Center on Media and Child Health

Research Toolbox: Recently Published Books

Recently published titles of interest on the topics of children, media, and health:

New Books

• Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture By Peggy Orenstein

The author offers a radical, timely wake-up call for parents, revealing the dark side of a pretty and pink culture confronting girls at every turn as they grow into adults.

• CyberSafe Protecting and Empowering Kids in the Digital World of Texting, Gaming, and Social by Media Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, MD, FAAP.

This informative book will guide parents through the landscape of the digital world, helping them better understand things like the history and the future of the Internet, cyberbullying, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpaceGaming and virtual worlds and digital footprints.

• Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls' Media Culture by Mary Celeste Kearney (Ed.)

This book is the first anthology devoted specifically to scholarship on girls' media culture. Taking a cultural studies approach, it includes analyses of girls' media representations, media consumption, and media production. The book responds to criticisms of previous research in the field by including studies of girls who are not white, middle-class, heterosexual, or Western, while also including historical research.

• Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen by James Bennett 

This book examines how television personalities function as commodities, and also function ideologically, thus relating them to issues of class, national identity, sexuality, gender and social history.

• The Winter of Our Disconnect: How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother Who Slept with Her iPhone) Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale  by Susan Maushart  

The author embarked with her three teenagers on a six-month screen blackout (no cellphones, iPods, PCs, laptops, game stations, or television) to discover if the technology intended to stimulate and keep us virtually more connected was, as she suspected, making us actually more disconnected and distracted.

 
Please let us know if you would like to see any books highlighted in the future!

Research Toolbox: New Book on Children and Television

Professor Dafna Lemish, editor of the Journal of Children and Media, incoming Chair of the Department of Radio-Television in the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University, and visiting scholar at CMCH, has published a new book, Screening Gender on Children’s Television: The Views of Producers Around the World (Routledge, 2010).

The book offers readers insights into the transformations taking place in the presentation of gender portrayals in television productions aimed at younger audiences. It goes far beyond a critical analysis of the existing portrayals of gender and culture by sharing media professionals’ action-oriented recommendations for change that would promote gender equity, social diversity and the well-being of children.

Incorporating interviews with 135 producers of children’s television from 65 countries, this book discusses the role television plays in the lives of young people and, more specifically, in developing gender identity. It examines how gender images presented to children on television are intertwined with important existential and cultural concerns that occupy the social agenda worldwide, including the promotion of education for girls, prevention of HIV/AIDS and domestic violence, and caring for “neglected” boys who lack healthy masculine role models, as well as confronting the pressures of the beauty myth.

The book also explores how children’s television producers struggle to portray issues such as sex/sexuality and the preservation of local cultures in a profit-driven market which continually strives to reinforce gender segregation. The book documents proactive attempts by producers to advance social change, illustrating how television can serve to provide positive, empowering images for children around the world.

Learn more about Professor Lemish’s research exploring the role of media in children's lives.

Does Gender Make a Difference When it Comes to Media?

Dr. Dafna Lemish, Professor of Communication at Tel Aviv University, editor of the Journal of Children and Media, and visiting scholar at CMCH, was recently notified that she will be the recipient of the first Teresa Award for the Advancement of Feminist Scholarship.

Lemish was chosen for her important contributions to the advancement of feminist scholarship, her ability to open new theoretical and methodological territory in feminist research, and her activism within academia to advance feminist scholarship. Her research, can be found in 8 books, 37 refereed journal articles, and more than 40 book chapters.

She will be presented with the award at a reception at the International Communication Association Conference in Chicago this May.

Here is a video interview with Dr. Lemish about her work: