Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen, and In Between

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Description

Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen and In-Between addresses the intersection of childrens and youths agency and popular culture. As scholars in childhood studies and beyond seek to expand understandings of agency, power, and voice in childrens lives, this book places popular culture and representation as central to this endeavor. Core themes of family, gender, temporality, politics, education, technology, disability, conflict, identity, ethnicity, and friendship traverse across the chapters, framed through various film, television, literature, and virtual media sources. Here, childhood is considered far from homogeneous and the dominance of neoliberal models of agency is questioned by intersectional and intergenerational analyses. This book posits there is vast power in popular culture representations of childrens agency, and interrogation of these themes through interdisciplinary lenses is vital to furthering knowledge and understanding about childrens lives and within childhood studies.

Reviews

This book is an important contribution to the debate for and against agency.

* Journal of Contemporary History *
This edited collection significantly expands the conversation on childrens 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 concepts 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

Author Bio

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.