Editorial Board:
Editor:
George H. Conklin,
 North Carolina
 Central University

Board:
Bob Davis
 North Carolina
 Agricultural and
 Technical State
 University

Richard Dixon,
 UNC-Wilmington

Ken Land,
 Duke University

Miles Simpson,
 North Carolina
 Central University

Ron Wimberley,
 N.C. State University

Robert Wortham,
 North Carolina
 Central University

® 
Volume 4, Number 1
Spring 2006

A Cultural Studies Approach to Teaching the Sociology of Childhood

by

Donna King
University of North Carolina at Wilmington

    There are a number of ways to teach the sociology of childhood.  I have developed a cultural studies approach that uses a variety of resources and activities.  Cultural studies refer to interdisciplinary and eclectic approaches to understanding the social significance of cultural products and everyday activities.  Much cultural studies tend to be explicitly critical and can include feminist, democratic-socialist, postmodern, semiotic, and deconstructive theories and methods (Barker 2000, Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler 1992, Sardar and Van Loon 1999, Storey 1996).  Cultural studies also focuses on the many ways ordinary people, and particularly young people, actively make meaning using cultural objects such as music, clothes, games, food, and language (Fiske 1989, Willis 1990).  Sociologists can use the tools of cultural studies both to study the symbolic creativity of everyday life and to analyze social relations of power in the cultural arena.

    The relative merit of a cultural studies approach to sociology includes introducing undergraduate students to concepts, methods and scholarship that specifically and critically address the mass-mediated cultural aspects of social life in which students’ have been immersed since birth and can relate to on a personal level.  The relative limitation of a cultural studies approach for undergraduate students is that much of the scholarship tends to be high level, aimed at graduate students and scholars, and thus may be difficult to decipher and off-putting without a lot of assistance from the professor.

    When teaching the sociology of childhood, my goal is to engage students in critical and reflective thinking about the changing meanings of childhood and children's experience in society today.  A central focus is on the role that corporations, the mass media, and popular culture play in shaping contemporary childhood and children's social identities.  I use Steinberg and Kincheloe (1997, 2004) Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood as a primary text.  I also use supplementary readings and show several videos that I will describe below.

    Students at my university who enroll in the sociology of childhood are drawn from many disciplines, including a large percentage from the Education of Young Children program that are required to take this course as part of their curriculum.  Sociology of Children and Childhood is listed in our catalogue as a 300 level undergraduate course with Introduction to Sociology as a prerequisite.  However, I have found it essential to begin with a basic review to help ground students in the sociological perspective.  For many students there will be a strong tendency throughout the entire semester to revert to a psychological perspective when analyzing children and childhood.  Therefore, this class offers an ongoing opportunity to encourage sociological imagination in a substantive area dominated by the biological and psychological.

    I often start by asking students: Who are children? What is childhood?  It is interesting to hear differing definitions.  Are infants children?  Are teenagers children?  What about college students?  What about adults relating to their parents?  We discover there is not a clear consensus about when childhood begins or when it ends, or who gets to define its criteria or boundaries.  Next, I ask students what they see as the most important issues concerning children and childhood in contemporary society.  This allows me to learn what are their interests and major concerns about children and hopefully to address these during the semester.  Finally, I ask students to reflect on how these definitions and issues relate to their own experiences, childhood being a social status every one of us has shared.

    I begin debunking essentialist notions about children and childhood by exploring the social construction of childhood using Philippe Aries's (1962) classic Centuries of Childhood.  Students are usually intrigued to learn that childhood can be viewed as a social invention, and they enjoy being shocked by Aries's contention that after a late weaning at around age 5 or 6, European children of the Middle Ages participated in work, war and sexual activity as adults.   Vivanna Zelizer's (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child, David Nasaw's (1985) historical work on children's entertainment, and a review of the history of child labor practices in the U.S. and globally are just a few of the many resources available that serve to deconstruct childhood as a timeless, protected and sentimental status.

    Questions about childhood innocence and contemporary adult ambivalence about children are the next major themes of the course.  For this section, students read the introduction and first chapter of Kinderculture (Steinberg and Kincheloe 1997:1-52), an article on childhood studies in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Heller 1998), and an article by Goetting (1994) called "Do Americans Really Like Children?"  I also show Innocence: What is a Child?, part one of an excellent 3-part video series from Australia called Myths of Childhood (1997).

