The bodies and minds of children--and the very space of children--are under assault. This is the message we receive from daily news headlines about violence, sexual abuse, exploitation, and neglect of children, and from a proliferation of books in recent years representing the domain of contemporary childhood as threatened, invaded, polluted, and "stolen" by adults. Through a series of essays that explore the global dimensions of children at risk, an international group of researchers and policymakers discuss the notion of children's rights, and in particular the claim that every child has a right to a cultural identity. Explorations of children's situations in Japan, Korea, Singapore, South Africa, England, Norway, the United States, Brazil, and Germany reveal how children's everyday lives and futures are often the stakes in contemporary battles that adults wage over definitions of cultural identity and state cultural policies. Throughout this volume, the authors address the complex and often ambiguous implications of the concept of rights. For example, it may be used to defend indigenous children from radically assimilationist or even genocidal state policies; but it may also be used to legitimate racist institutions. A substantive introduction by the editor examines global political economic frameworks for the cultural debates affecting children and traces intriguing, sometimes surprising, threads throughout the papers. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Norma Field, Marilyn Ivy, Mary John, Hae-joang Cho, Saya Shiraishi, Vivienne Wee, Pamela Reynolds, Kathleen Hall, Ruth Mandel, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, and Njabulo Ndebele.

As countries experience increasing cultural diversity both within and between their borders, contemporary researchers are exploring the connection between culture and children's learning and academic experiences. One important goal is to provide all children with educational experiences that are culturally sensitive, relevant, and effective in helping them reach their maximum potential and preparing them for the future. With over twenty-five contributing authors, this volume investigates the connection between culture and children's schooling and learning experiences from multidisciplinary perspectives, diverse methodologies, and cross-cultural and culture specific approaches. The common thread running through the chapters is the understanding that learning is an activity that takes place within cultural contexts. Together, the chapters highlight the forces that shape children's everyday learning experiences. Core themes address how parental beliefs and cultural ways of learning and problem-solving shape children's learning experiences and social interactions with teachers; the importance of quality early childhood education and playful learning to children's school success and development; and how the complex intersection of cultural variables with forces such as historical injustice, social and educational inequality, economic stability, and political ideologies shape children's learning. The volume honors the experiences of Indigenous, newcomer, first-generation children, and children of underrepresented communities and highlights the vital role that policy makers, teacher educators, schools, and classroom educators play in helping all children reach their academic and social potential.

Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture proposes new theoretical frameworks for understanding the contradictory ways masculinity is represented in popular texts consumed by boys in the United States. The popular texts boys like are often ignored by educators and scholars, or are simply dismissed as garbage that boys should be discouraged from enjoying. However, examining and making visible the ways masculinity functions in these texts is vital to understanding the broad array of works that make up children’s culture and form dominant versions of masculinity. Such popular texts as Harry Potter, Captain Underpants, and Japanese manga and anime often perform rituals of subject formation in overtly grotesque ways that repulse adult readers and attract boys. They often use depictions of the abject – threats to bodily borders – to blur the distinctions between what is outside the body and what is inside, between what is "I" and what is "not I." Because of their reliance on depictions of the abject, those popular texts that most vigorously perform exaggerated versions of masculinity also create opportunities to make dominant masculinity visible as a social construct.

This volume explores the mutual influences between children’s literature and the avant-garde. Olson places particular focus on fin-de-siècle Paris, where the Avant-garde was not unified in thought and there was room for modernism to overlap with children’s literature and culture in the Golden Age. The ideas explored by artists such as Florence Upton, Henri Rousseau, Sir William Nicholson, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Marc Chagall had been disseminated widely in cultural productions for children; their work, in turn, influenced children’s culture. These artists turned to children’s culture as a "new way of seeing," allied to a contemporary interest in international artistic styles. Children’s culture also has strong ties to decadence and to the grotesque, the latter of which became a distinctively Modernist vision. This book visits the qualities of the era that were defined as uniquely childlike, the relation of childhood to high and low art, and the relation of children’s literature to fin-de-siècle artistic trends. Topics of interest include the use of non-European figures (the Golliwogg), approaches to religion and pedagogy, to oppression and motherhood, to Nature in a post-Darwinian world, and to vision in art and life. Olson’s unique focus covers new ground by concentrating not simply on children's literature, but on how childhood experiences and culture figure in art.

Godzilla stomped his way into American movie theaters in 1956, and ever since then Japanese trends and cultural products have had a major impact on children's popular culture in America. This can be seen in the Hello Kitty paraphernalia phenomenon, the popularity of anime television programs like Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z, computer games, and Hayao Miyazaki's award-winning films, such as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. The Japanification of Children's Popular Culture brings together contributors from different backgrounds, each exploring a particular aspect of this phenomenon from different angles, from scholarly examinations to recounting personal experiences. The book explains the interconnections among the various aspects of Japanese influence and discusses American responses to anime and other forms of Japanese popular culture.

