Description
Book SynopsisRepresenting Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen and In-Between addresses the intersection of children's and youth's agency and popular culture. As scholars in childhood studies and beyond seek to expand understandings of agency, power, and voice in children's 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 children's agency, and interrogation of these themes through interdisciplinary lenses is vital to furthering knowledge and understanding abou
Trade ReviewThis book is an important contribution to the debate ‘for’ and ‘against’ agency.
* Journal of Contemporary History *
This edited collection significantly expands the conversation on children’s 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 concept’s 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
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Jessica Clark and Ingrid E. Castro – Zuzu’s Petals and Scout’s Mockingbirds: The Legacy of Children’s Agency in Popular Culture
Part I: Political Agency
Chapter 1: Catherine Hartung – “To All the Little Girls. . .Never Doubt that You are Valuable and Powerful”: Representations of Children’s Agency in the Pop Culture Politics of the Trump Era
Chapter 2: Fearghus Roulston and Lucy Newby – Innocent Victims and Troubled Combatants: Representations of Childhood and Adolescence in Post-Conflict Northern Irish Cinema Era
Chapter 3: John C. Nelson – “Wise as Serpents and Innocent as Doves”: Agency and Dehumanization of Children During Wartime
Part II: Social Agency
Chapter 4: Anja Höing – Animalic Agency: Intersecting the Child and the Animal in Popular British Children’s Fiction
Chapter 5: Michael G. Cornelius – Homogeneity, Agency, and the Girls’ College Series, 1905–1925
Chapter 6: Terri Suico – Fractured Friendships and Finding Oneself: Adolescent Girls Losing Friends but Finding Their Voices in Recent Young Adult Literature
Chapter 7: Jessica Clark – “Speddies” with Spray Paints: Intersections of Agency, Childhood, and Disability in Award-Winning Young Adult Fiction
Chapter 8: Tabitha Parry Collins, Mary L. Fahrenbruck, and Leanna Lucero – Trans Reality: The Development of Agency in Trans*gender and Gender Fluid Characters in Young Adult Novels
Part III: Generational Agency
Chapter 9: Michelle Nicole Boyer-Kelly – Māori Agents of Change: Examining the Children of Whale Rider, Once Were Warriors, and Potiki
Chapter 10: Shih-Wen Sue Chen and Sin Wen Lau – Children’s Agency and the Notion of Guai in Chinese Reality TV
Chapter 11: John Kerr – Children Redefining Adult Reality in Maternal Gothic Films
Chapter 12: Ingrid E. Castro – The Spirit and the Witch: Hayao Miyazaki’s Agentic Girls and Their (Intra)Independent Genderational Childhoods
Afterword
David Buckingham –Agency and Representation in Children’s Media Culture
