21 July 2014

Honourable Mention for Helle Strandgaard Jensen's essay

The prize committee for the Fass-Sandin Article Prize of the Society for the History of Children and Youth has given Helle Strandgaard Jensen's article on conflicting notions of children and childhood in Danish children's Television around 1968 "Honourable Mention" recognition. They say:

Helle Jensen's "TV as Children's Spokesman: Conflicting Notions of Children and Childhood in Danish Children's Television around 1968", published in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, receives Honourable Mention for the Fass-Sandin Prize. Jensen draws on archival, published, and audiovisual evidence to argue that Danish television around 1968 innovated a 'radical viewpoint': that children were a social group who had the right to have its interests represented in the public sphere, and that television should perform that function. Thus Jensen draws forward a subtle but profoundly useful distinction between children's television that aims mainly to talk (or even to sell) to children, and that which aims to speak for them. Through this distinction, Jensen intervenes in models that reductively categorize children as empowered or exploited. The essay is perceptive and beautifully written, and its conclusions are simultaneously subtle and forceful.