A Critical Conversation on Agency

A Critical Conversation on Agency Stephanie Olsen (bio), Kristine Alexander (bio), Susan Miller (bio), Ville Vuolanto (bio), Simon Sleight (bio), Mischa Honeck (bio), Sarah Emily Duff (bio), and Karen Vallgårda (bio) STEPHANIE OLSEN It is no surprise that debates about agency play out in the history of childhood and youth. Children and youth are among the most marginalized actors because of their minority and because of various intersecting categories—class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, disability—that often leave them without a strong say in their own lives. Yet historians of childhood and youth have been some of the most vocal in articulating a discomfort with the concept of agency. Recent scholarly debates over the usefulness of agency as a tool for understanding change over time have pointed to its limitations: it tends to privilege certain kinds of resistance over more complex analyses of people's responses to change; in doing so, it leaves out certain categories of people unable to participate in resistance narrowly defined. Key interventions by historians of childhood have suggested that the conventional formulation of agency needs replacing or at least redefining.1 This work builds on seminal interventions by historians of race, slavery, and gender.2 The focus has mainly been on the limits of the concept, with calls for its fine-tuning or even for its complete rejection. Agency has demonstrated itself to be a resilient and appealing concept, though, despite the continued negative attention. In part, I surmise, this is because there has not been a case made for other concepts that can replace it or fulfill its analytical role with a similar convenience but with fewer criticisms. Ishita Pande's provocative question in response to Sarah Maza resonates loudly here: "Does the child vanish with the onset of agency?"3 Our fundamental question as historians of childhood and youth, about age as a contingent but meaningful category itself, seems to be tied up with the problematic search for agency. End Page 169 This article features in conversation leading scholars in the field, all of whom have pondered and problematized agency in different national and colonial contexts, each with something distinctive to say from various subdisciplinary and geographical perspectives. Our discussion stems from a roundtable, part of the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences conference on The History of Experience and Agency: A Critical Intervention (HEX 2021).4 We point to potential pitfalls of agency from various theoretical, methodological, and political perspectives and, in an attempt to move away from or at least to rethink agency, discuss potential alternative routes out of the "agency trap." A novel reformulation of the category of experience figures prominently in theorizing these alternatives.5 Recent trends in this new history of experience seem to be entwined with the critical discussion on agency, to the point of letting it go. With this and other potential paths away from a focus on agency, historians of childhood and youth might retool to get the analytical results for which we strive from our archives and historical actors. Our conversation here draws out the various ways that we have problematized agency, the various reservations we have about the concept and the various solutions we have thought through. For some of us, "agency" does not simply need to be replaced as a concept with another similar one, but rather we need to reframe how we approach the history of children's voices and power, as well as how "the child" is historically constructed and shaped. Is there a clear distinction, theoretically or methodologically, between agency and "children's voices?"6 We ask what it is that we are trying to "get at" with agency and how we can reformulate these goals with a refined understanding of agency or with other tools entirely. We ask why this is a particularly pressing issue for historians of childhood and youth, but we also probe the extent to which this should be an issue for all historians, suggesting that new insights from our field can contribute to historical methodology more widely. We explore what a new analytical framework without agency might mean for the history of childhood and youth and how we...