The contested politics of children's media
Name of applicant
Helle Strandgaard Jensen
Title
Associate Professor
Institution
Aarhus University
Amount
DKK 722,031
Year
2022
Type of grant
Monograph Fellowships
Summary
Children’s media has become a central but highly contested issue in modern culture and identity politics. The book explains why this is as it examines 40 years of debates from news media outlets in the US, the UK, and Denmark. It shows how agreement on what constituted ‘appropriate’ children’s media gradually dissolved, and conflicting ideas emerged. The book makes an important contribution to our understanding of these conflicts, as it parts with existing research that focuses on single issues and adopts a present-day perspective. Instead, it provides an overarching, historical and transnational explanation of why children's media became a battleground for fights over rivaling social and cultural values.