elsewhere the importance of corporality for various aspects of childhood and the everyday lives of children was elaborated in detail. With respect to educational processes studies deploying phenomenology or performance theory have consistently pointed to the significance of corporeality (eg Wulf/Zirfas 2007; Schulz 2010; Bilstein/Brumlik 2013). Tervooren (2006: 65ff) has related this aspect to childhood systematically. From the perspective of practice theory Kelle (2010) et. al. extensively examined the role of children's bodies in paediatrician's checkups in a DFG-funded project. For welfare organisations children's bodies and in particular touch are important but problematic elements of the production of care and agency - this is particularly true for the field of out-of-home care. In the course of the proposed research fellowship relational understandings of agency will be elaborated for Childhood Studies. Furthermore an empirical approach to agency and corporeality will be tested by developing a research design and carrying out preliminary ethnographic studies in welfare organisations within the field of out-of-home care. This will happen together with colleagues from the "School of Applied Social Sciences" (University of Stirling), who have broad experience in research on childhood in welfare organisations.
DFG Programme
Research Fellowships
International Connection
United Kingdom
