ABSTRACT

Practising across multiple disciplines and employing a variety of methods, media researchers in a Critical Studies tradition may have formal training in literary criticism, history, film-making, art history, philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, narratology, pedagogy, linguistics or other fields. Given this diversity, Critical Studies is best understood as an approach to the object of study and a way to practice scholarship rather than a discipline in its own right. The chapter offers a broad background to the tradition of Critical Studies and is informed bymy ownmulti-disciplinary training and its application in practice to the exploration of children’s media use. This chapter focuses on an intellectual heritage with roots in Marxist Critical Theory and a view that the economic, social, political, and cultural are inseparable and mutually constitutive. Media are understood here as cultural forms that express broader social patterns (Williams, 1974) and Critical Studies examine the cultural forms and cultural practices that take shape in the nexus of technology, text, and context. The critique inherent to Critical Studies is an activist one with aims to identify and address social

problems, particularly those to do with inequality and power. Like Feminist Studies and early Cultural Studies, Critical Studies is a counter-hegemonic practice that often questions the received wisdom and challenges the dominant paradigm or discourse (Kincheloe and McLaren, 2002; Fay, 1987). Critical Studies acknowledges that children’s relatively subordinate and dependent status in society limits their opportunity to speak on their own behalf and to participate fully in society. Their access to media is often circumscribed and restricted, their opinions and preferences are not often sought after, and yet children are spoken for and about, particularly through media regulation and policy. As part of its counter-hegemonic practice, Critical Studies scholarship often highlights children’s media practices, and tries to do so in the words of children and with their participation, to understand how children make media meaningful. In this way, Critical Studies emphasizes children’s agency in media interactions and economies. Broadly, Critical Studies scholarship has explored images of children in media (representa-

tions) and what they indicate about our understanding of children and childhood at particular historical moments; how children understand media (meaning construction); what children do with media (as consumers and producers); how industrial systems of media treat children (as consumers) – and it has looked reflectively at scholarship itself by examining the construction of children and media as a specialized area of inquiry. Often the subject of inquiry is focused at the intersections and interfaces of such concerns.