    I begin by asking students what it means to be ambivalent.  A surprising number are not clear that the term refers to having conflicting views or feelings about someone or something.  Different types of adult ambivalence about children are discussed in the readings and the video.  Goetting focuses on the disjunction between American sentimental rhetoric about children and our society's reluctance to guarantee material support for all children's well being.  As an assignment, I have students research the Children's Defense Fund http://www.childrensdefense.org and UNICEF  http://www.unicef.org .

    Web pages for up-to-date statistics on the material state of children on the local, national and international level.  This assignment can be easily converted into a more formal class presentation project.   In class, students learn how children's economic vulnerability is tied to the welfare of women, to changes in the structure of work and family, and particularly to the feminization of poverty and the dismantling of welfare programs.  We discuss Steinberg and Kincheloe's (1997:20-21) critique of the call for a return to "family values" as "code words for neglect" masking anti-feminist ideology and economic and structural inequalities affecting women and children. 

    Adult ambivalence about children and childhood can also be studied on the symbolic level.  The Childhood Studies article (Heller 1998) and the Myths of Childhood Innocence video (1997) explore how cultural definitions of children as innocent, as victims, or as bad serve more to address adult needs, fears, and desires than the lived reality of children.  Photographer Anne Geddes's popular images of chubby infants dressed as fairies and cherubs juxtaposed with Sally Mann's controversial photographs of her own children in jaded, adult-like poses - hand on hip, holding a cigarette - strikes an uncomfortable chord (Myths of Childhood Innocence 1997, Heller 1998).  In class we explore boundaries of socially acceptable images of children and childhood to better understand social attitudes and awareness of childhood realities.  For example, images of children as vulnerable victims of stranger abduction and sexual predation, which dominated the cultural imagination in the late eighties and early nineties, served in part to mask closer to home realities of custodial disputes, parental kidnapping and incestual abuse.  As Glassner (1999:307) states, "By means of their selection of stories and frames, journalists and editors can evade discussion of other social issues" [emphasis in the original.]  Pointing to some of those other issues, Kitzinger (1988:80) observes that:

Innocence, then, is a problematic concept because it is itself a sexual commodity and because a child who is anything less than 'an angel' may be seen as 'fair game,' both by the courts and by other men who will avail themselves of a child they know has been abused… More fundamentally, however, 'innocence' should be rejected because it is an ideology used to deny children access to knowledge and power.

    As an assignment looking at the symbolic representation of children in popular culture, I have students bring in at least 5 magazine advertisements featuring children.  They note which magazine and issue each ad came from and also take note which magazines have little or no ads featuring children.  Students work in small groups for about 20 minutes looking for patterns in the social information the ads (or the absence of ads) convey about how the culture views children and how children's images are used to sell products.   A recent ad featured a well-scrubbed, smiling and relaxed mother, father, and sister surrounding a calm and contained boy sitting contentedly at a table doing his homework.  The ad, reminiscent of those showing immaculately dressed women serenely scrubbing floors or hauling laundry, was for a prescription drug to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.  Visual texts are rich and open to a variety of interpretation, but patterns can be found, and the activity generates discussion and critical thinking about the popular representation of children. The exercise is a toe in semiotic waters, designed to generate thinking about the relationship of children and commercial culture, which becomes the next major theme of the course.

    The increasingly important role that corporations play in socializing children is complex, insidious, and the central focus of Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood (Steinberg & Kincheloe 1997, 2004).  Steinberg and Kincheloe's introduction to this edited collection is an insightful analysis of the many changes that corporate culture has wrought upon contemporary childhood.  Corporations systematically and cynically target children in order to shape compliant consumers and sell products.  This extremely well-funded consumer socialization--bombarding children to an unprecedented degree of intensity and sophistication using the best and brightest minds trained in advertising psychology--is shaping children's values, identities, and behaviors in ways that have serious, but largely unexamined, consequences for children, for families, and for society.

    On the one hand, children are immersed, from the earliest age, in a commercial universe in which the dominant message equates happiness with buying things.   Children are actively recruited into a consumer culture that tells them over and over again that they need more and more stuff, and that individual worth is measured by what one has.  The early and intense promotion of greed and materialism among even very young children is designed to establish brand loyalty, to tap into a lucrative market with sizable discretionary income, and to produce lifelong hedonistic consumers.

    As an adjunct to this theme, I show a short segment from a video, The Ad and the Ego (1996), which argues that advertising is the most significant shaper of culture today, even more effective because it is usually seen as trivial, insignificant and easily ignored .  As media critic Jeanne Kilbourne comments in the video, these mistaken assumptions ("I don't pay attention to ads; they have no effect on me") are the reason advertising is such a powerful pedagogical tool.

