Children's media: Global-market products in a local setting
The particular focus of the project CHILDREN-MEDIA (Transnational histories of children's media in a 'glocalised' world) is the American-produced and globally marketed children's television programme Sesame Street. Comparing its transfer from the United States to Denmark/Scandinavia, Britain, West Germany and Italy, it investigates the programme's appropriation or rejection by national broadcasting companies in the 1970s. An important line of research is the challenges that global-market products are seen as introducing given that children's media products are often considered to play an important role in their enculturation into a specific cultural (national) environment. As such, the study investigates the reasons behind the programme's varied reception in the different countries vis-à-vis the national broadcasters' views of TV's role in children's enculturation. To date, the team has collected sources for the project in Denmark, Germany and Italy. This included a month spent at the archives of the Children's Television Workshop (the creators of Sesame Street) in Washington, and at archives in Denmark and Italy. An analytical framework has been constructed for interpreting successful transfers, and papers are in preparation on the lack of transnational perspective in children's media history and Sesame Street's transfer. Other project activities include participation in a conference on Child and Teen Consumption and the hosting of an international workshop on the localisation of children's media. The 2-day workshop hosted 14 participants from Europe and the United States. A research group has been initiated as part of an interdisciplinary effort involving several researchers from education and media studies. Research is helping to map out the consequences (in some cases) of a significant distance between the cultural ideals encoded in a global-market product and the ideals held by recipients in different national settings. The findings will offer insights into American and inter-European notions of the role of television in children's enculturation.
Keywords
Children's media, media products, global market, transnational histories, children's television