Can children’s media be a source of education and empowerment? Or is the commercial media market a threat to their sense of social and democratic values? Such questions about the appropriateness of children’s media consumption have recurred in public debates throughout the twentieth century. From Superman to Social Realism provides an exciting new approach to the study of children’s media and childhood history, drawing on theories of cross-media consumption and transnational history. Based on extensive Scandinavian source material, it explores public debates about children’s media between 1945 and 1985. Readers are taken on a fascinating journey through debates about superheroes in the 1950s, politicization of children’s media in the 1960s, and about television and social realism in the 1980s. Arguments are firmly contextualized in Scandinavian childhood and welfare state history, an approach that demonstrates why professional and political groups have perceived children’s media as the key to the enculturation of future generations.

This essential volume brings together the work of internationally-renowned researchers, each experts in their field, in order to capture the diversity of children and young people′s media cultures around the world. Why are the media such a crucial part of children′s daily lives? Are they becoming more important, more influential, and in what ways? Or does a historical perspective reveal how past media have long framed children′s cultural horizons or, perhaps, how families - however constituted - have long shaped the ways children relate to media? In addressing such questions, the contributors present detailed empirical cases to uncover how children weave together diverse forms and technologies to create a rich symbolic tapestry which, in turn, shapes their social relationships. At the same time, many concerns - even public panics - arise regarding children′s engagement with media, leading the contributors also to inquire into the risky or problematic aspects of today′s highly mediated world. Deliberately selected to represent as many parts of the globe as possible, and with a commitment to recognizing both the similarities and differences in children and young people′s lives - from China to Denmark, from Canada to India, from Japan to Iceland, from - the authors offer a rich contextualization of children′s engagement with their particular media and communication environment, while also pursuing cross-cutting themes in terms of comparative and global trends. Each chapter provides a clear orientation for new readers to the main debates and core issues addressed, combined with a depth of analysis and argumentation to stimulate the thinking of advanced students and established scholars. Since children and young people are a focus of study across different disciplines, the volume is thoroughly multi-disciplinary. Yet since children and young people are all too easily neglected by these same disciplines, this volume hopes to accord their interests and concerns they surely merit.

This book addresses cultural variability in children’s social worlds, examining the acquisition, development, and use of culturally relevant social competencies valued in diverse cultural contexts. It discusses the different aspects of preschoolers’ social competencies that allow children – including adopted, immigrant, or at-risk children – to create and maintain relationships, communicate, and to get along with other people at home, in daycare or school, and other situations. Chapters explore how children’s social competencies reflect the features of the social worlds in which they live and grow. In addition, chapters examine the extent that different cultural value orientations manifest in children’s social functioning and escribes how parents in autonomy-oriented cultures tend to value different social skills than parents with relatedness or autonomous-relatedness orientations. The book concludes with recommendations for future research directions. Topics featured in this book include: Gender development in young children. Peer interactions and relationships during the preschool years. Sibling interactions in western and non-western cultural groups. The roles of grandparents in child development. Socialization and development in refugee children. Child development within institutional care. Children’s Social Worlds in Cultural Context is a valuable resource for researchers, clinicians/practitioners, and graduate students in developmental psychology, child and school psychology, social work, cultural anthropology, family studies, and education.

This gripping book considers the history, techniques, and goals of child-targeted consumer campaigns and examines children's changing perceptions of what commodities they "need" to be valued and value themselves. In this critique of America's consumption-based society, author Jennifer Hill chronicles the impact of consumer culture on children—from the evolution of childhood play to a child's self-perception as a consumer to the consequences of this generation's repeated media exposure to violence. Hill proposes that corporations, eager to tap into a multibillion-dollar market, use the power of advertising and the media to mold children's thoughts and behaviors. The book features vignettes with teenagers explaining, in their own words, how advertising determines their needs, wants, and self-esteem. An in-depth analysis of this research reveals the influence of media on a young person's desire to conform, shows how broadcasted depictions of beauty distort the identities of children and teens, and uncovers corporate agendas for manipulating behavior in the younger generation. The work concludes with the position that corporations are shaping children to be efficient consumers but, in return, are harming their developing young minds and physical well-being.

In this study of representations of children and childhood, a global team of authors explores the theme of undeadness as it applies to cultural constructions of the child. Moving beyond conventional depictions of the undead in popular culture as living dead monsters of horror and mad science that transgress the borders between life and death, rejuvenation, and decay, the authors present undeadness as a broader concept that explores how people, objects, customs, and ideas deemed lost or consigned to the past might endure in the present. The chapters examine nostalgic texts that explore past incarnations of childhood, mementos of childhood, zombie children, spectral children, images and artefacts of deceased children, as well as states of arrested development and the inability or refusal to embrace adulthood. Expanding undeadness beyond the realm of horror and extending its meaning conceptually, while acknowledging its roots in the genre, the book explores attempts at countering the transitory nature of childhoods. This unique and insightful volume will interest scholars and students working on popular culture and cultural studies, media studies, film and television studies, childhood studies, gender studies, and philosophy.