A two-day symposium exploring the practices and expanding field of research around youth and the media.
This presentation explores the role of children as participants and respondents in media research. Taking work in China and Australia as a basis for conceptual discussion, and using recent case studies and ongoing projects in film, mobile cultures and television to exemplify points and issues, the chapter questions the role of history, culture, and language in the uses and affect of media for young people. Specifically, the talk suggests how questions of relative cultural and political value, of communicative spheres in sub-public space, and of uneven and unexpected experiences of modernity and development, may be recognised and interpreted in media worlds outside the hegemonies of Western discourse.
Stephanie Hemelryk Donald is director of the Institute for International Studies, and a member of the China Research Group at UTS. She studied in Taiwan and at Oxford University in the 1980s and wrote a PhD on Chinese film and public space in the 1990s at the University of Sussex . In the late 1990s she worked with Harriet Evans at the University of Westminster and Jeffrey Wasserstrom at Indiana on the 'Picturing Power' project, which resulted in a book and travelling exhibition of Chinese political posters of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Her first monograph: Public Secrets Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China was published in 2000. She edited Media inChina : Consumption, Content and Crisis (with Michael Keane and Yin Hong, 2002) and is the co-author of The State of China Atlas(second edition, 2005). Her book on children's film culture, Little Friends: Children's Film and Media Culture in China , was also published during 2005.