    Children's exposure to commercial messages is complete, total, ubiquitous, extending even to formerly protected areas such as the public schools (Steinberg & Kincheloe 1997:3-5).  As an example of this, I show a short segment from the PBS video Affluenza (1997) that looks at how schools, strapped for cash, are relying more and more on corporate advertising in the form of “learning activities” (such as a project on the history of the Tootsie Roll), enforced in-class viewing of commercials on Channel One programming, fast-food concessions in the lunchroom, and even billboards on school buses.

    On the other hand, advertising promotes and reinforces insecurity about one's self-worth and sense of belonging - through insinuations and outright ridicule and degradation rituals - then offers products as the route to salvation (Jhally 1995).  Children learn from advertising that if they just have the right clothes, the right toys, the right look, even the right smell, only then will they be all right.  Of course, all of this comes at a high price, both emotional and financial, and artificially engineered rapid change makes being "cool" a difficult and expensive target to hit.  This theme is demonstrated quite nicely in a short video from Canada called All The Right Stuff (1995), which features a young skateboarder reflecting on media and cultural pressure on youth while spending his birthday money in the mall. The Merchants of Cool (2001) is another excellent video on youth commercial culture that looks specifically at the cynical manufacturing of youth trends, where market researchers infiltrate youth culture to cannibalize it and then sell it back as the latest commodity.

    Youth marketing tactics have also taken an explicit pornographic turn, as evidenced in the production Brittany Spears' music videos by a porn director, Calvin Klein advertising campaigns using child models in provocative poses, and Abercrombie & Fitch clothing company promoting thong underwear for 7-10 year old girls.  As these examples indicate, the commercial targeting of child consumers comes hand-in-hand with children’s early and on-going exposure to explicit adult content in the media. 

    Not only are children enveloped in a sexually explicit commercial universe, delivered to them in dizzyingly fast and furious "hyperreal" style; corporations are also in the business of marketing rebellion.  Advertisers directly address children in a way that is guaranteed to delight, telling kids over and over how much smarter and cooler they are than their hapless parents.  This early and ongoing exposure to aggressive commercial culture and explicit adult content, coupled with advertising hailing children as all-knowing and their parents as hopelessly lost, is not simply fostering young hedonistic consumers, say Steinberg and Kincheloe; it is actively shaping children’s consciousness and fostering a new breed of kid-with-adult-knowledge: "Children's access to the adult world via the electronic media of hyperreality has subverted contemporary children’s consciousness of themselves as incompetent and dependent entities (Steinberg and Kincheloe 1995:17)."

    One largely unexamined consequence of the new breed of postmodern, worldly, "wise-ass" children, say Steinberg and Kincheloe, is a cultural backlash starting in the 1970s that is evident in horror movies such as The Other, The Exorcist, The Bad Seed, Children of the Corn, etc., where "independent and self-sufficient youths with an 'inappropriate' insight into the adult world" are depicted as evil monsters that must be destroyed (1997:37).  According to Kincheloe, adult hostility is projected onto cinematic "evil children" as a means of concealing parental resentment of children as "alien intruders (1997:37)." 

    In addition, he argues, comedies such as the enormously popular Home Alone movies offer a more subtle and nuanced but no less hostile portrayal of contemporary children as unwanted, alienating, and guilt-producing problems for adults.  Kincheloe situates parental ambivalence and children's alienation in the context of complex social forces that need to be recognized and addressed if rapprochement is ever to be reached.  The genie is out of the bottle, he argues, "adult information is uncontainable (1997:17)" and traditional notions of "protecting" children on the one hand and "controlling" them on the other must make way for new ways of parenting, teaching, and mentoring children that will provide both children and adults with the necessary skills to make sense, critical reflective sense, of the flood of information and advertising inundating them.  Media literacy becomes fundamental for negotiating what Steinberg and Kincheloe see as an irreversible postmodern social reality.  Teaching media literacy and beginning to apply its tools is the next curricular priority in my Sociology of Children and Childhood class.

    There are several possibilities for class assignments in this section of the course.  As a very simple exploratory assignment, I have students watch at least one hour of children's commercial television programming, paying attention to what is being sold to children and how children are being addressed.  Some cable channels, such as Nickelodeon, restrict the amount of commercials being shown, and so is not the best source.  Saturday morning children's programming on the major broadcast networks is replete with commercials, and is a good bet for this assignment.

