A critical exploration of how young people come to have agency in the world.

In this critical study, readers are asked to consider how children and youth are constrained by social, cultural, political, and economic forces and how they overcome these to exercise their agency. This volume discusses issues such as the place of institutional and residential care, children as the subjects of academic research, and the voice of children and youth in the justice system, particularly that of Indigenous youth. Each chapter explores and challenges the notion that only adults can understand and determine the needs of young people by providing examples of children and youth who already participate in complex environments and by arguing for an acknowledgment of their rights and agency in each circumstance. By dismantling the Western world’s romantic notion of childhood innocence, the authors critically explore the understandings of young people as agents in their own worlds.