Table of Contents

Introduction

Jessica Clark and Ingrid E. Castro – Zuzu’s Petals and Scout’s Mockingbirds: The Legacy of Children’s Agency in Popular Culture

Part I: Political Agency

Chapter 1: Catherine Hartung – “To All the Little Girls. . .Never Doubt that You are Valuable and Powerful”: Representations of Children’s Agency in the Pop Culture Politics of the Trump Era

Chapter 2: Fearghus Roulston and Lucy Newby – Innocent Victims and Troubled Combatants: Representations of Childhood and Adolescence in Post-Conflict Northern Irish Cinema Era

Chapter 3: John C. Nelson – “Wise as Serpents and Innocent as Doves”: Agency and Dehumanization of Children During Wartime

Part II: Social Agency

Chapter 4: Anja Höing – Animalic Agency: Intersecting the Child and the Animal in Popular British Children’s Fiction

Chapter 5: Michael G. Cornelius – Homogeneity, Agency, and the Girls’ College Series, 1905–1925

Chapter 6: Terri Suico – Fractured Friendships and Finding Oneself: Adolescent Girls Losing Friends but Finding Their Voices in Recent Young Adult Literature

Chapter 7: Jessica Clark – “Speddies” with Spray Paints: Intersections of Agency, Childhood, and Disability in Award-Winning Young Adult Fiction

Chapter 8: Tabitha Parry Collins, Mary L. Fahrenbruck, and Leanna Lucero – Trans Reality: The Development of Agency in Trans*gender and Gender Fluid Characters in Young Adult Novels

Part III: Generational Agency

Chapter 9: Michelle Nicole Boyer-Kelly – Māori Agents of Change: Examining the Children of Whale Rider, Once Were Warriors, and Potiki

Chapter 10: Shih-Wen Sue Chen and Sin Wen Lau – Children’s Agency and the Notion of Guai in Chinese Reality TV

Chapter 11: John Kerr – Children Redefining Adult Reality in Maternal Gothic Films

Chapter 12: Ingrid E. Castro – The Spirit and the Witch: Hayao Miyazaki’s Agentic Girls and Their (Intra)Independent Genderational Childhoods

Afterword
David Buckingham –Agency and Representation in Children’s Media Culture

About the Author

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.

Reviews

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.
*Jessica Taft, University of California at Santa Cruz, author of Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas*

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.
*William A. Corsaro, Robert H. Shaffer Professor of Sociology, Indiana University, author of The Sociology of Childhood and We're Friends, Right?: Inside Kids' Culture*