    Another assignment is to have students watch one or more of the movies mentioned in the reading assignments and write a short paper answering the following questions:  Do you agree with the depictions of the "smart ass" or "bad seed" child that Kincheloe describes?  Why or why not?  Students then watch a current or recent movie featuring children and answer the following questions:  How are these children portrayed?  How do these portrayals compare/contrast with the Kevin character in Home Alone?  With the "evil" child characters of the 1970s and 80s?

    Applying media literacy tools, the remainder of the semester is spent analyzing specific aspects of children’s popular culture for the not always obvious lessons children are learning about social relations of power.  This is done both by analyzing children’s popular media and by talking to children about their involvement in music, movies, fashion, and video games, to get at least a preliminary sense of the lived world of postmodern children today.  There are many excellent videos available to augment assigned readings for this section and to spark class discussion.

    I start with a critical analysis of the Disney phenomenon.  In "Are Disney Movies Good For Your Kids? (1997:53-67)"  Henry Giroux explores a 'hidden curriculum' in Disney cultural productions that promotes racist and sexist stereotypes, revises history to obscure imperialism, promotes conformity while it discourages democratic political activity, and erases "boundaries between entertainment, education, and commercialization" in order to sell more products (1997:55). 

    Giroux demonstrates how in hugely popular Disney animated movies such as The Little Mermaid and The Lion King female characters are portrayed within narrowly defined gender roles "defining [women and girls'] sense of power and desire almost exclusively in terms of dominant male narratives (1997:58)."  Even the more complex portrayal of Belle in Beauty and the Beast becomes the story of "another woman whose life is valued for solving a man's problems (1997:59)." Racist stereotypes in The Jungle Book and Aladdin are discussed as "codes in which children are taught that cultural differences that do not bear the imprint of white, middle-class ethnicity are deviant, inferior, ignorant, and a threat to be overcome (1997:62)." 

    Giroux also critiques the far-reaching effects of the "Disneyfication" of public spaces and history, such as Times Square in New York City and the revisionist movie Pocahontas, as "securing particular ideological interests, legitimating specific social relations, and making a distinct claim on the meaning of public memory" for which Disney needs to be held accountable (1997:65).  Giroux and others who have written critical studies of Disney are well aware of the power of corporate censorship, having experienced it first-hand.  All of the above is discussed in the Media Education Foundation video, Mickey Mouse Monopoly (2001); a perfect complement to the assigned reading that features Giroux and other scholars’ critical assessments of the enormously popular cultural icon.

    Be prepared for strong reactions, both positive and negative, to critical analyses of Disney.  While some students will enthusiastically embrace Giroux's critique and write spirited essays analyzing its construction of race, class, and gender roles, others will passionately defend Disney as harmless, magical fun, and denounce critical perspectives as "reading too much into it."  In fact, tolerance for critique of Disney can almost be used as a litmus test for students' level of sociological imagination; the more sociological the student, the better able to incorporate both pleasure and critique in their assessment.

    Other aspects of children's culture covered include Provenzo's "Video Games and the Emergence of Interactive Media for Children (1997:103-114)," a sharp critique of new virtual reality technology in video games that encourages highly involved interactive participation in increasingly pornographic and violent gaming.  The MEF video, Game Over: Gender, Race, and Violence in Video (2002) is a perfect complement for this reading. As an assignment, I have students interview a child or someone they know who is a devoted fan of video gaming.  We discuss interview strategies in class and emphasize using an open-minded approach that allows for the enthusiastic fan to describe the significance of video gaming in their lives.  When students interview someone who is past childhood they ask them to reflect on their childhood involvement in video games as well.  Students meet in small groups to share their findings and then as a class discuss the contrast between the negative critiques in the readings and videos and the positive experiences of the fans.

    For a specific look at how commercial culture is targeting young girls, I show the MEF video, What a Girl Wants (2000) and have students read articles by Motz (1992), "Seen Through Rose-Tinted Glasses: The Barbie Doll in American Society," Steinberg (1997) "The Bitch Who Has Everything," Piercy (2002), "Barbie Doll," and Brady (1997), Multiculturalism and the American Dream, about the American Girl doll series.  The video is a charming and touching series of interviews with young girls talking about a range of topics from breast size and "booty videos" to pressures to have sex and media exploitation of women, and it is here that Brittney Spears' porn direction is discussed.  The readings use Barbie Doll and the American Doll series as focal point for critical analysis of the lessons girls learn about gender, race, class, power, and consumer socialization in their interaction and involvement with these dolls. 

