The duality of children’s political agency in deportability
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395716665391 |
| Date | 01 August 2017 |
| Author | Jacob Lind |
| Published date | 01 August 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
research-article2016
Special Issue Article
Politics
2017, Vol. 37(3) 288 –301
The duality of children’s
© The Author(s) 2016
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political agency in
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395716665391
DOI: 10.1177/0263395716665391
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
deportability
Jacob Lind
Malmö University, Sweden
Abstract
Drawing on in-depth ethnographic observations among irregularised migrant families in
Birmingham, UK, this article discusses how children’s political agency manifests in everyday life.
It shows how children who become aware of their legal status as ‘deportable’ reject this subject
position and offer their own definitions of who they are and where they belong. Simultaneously,
it is argued that children with varying degrees of knowledge about their legal status also express
political agency through their struggle to sustain the inclusion they experience. Such expressions
highlight the duality of children’s political agency in irregular situations.
Keywords
children, deportability, the irregular situation, political agency
Received: 26th October 2015; Revised version received: 6th June 2016; Accepted: 18th June 2016
In this article, I discuss how the context of the irregular situation characterised by the
‘deportability’ of the people who end up in it (De Genova, 2002) is a fruitful case to
analyse for broadening our understanding of how children’s political agency comes
about. Through ethnographic observations of the everyday lives of irregularised migrant
children in Birmingham, UK, I highlight the duality of children’s political agency by
focusing on what the children do rather than who they are (Bosco, 2010). I show how
children can aim to sustain their social inclusion and resist their subject position of being
‘deportable’ at the same time.
But why should we study children’s political agency to begin with? And why is the
irregular situation interesting? According to Stuart Aitken et al. (2007: 3), children are an
‘important fulcrum of, and impetus for, change’ in a globalised world. Furthermore, Anne
McNevin (2011: 5) sees ‘irregular migrants’ acts of contestation as a new frontier of the
political. Inspired by this, I argue that studying what children do in an irregular situation
Corresponding author:
Jacob Lind, Department of Global Political Studies, Malmö University, 205 06 Malmö, Sweden.
Email: jacob.lind@mah.se
Lind
289
may contribute to an understanding of how political agency is enacted by children even
in, or perhaps especially in, the most vulnerable positions. Also, I aim to understand what
change they themselves aspire for at this political frontier by acknowledging these chil-
dren’s struggles in their everyday lives.
Earlier research on the everyday lives of children and their families in an irregular situ-
ation has been conducted in Sweden (Ascher and Wahlström Smith, 2016), the United
Kingdom (Sigona and Hughes, 2012), and more extensively in the United States (Abrego,
2006; Dreby, 2015; Gonzales, 2016; Menjívar, 2006). These studies discuss to varying
extents the coping strategies, resilience, and agency of children. None of them engage in
a discussion about how their struggles can be understood as contesting the irregular
situation and thus serving as expressions of political agency. This article attempts to fill
this gap and answer Fernando Bosco’s (2010: 385) call for more explorations between
‘children, activism, and political work in more explicit ways’.
The political agency that the children in this study express is, to a large extent, a
reaction to finding themselves in a repressive situation where they can be deported.
They would prefer not to have to contest it and to live their lives without being subject
to migration control. I do not aim to idealise or romanticise actions by the children
concerned. My point of departure is that since the children I met are living under these
circumstances, it is important to recognise their struggles. I agree with Sana Nakata
(2008: 23) who suggests (in this journal) that ‘an individual who has recognised politi-
cal agency will be visible in political conflict, and his or her political actions will be
recognised by others and become central to key debates’. However, it is also important
to remember that increased visibility can also lead to an increased risk of deportation.
I have mitigated this risk through a thorough discussion with my participants about
anonymisation, including ensuring that parents were aware of these risks and fully
agreed on the family’s participation in the study.
I begin by positioning this article within the literature on children’s political agency
and discussing in more detail why the irregular situation is a specifically interesting case
for studying how this political agency comes about. After a brief methodological discus-
sion on the implications of the call for more empirical studies within this field, I show,
through ethnographic observations, how children contest the ‘deportability’ imposed on
them. I then argue for the importance of children’s contextual knowledge for acts of con-
testation to occur and exemplify these contestations by highlighting the everyday strug-
gles for these children to assert the right to decide on their own identity and belonging.
Simultaneously, I highlight the duality of children’s political agency in the irregular situ-
ation by contrasting these explicit contestations of the subject positions imposed on them
with examples of how children, with varying degrees of knowledge, struggle to sustain
their experiences of societal inclusion.
Children’s political agency as it happens in the world
It is a well-established fact, or even a ‘mantra’, within childhood research that children
are social actors who have agency of various kinds in different situations (Tisdall and
Punch, 2012); however, there is no common understanding about what this agency actu-
ally implies. One could question whether agency is a useful theoretical concept for under-
standing anything at all if it potentially encompasses any action, enacted by any subject,
in any situation. By narrowing down the discussion by adding a prefix such as political
agency, this problem becomes less prevalent. In this vein, Lorenzo Bordonaro (2012)
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Politics 37(3)
argues for an urgent need to bring political and rights discourses into the debate around
agency. He remarks that children’s agency should be seen as a political project rather than
an essentialised feature of individuals. I agree with Bordonaro, and in this article, I will
specifically argue, drawing primarily on the work of Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and Jouni
Häkli, for the need to study how children’s political agency comes about in the everyday
lives of children. This differs from discussing what it is in an essentialised sense, since the
how of political agency is possible to study empirically.
To understand what ‘the political’, or ‘politics’, is, Hannah Arendt (1958: Chapter 10)
suggested that we need to focus on how political action happens ‘in the world’. Kallio
and Häkli (2010) connect Arendt’s point with an argument (drawing on Flyvbjerg, 2001)
that children are a ‘critical case’ useful for furthering our understanding of how political
action is expressed in everyday life. This means that studying children can help us
understand at a more general level how the concepts of ‘agency’ and ‘politics’ are con-
nected. To be able to study the critical case of children’s political agency, Häkli and
Kallio (2014) then suggest that such research needs to be empirically informed so that
‘the meanings of the political’ can be worked out in practice and not just in theory. They
suggest that such empirical studies should focus on ‘lived childhoods’ and their ‘political
worlds’ (i.e. contexts) and ‘what kinds of dynamisms uphold and transform the political
worlds where children act as competent agents’ (Kallio and Häkli, 2011: 24).
What, though, from the perspective of political research is so special about children?
To begin, even with signs of change, children are mostly invisible in research on political
agency as well as in transnational migration since the subject in such research is usually
implied to be an adult. Such ‘adultism’ leaves out half of the world’s population as irrel-
evant non-subjects (Marshall, 2015; White et al., 2011). This fundamental exclusion from
the polity turns childhood into a useful conceptual lens through which traces of the politi-
cal processes that control the direction of history can be tracked. Still, it is not useful to
just include children into the realm of adulthood without making note of the specificities
of children’s politics. Rather, by discussing those specificities, we get a contextualised
understanding of how political agency is lived and experienced. Kallio (2007: 124) sepa-
rates children as political actors from adults by focusing on the everyday life experiences
and practices of children rather than their ‘reflective contemplations or moral judge-
ments’. As Kallio and Häkli (2010: 357) point out:
Children typically fail to measure up to adults’ and institutional actors’ rational argumentation
and thus by necessity practice politics on other, often bodily, grounds […] at the same time
children are human beings thoroughly involved in meaning-making processes and identity
construction, living their lives as actual...
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