Extract

Putting to rest the popular adage that children are meant to be “seen and not heard,” a spate of recent books tout young people’s visibility and voices. Over the past 2 decades, researchers hailing from communication, sociology, psychology, and education disciplines have sought to not only study but also help create the conditions to see and hear youth. Assisted by their home universities, interested grantors, policy makers, and school administrators, communication scholars have a wide array of settings in which to see children and teenagers as actively engaging with media as consumers and critics. From this legacy, books by Mary Celeste Kearney, Gerry Bloustien, and Ellen Seiter illustrate and theorize the importance of young people as media producers. Their work, international and cross-disciplinary in scope, brings together an arsenal of new action-oriented research with cultural studies, feminist theory, and ethnographic methods. Together, they offer an empowering, yet complicated, picture of young people and their creative potentials.

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