    McDonald's is the next topic of investigation in the commercialization of children's culture.  Kincheloe's (1997:249-266) "McDonald's, Power, and Children: Ronald McDonald (aka Ray Kroc) Does It All For You," analyses how McDonald's ad campaigns work as "legitimation signifiers" transferring "reverence for America to McDonald's (1997:253)."  Kincheloe argues that, like Disney, McDonald's works to "maximize capital accumulation, influence social and cultural life, and …help mold children's consciousnesses (1997:254)."  For younger children, Ronald McDonald and "happy meals" are used aggressively to promote "pester power" in kids, and "[b]y the time a child reaches the age of three, more than four out of five know that McDonald's sells hamburgers (1997:255)."  Older children are addressed in knowing postmodern style, with consuming at McDonald's offered as "oppositional culture" for the preteen set (1997:256).  As an adjunct to this theme, I show the 1999 video McLibel (2005). It is a fascinating documentary of a group of London protestors sued for libel by McDonald's for handing out flyers titled "What’s Wrong With McDonald's," criticizing the corporation’s product and practices.  McDonald's, known for its heavy-handed bullying of critics, had a real fight on its hand with these activists, who cited Ronald McDonald and the targeting of young children as one its unethical practices.

    Finally, I show a video called It's Elementary: Talking about Lesbian and Gay Issues in School (1997) which focuses on educating children early about the prejudice and misinformation they see and hear about homosexuality in the popular culture.  Children's notions about gays and lesbians are often formed from what they see on sensationalized talk shows and stereotypical movies.  In the video, one young boy describes his impression of what it means to be gay as embodied in Jim Carrey's character, Ace Ventura, who goes to extreme comic lengths to clean his mouth after having kissed a man he thought was really a woman.

  A cultural studies approach to the sociology of childhood is both critical and reflective in nature.  It is necessary, therefore, to devise teaching and testing strategies that allow students to develop and demonstrate critical and reflective responses to readings, videos, class lectures and discussion.  Ideally, a seminar structure with lots of writing assignments is the best context for a cultural studies approach to teaching the sociology of childhood.  But this will be difficult or impossible for most faculty members with heavy teaching loads and large classes.  Enrollment is quite high, for example, in my sociology of children and childhood class, with typically 35-40 students in attendance.  However, over a series of semesters, I have experimented with different teaching and testing methods that allow for critical and qualitative student responses to a cultural studies curriculum. Based on students' evaluations, I have discovered that it is very important to be organized in class presentation and consistent in testing methods.  While a seminar approach in which everyone has read the material and is prepared for class discussion is wonderful in theory, in practice, I have learned that it is crucial to go over the readings in detail, helping students to see the main points and guiding them through the structure of the text.

    I have also learned that many students need help structuring their responses in essay exams.  One method I have found helpful as a manageable in-class writing assignment is what I call the "guided essay."  Based on specific themes covered in class, these essay exams are comprised of a series of sequenced questions that build on each other in an orderly fashion.  Presenting questions in this manner helps students to structure their responses at the same time it tests their comprehension.  It also makes reading and grading large numbers of papers an easier, more manageable task.  I have also found it helpful to assign carefully constructed take-home essay exams, again with very clear thematic focus and organization requirements.  Many students benefit from having time and leisure to tackle and synthesize difficult readings at home.  Another helpful strategy is to make exemplary essays written by previous students available as models (although this can be tricky if you are asking the same sorts of questions over a series of semesters).

    There are many ways to teach the sociology of children and childhood.  I have presented a cultural studies approach that focuses specifically on the increasingly important, but generally unrecognized, role that corporations play in the commodification of childhood and the consumer socialization of children.  Using an explicitly critical perspective, my goal is to provide students with analytic tools and media literacy skills for deconstructing commercial culture as it is targeted to children.  Courses on the sociology of childhood draw students from many disciplines and also provide instructors with ongoing opportunity to promote a sociological perspective in an area that is typically dominated by the psychological and biological. 

Aries, Philippe.  1962.  Centuries of Childhood.  New York: Knopf.

Barker, Chris.  2000.  Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Brady, Jeanne.  1997.  "Multiculturalism and the American Dream."  Pp.219-226 in Kinderculture, edited by Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe.  Boulder: Westview.

Fiske, John.  1989.  Reading the Popular.  Boston: Unwin Hyman.

