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

The place of childhood in popular culture is one that invites new readings both on childhood itself, but also on approaches to studying childhood. In our focus on methods of researching children's popular culture, we argue that the interplay of the age of the players, the status of their popular culture, the ephemerality of the objects, and indeed the ephemerality - and long lastingness - of childhood, all contribute to what could be regarded as a particularized space for childhood studies - and one that challenges many of the conventions of "doing research" involving children. At the heart of Researching Children's Popular Culture is the idea of children's popular culture as a research site made up of a number of research spaces. The book starts out by examining the political space of children's popular culture in the context of its low status and ephemerality.; It then moves on to consider various ethnographic and textual approaches to researching children, childhood and popular culture: memory spaces which explore the place of the of children's popular culture in adult memory, visual spaces and the gaze of the child as visual ethnographer; physical spaces and children's bedrooms as cultural texts, virtual spaces which look at approaches to studying children's websites and the internet as a new space within which to explore childhood and popular culture; and finally historical spaces which provide a retrospective view of the fashion doll and doll play as a context for deciphering Barbie's place in present day girls' popular culture. Overall, Researching Children's Popular Culture can be read as a book on research methodology with particular attention to biographical approaches. It also contributes to the emerging body of scholarship on the new social studies of childhood within Age Studies