Speaker: Yael Warshel

Responding to research about children and media that has emphasized an analysis of the effects or interpretation by children living in peace zones of fictive violence, nascent literature about children, media and conflict, has instead emphasized an analysis of the effects or interpretation by children living in peace zones of non-fiction violence, or news. In this brownbag I discuss alternative conceptions for the analysis of children, media and conflict based on research I conducted with Palestinian children. That research is discussed in the article made available for this talk, “It’s All about Tom and Jerry, Amr Khalid and Iqra, Not Hamas’s Mickey Mouse: Palestinian Children’s Cultural Practices Around the Television Set”. There I describe Palestinian family television viewing dynamics, including how parents of children living in Gazan refugee camps attempted to “use” media (regardless of their contents) as mediating artifacts to manage the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They did so in an effort to safely divert their children’s leisure practices into the home (attempting to navigate them away from becoming victims of centralized Israeli violence on the one hand, and learning “bad” habits from youth mobilizing in the camps to perpetrate networked Palestinian violence, on the other hand). I use the theoretical and methodological frameworks I discussed in that article as a basis for which to introduce the concept of a globally-focused transdisciplinary initiative about Children, Youth, and Media in Conflict Zones at Penn State. I will conclude by referencing my continued use of these frameworks in the research I am conducting across the North and West African Sahara.