Liesbeth de Block

At the Crossroads of Childhood, Media, and Migration

Cosmopolitan urban centers such as London with their rich mix of peoples, cultures, and languages are the site of multiple crossroads: not an intersection between a singular local and global road but a meeting point of different places, peoples, and affiliations. The issue is no longer the relationship between a “host” community and the newcomer, but how people from many different parts of the world interact with each other both locally and globally. In this chapter we aim to address these multiple crossroads and the specific role that media consumption and production can play in children’s experiences of them (de Block and Buckingham, 2007).

Speaking for Themselves?: Researching Youth Media Production

Our primary focus thus far has been on children as ‘consumers’ of media. In this chapter and the two that follow, we move on to look at their use of media for creative production and communication. Chapters 8 and 9 present further material from our CHICAM project, looking at the videos produced by the children, and how these formed the basis for intercultural communication between them. This chapter provides a more broad-ranging overview of the issues relating to children’s creative production, looking at the use of media in the home, in educational settings and in the context of research. Our particular interest here is in the possibility of using media to ‘give children a voice’, and to promote intercultural communication: as we shall argue, achieving these aspirations is not as straightforward as it might at first appear. We will be referring briefly to our CHICAM research here; but we will also discuss an earlier project, VideoCulture, which similarly involved the production and exchange of videos by young people.

Rapping All Over the World: Music, Media and Intercultural Communication

Music can provide a powerful means of representing identity, and of asserting cultural difference. Yet it also increasingly crosses boundaries, offering the potential for transnational communication and new forms of global culture. This applies particularly to children and young people — both to their consumption of music and to what they produce. The expanding array of new media technologies offers many different opportunities for young people to make and exchange music, through file-sharing, sampling, re-mixing and creating their own sounds. Youth cultures may have local references and influences, but they are also increasingly global, allowing young people from very different parts of the world to recognise, identify with and utilise similar styles of music, and the varieties of fashion, graphics and dance that are associated with them. Contemporary popular music often incorporates a range of styles, bringing them together to create new ‘hybrid’ forms. For children who have experienced migration, separation and new settlement, and who are coming to terms with different cultural influences, the role of music can therefore be particularly significant.

We Are the World?: Children and Migration

In this chapter, we review some of the research on migration as it relates specifically to young people, and briefly present some evidence from our own and others’ work. Like Castles and Miller (2003: 25), we see migrations as ‘collective phenomena, which should be examined as subsystems of an increasingly global economic and political system’. Even so, we believe there is a need to focus on the particularities of young peoples’ experiences and concerns, and to recognise their agency in this process. We start by situating our discussion within the changing causes, patterns and power structures of migration more broadly, and consider the importance of taking into account child migrants in particular. We then move on to discuss the different categories of child migrants; and finally we consider the more personal ways in which migration changes family relationships, and how migrant children are positioned by the institution of the school.

Making Migrant Identities: Television in Children’s Everyday Lives

In this chapter, we look more closely at a small number of individual children, exploring some of the ways in which they used and interpreted television in their everyday lives. The four children we consider in detail were aged 8 (two among them), 10 and 11, and they had all recently come to London from very different locations and circumstances around the world. Our focus here is specifically on television, which (at least for young children of this age) remains the medium that is most discussed and acted out in their everyday lives, and which forms their main means of access to world events. We explore how television was woven into the fabric of their lives, as they settled into their new locality and negotiated new relationships in school, in the playground, in their neighbourhoods and at home, while still remembering or maintaining contact with their places of origin. We also consider how particular types of television content — both children’s programmes and ‘adult’ programmes such as news — resonated with their personal concerns and anxieties, and enabled them to address the emotional implications of their experiences.

Picture Me In: Migrant Children as Media Makers

In this chapter and the next, we return more directly to our CHICAM research, to consider the ways in which the children took up our invitation to create and exchange their own media productions. As we have explained, CHICAM was based around a network of media-making ‘clubs’ in six European countries. In each club, a researcher and a media educator worked with the children to create short productions, which were then shared via the Internet.

Finding a Place: Migrant Children Using Media

In this chapter and the next, we move from broad overviews of previous studies to more detailed analyses of data drawn from our own empirical research. Our focus here is on the diverse ways in which migrant children use media in the context of their everyday lives and relationships. This chapter presents some findings from our CHICAM project, looking at these children’s uses of media in different European national settings; while the next explores three individual case studies drawn from Liesbeth de Block’s earlier research with migrant children in London.

Going Global: Childhood in the Age of Global Media

In Chapter 3, we reviewed research on migrant and ethnic minority children’s uses of media — particularly media that are specifically targeted at transnational audiences. In this chapter, the focus shifts to an examination of ‘global’ media for children — by which we mean media produced for a mass audience of children worldwide. Rather than looking only at the act of use or consumption, we also focus here on the companies that produce these media and the representations they provide: addressing these dimensions is crucial if we are to understand the wider structural contexts in which childhoods are lived out. While outlining some general tendencies in this field, we also look more closely at a few specific instances drawn from our own empirical research on two international projects tracking the global distribution and consumption of Disney and Pokemon products.

Between the Global and the Local: Young People, Media and Migration

As we have seen, academic discussions of globalisation and its consequences have been quite strongly contested. For some authors, globalisation is merely a further logical stage in the development of modern capitalism; while for others, it represents a distinctive break with the past, as embodied in the form of the traditional nation state. For some, it is primarily a cultural phenomenon, while for others it is essentially driven by economic and political forces. And while some are keen to celebrate the emergence of new global dialogues that will create tolerance and mutual understanding, others see only an extension of already well-established relationships of oppression and inequality.

Changing Spaces: Globalisation, Media, Identity and Childhood

An Armenian girl in the Netherlands watches a Brazilian telenovela on a Russian satellite TV channel. A Kurdish boy living in Athens records a video of himself singing a lyric by a Turkish poet, translated into Greek. In London, two girls, one Sri Lankan and one Kenyan, debate the merits of popular Hindi films. A Romanian family in Italy watches a Spanish soap opera — although none of them can follow the language. In a small town in Sweden, two Kosovan/Albanian girls act out a scenario for the video camera based on the Swedish version of Big Brother, originally a Dutch television format. An Angolan boy now living in London reminisces about watching Disney cartoons in his former home in Portugal. Turkish children in Germany, in Sweden and in Greece celebrate the Turkish winner of the Eurovision song contest, praising her ability to mix traditional Turkish music with contemporary Western pop. A Kenyan girl in the United Kingdom keeps in contact with her friends and grandparents in Nairobi through chat rooms and e-mail.