Reference no: EM132330305
This assignment should be double-spaced and has to have a title page. For the late assignment policy, please refer to the syllabus. This assignment is designed to be between 4-5 pages. For both undergraduate and graduate students, this assignment will provide 10% toward their final grade. While you don't haveto, you can certainly include (cited) others' work. This assignment does not necessarily have a strict structure, meaning how you go about it, how you format it, and what you choose to focus are entirely up to you as long as you address what it is about. Instead of TV shows, you can use commercials from online sources (such as social media), or magazines, or a combination of these sources.
In the -especially - interdisciplinary childhood and studying children studies, several scholars (citations are available upon request) note "the Dilemma of the Postmodern Child". While their autonomy in day to day life is decreasing, children are targeted and enveloped in a commercial universe, delivered to them in dizzyingly fast and furious "hyperreal" style. Moreover, advertisers are also hailing children as all-knowing and their parents as hopelessly lost, "The genie is out of the bottle", some argue; traditional notions of "protecting" children on the one hand and "controlling" them on the other must make way for new ways of parenting, teaching, and mentoring them that will provide both children and adults with the necessary skills to make sense, critical reflective sense that is, of the flood of information and advertising inundating them.
As a very simple exploratory assignment, I am asking you to watch at least one hour of children's commercial television programming (could be in shorter segments from different channels or from the same channel), paying attention to what is being sold to children, who are these children, and how children are being addressed, etc. In your writing, you can focus on a couple of advertisements or more than that. I would like for you to analyze (of course, I understand that given the time and also page limit, your analysis will not be quite in-depth) these commercials in terms of the children's agency and the role of the parents in whichever way you choose to go about this assignment. Additionally, I would like for you to pay attention to the existence of what scholar are pointing out over and over: "narrowly defined gender roles, social class biases, racist and sexist stereotypes, and the overarching narrative of the dominant culture." Please describe clearly what sources you have used for this assignment before diving into any kind of analysis.