Article

Care experienced young people: Agency and empowerment

Details

Citation

Priestley A (2020) Care experienced young people: Agency and empowerment. Children and Society, 34 (6), pp. 521-536. https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12383

Abstract
Empowerment discourses have become fashionable in current policy and practice relating to young people, including those with care experience. Empowerment, however, is a slippery and contested concept, associated with neo-liberal discourses. An ecological understanding of agency offers more theoretically nuanced understandings of empowerment, taking account of the complex, temporal, and relational factors, upon which empowerment is contingent. This paper utilises data generated through an ‘empowerment group’ for care-experienced young people; it illustrates how an ecological understanding of agency, as a heuristic, might further understanding of the lives of care-experienced young people.

Keywords
agency; empowerment; young people

Journal
Children and Society: Volume 34, Issue 6

StatusPublished
Publication date30/11/2020
Publication date online08/04/2020
Date accepted by journal13/03/2020
URLhttp://hdl.handle.net/1893/31062
PublisherWiley
ISSN0951-0605
eISSN1099-0860

People (1)

Dr Andrea Priestley

Dr Andrea Priestley

Lecturer, Education