Giroux, Henry A.  1997.  "Are Disney Movies Good for Your Kids?”" Pp.53-68 in Kinderculture, edited by Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe.  Boulder: Westview.

Glassner, Barry.  1999.  “The Construction of Fear.”  Qualitative Sociology 22(4):301-309.

Goetting, Ann.  1994.  “Do Americans Really Like Children?”  The Journal of Primary Prevention 15(1):81-92.

Grossberg, Lawrence, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler, editors..  1992.  Cultural Studies.  New York: Routledge.

Heller, Scott.  1998.  “Childhood: The Meaning of Children in Culture Becomes a Focal Point for Scholars.”  The Chronicle of Higher Education 44(48):14-16.

Jhally, Sut.  1995.  "Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture." Pp.77-87 in Gender, Race, and Class in Media, edited by Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Kincheloe, Joe.  1997.  "Home Alone and Bad to the Bone: The Advent of a Postmodern Childhood." Pp.31-52 in Kinderculture, edited by Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe.  Boulder: Westview.

Kincheloe, Joe.  1997.  "McDonald's, Power, and Children: Ronald McDonald (aka Ray Kroc) Does It All For You."  Pp.249-266 in Kinderculture, edited by Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe.  Boulder: Westview.

Kitzinger, Jenny.  1988.  "Defending Innocence: Ideologies of Childhood."  Feminist Review 28:77-87.

Males, Mike A.  1999.  Framing Youth: 10 Myths about the Next Generation.  Monroe, ME: Common Courage.

Miller, Leslie.  2002.  "Teenagers More Likely to be Victims of Crimes."  Wilmington Morning Star, July 17:5A.

Mott, Marilyn Ferris.  1992.  "Seen Through Rose-Tinted Glasses: The Barbie Doll in American Society."  Pp.211-234 in Popular Culture: An Introductory Text edited by Jack Nachbar and Kevin Lause.  Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green.

Nasaw, David.  1985.  Children of the City: At Work and At Play.  Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Piercy, Marge.  2002.  "Barbie Doll."  Pp.272-273 in Everyday, Everywhere: Global Perspectives on Popular Culture, edited by Stuart Hirschberg and Terry Hirschberg.  Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Provenzano, Eugene F. Jr.  1997.  "Video Games and the Emergence of Interactive Media for Children."  Pp.103-114 in Kinderculture, edited by Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe.  Boulder: Westview.

Sardar, Ziauddin, and B. Van Loon.  1999. Introducing Cultural Studies. New York: Totem.

Steinberg, Shirley R.  1997.  "The Bitch Who Has Everything."  Pp.207-218 in Kinderculture, edited by Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe.  Boulder: Westview.

Steinberg, Shirley R. and Joe L. Kincheloe. 1997, 2004. Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood.  Boulder:Westview.

Storey, John.  1998.  An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture.  Athens, GA: University of Georgia.

Willis, Paul.  1990.  Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young.  Boulder: Westview.

Zelizer, Vivianna.  1985.  Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children.  New York: Basic Books.
 
 

Affluenza.  1997.  Bullfrog Films.
 Link
 http://www.pbs.org/kcts/affluenza/

All the Right Stuff.  1995.  Bullfrog Films.
 Link
http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/all.html

Barbie Nation.  1998.  New Day Films
 Link
http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov1998/barbienation/

Game Over: Gender, Race, and Class in Video Games.  2002.  Media Education Foundation.
 Link
http://www.mediaed.org/videos/
MediaGenderAndDiversity/GameOver

It’s Elementary: Talking about Lesbian and Gay Issues in School. 1997. New Day Films.
 Link
http://www.newday.com/
films/Its_Elementary.html

McLibel: Two Worlds Collide.  1999.  Media Education Foundation. 
 Link
http://www.spannerfilms.net/?lid=161

Merchants of Cool.  2001.  Frontline/PBS.  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/
frontline/shows/cool/
 Link

Mickey Mouse Monopoly: Disney, Childhood, and Corporate Power.  2001.  Media Education Foundation.
 Link
http://www.mediaed.org/videos/
CommercialismPoliticsAndMedia/
MickeyMouseMonopoly

The Ad and the Ego: Truth and Consequences.  1996.  California Newsreel.
 Link
http://www.parallaxpictures.org/AdEgo_bin/AE000.01a.html

What a Girl Wants.  2000.  Media Education Foundation.
 Link
http://www.mediaed.org/videos/
MediaGenderAndDiversity/WhatAGirlWants

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©2006 by the North Carolina Sociological Association