The Child Audience: Impressionability, Pedagogy, and Popular Culture

Abstract

In this thesis, I will explore the cultural constructs of childhood and adolescence and how they have been translated in scholarly and cultural understandings of the child and young audience. Beginning with cultural conceptions and assumptions about the child’s mind and learning, I will use historical, discursive and textual analysis to examine how recent discourses on the child and teenage or young adult audience have drawn on older ideas about impressionability and education, and how these same ideas have permeated the cultural production of children and young people’s popular culture and fed into newer media forms and responses to the creative practices of young online participants.