Researching Children's Popular Culture: The Cultural Spaces of Childhood (review)

Co-authors Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh have produced a timely and impressive study that argues for the importance of studying children's popular culture. By examining multiple texts from television and films to toys, books, and dolls, such as Barbie, their project illustrates the research potential inherent to the study of childhood and children's popular culture. In addition, the fruits of their efforts explore rich ethnographic and textual analysis of areas such as the child as a visual ethnographer, the place of children's popular culture in adult memory, the child's bedroom as a cultural text, and the role of Barbie in constructing girls' culture. Not only do the authors present an accessible and passionate discussion about the relationship between the status of children's popular culture and the status of childhood, they also share the challenges of engaging in such work.

Scholars interested in the subject may ponder the following questions posed by Mitchell and Reid-Walsh:

How might we conduct fieldwork in spaces where popular culture is more naturally encountered—movie theaters, shopping malls, and children's bedrooms? How, for example, can adults engage the child-as-expert in the study of a form of material culture that is of low status and often outside the boundaries of what is accepted as "quality" children's play? What credibility does the adult "outsider" bring to the research site? How do we blend and adapt methodologies from a variety of arenas such as visual studies, biographical studies through memory and autobiography, studies in material culture and historical studies—all areas that are not necessarily associated with researching popular culture and contemporary childhood?

(2-3)

By first presenting the reader with an orientation for researching popular culture, Mitchell and Reid organize their efforts by considering six overlapping research spaces. Within the first chapter, "Political Spaces: Contexts for Researching Children's Popular Culture," the authors metaphorically map out what they consider as the critical spaces of children's popular culture. They explore the dynamics of the relationship between adults and children within the political spaces of researching children's popular culture. They state that, "[a] child's engagement with popular culture is often determined by the child not the adult, so the space of popular culture may exist as a pocket of resistance, within and against a larger space of quality culture, like a child "hiding an action figure in his/her backpack to assert a sense of individuality" (15). Mitchell and Reid-Walsh further argue the need to contemplate the vexing issues of children's popular culture by exploring areas such as popular junk food as culture, class and popular culture, working with children, and listening to children. They discuss that children have maximum personal and, at times, financial control to purchase trendy consumable sweets such as JawBreakers, etc., in order to define the "self" (20). In today's commercial market, the appeal of junk food items, such as Sponge Bob Square Pants jelly pops or the Incredible Hulk fruit snacks, is to young children.

Children's commercial cultural products help to construct their play, pleasures, and desire and offer insights into an increasingly reflexive industry (Kenway and Bullen). When considering the rich tapestry of texts aimed at aiding young consumers to make sense of their position and place in the world, it is important to consider how the products seek to define the nature of self. Many of these texts work on creating stand-alone meaning for its properties and that meaning transcends in a particular type of product; in other words, the companies work on creating brands (Klein 5). Within the field of children's book publishing, for example, books are now partnered with toys or music CD's or transformed into movies.

The heart of Mitchell and Reid-Walsh's second chapter pertains to considering childhood culture within the space of memory (48). The second chapter, entitled, "Memory Spaces: Exploring the Afterlife of children's...