Ethnocentrism is a recurring feature of both the industries that produce childrenâs screen content and scholarship on children and media. Timothy Havens analysed some time ago (2007) how the âvibrant business cultureâ of North American and European âchildrenâs television merchantsâ privileges an âindustry loreâ among insiders, which tracks North American and European models of childhood tastes and promotes them as universal. Public recognition of ethnocentric scholarship in the field is more recent, as are concerns about a lack of studies on the institutions and industries involved in childrenâs media. Revealing that only 14 per cent of articles published in the Journal of Children and Media between 2005 and 2018 had studied the âprocesses of production, political-economic forces, or the institutional policies and practices in the media with which children engageâ (Lemish 2019, 121)ânamely processes related to the phenomenon articulated by Havensâthe journalâs founding and outgoing editor, Dafna Lemish, recalled her efforts to correct an âunderlying ethnocentrismâ in submitted manuscripts, whereby the âAmerican context was assumed to be the default positionâ (ibid., 123). She noted that her preferred practice of always naming the place where research had been conducted met resistance: there were worries the published findings would be seen as having narrower applicability, plus an implicit understanding on the part of some scholars that research beyond the US represents âcase studiesâ of limited relevance.
This short book addresses gaps of this kind in our understanding of processes that underpin the making and circulation of screen content across two adjacent regions of the world. It attempts to do so by setting âcentrismsâ aside, whether ethnocentrism, Euro-centrism or Arab-centrism. It does in some sense seek to engage with an outward-looking version of what might be called child-centrism. That is to say: outward-looking in the sense of not âisolat[ing] children into child-centred areas and concerns away from such matters as politics, economics or lawâ (Anderson 2016, 6). The bookâs âwide-angleâ approach to geographical, political-economic and childhood concerns is prompted by recent disruptive shifts in regional geopolitics and large-scale population movements, which have occurred simultaneously with global shifts in delivery platforms for childrenâs screen media content.
Shifts of this magnitude call for new insights into how childrenâs screen media policy and production proceed across divides of language and culture. Insights sought in this book start with questions about the extent to which young children in Arab and European countries engage with the same or similar content. By âyoung childrenâ we mean those aged under around 12 years since they are the focus of most industry attention. The book focuses on sources of funding and ideas in the creation and delivery of content targeted at children and, by examining some examples of collaboration, seeks to understand whether and how finance and ideas interact across territories and cultures, and for whose benefit. Whose voices are loudest when it comes to pressures for regulating childrenâs screen content, and what do they want: a vaguely worded catch-all protection from ill-defined âharmfulâ content, more generous provision of beneficial material or opportunities for children themselves to take part in media-making? How do commissioners and producers of childrenâs screen content respond to population flows that are changing the composition of child audiences in those Arab and European countries that have taken in the largest numbers of refugees? Questions like these problematise attempts to assign initiatives or trends to separate geographic regions. For one thing, content providers operate on an increasingly global scale and the most powerful are based in the US. For another, the geographic remits of relevant institutions are not always clear-cut. The European Union (EU) overlaps with the larger Council of Europe (CoE), and Arab entities are represented on bodies such as the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the CoEâs European Audiovisual Observatory.
If regional demarcations can be problematic analytically, terms like âlocalâ and âglobalâ have also been roundly challenged in studies of transnational media and childhood studies. Where media are concerned, migration and digital communication technologies mean that âlocalâ content can be accessed from anywhere, arguably leading to a situation in which the local and the global âinform and transform one another in a constant dialogueâ (Chalaby 2009, 3â4). In the context of childhood, the global scale of migration has reinforced analystsâ dissatisfaction with ethnocentric binaries between a normative universal âglobalâ and culturally particular âlocal,â especially the subaltern âlocalâ childhood of the majority world (Hanson et al. 2018, 274, 292). Migration has blurred the âboundaries between majority and minority worlds,â leading to research on transnational families as well as the way children use digital technologies and social media to develop and maintain relationships beyond the family and âlocalâ community and to relate with their peers in new ways (ibid., 277).
In the days when transnational television was still something of a novelty, the concept of a âgeolinguistic regionâ (Sinclair et al. 1996, 11â14) seemed to suit the Arab world rather well, because certain forms of Arabic were intelligible across multiple contiguous countries from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Even that concept, however, took account of media flows not only within an âimmediate geographic clusteringâ but with diasporic communities âon other continentsâ (ibid., 26). Today an Arab-centric view of childrenâs media is rendered even less useful by the effects of violent conflicts within the Arab region that set governments and communities against each other. Among the six states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates or UAE) belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), an âunprecedentedâ concentration of power in the hands of the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi (the UAEâs most powerful emirate) is seen to have âwidened existing fractures, created new fault lines, and inflicted potentially long-term damage on what had been the most durable regional organization in the Arab worldâ (Coates Ulrichsen 2018). Starting in 2015, Saudi Arabia led a war on Houthi rebels in neighbouring Yemen, with backing from the US, the UK and France. Describing the ensuing 4-year toll of death, injury, famine, disease and deprivation as âthe worldâs largest humanitarian crisis,â the United Nations Childrenâs Fundâs (UNICEFâs) Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region said it had ânot spared a single childâ (Cappelaere 2019). Fractures between governments on the Arabian Peninsula, notably Saudi Arabia and Qatar, were meanwhile implicated in escalating the civil war that started in Syria in 2011, because of their support for different factions in the fighting. In March 2019, UNICEFâs Executive Director reported that 2018 had seen the most children killed in Syria of any year in the war so far, mostly through unexploded ordnance and the highest number of attacks against education and health facilities (Fore 2019).
In addition to these militarised rifts, another fault line that undermines the rationale for studying media specifically for Arabic-speaking children is the deep disparity between the plight of children living with the effects of armed attacks and daily insecurity in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, the Gaza Strip and Libya and the situation of those in other Arab countries where the phenomena of displacement, lack of schooling and traumatic experiences are not part of the everyday. Moreover, when it comes to finding what is done to meet the information and self-expression needs of children in these diverse circumstances, the story often involves non-Arab bodies, including non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from Europe. This is the irony of what is and what is not allowed under Arab authoritarian regimes. These regimes are responsible for so many civilians having left their homes to escape violence or because there are no jobs and they cannot make a living or because they are under threat of detention for claiming their civil and political rights. Yet the political systems that perpetuate pressure for forced migration cannot realistically be discussed without reference to a âtradition of external interventionâ (Henry and Springborg 2001, 8), sustained in the post-colonial era through US and European deals in arms and oil. Even before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 it was recognised that any attempt to analyse âhuman developmentâ in the Arab region needed to include a âcritical understanding of âexternalâ power dynamics,â including the âblind eyeâ turned by Western governments to âlarge-scale abuses of human, civil and political rights by client regimesâ (Levine 2002). Continuing cross-regional intergovernmental relationships since 2003â04 may have been camouflaged on occasion by efforts at âdemocracy promotion,â but true democratisation proved incompatible with achieving the political continuity that governments on both sides ultimately preferred (Sakr 2016, 175â176). The result has been a situation in which Arab governments âmistrustâ voluntary rights-based associations, often to the point of banning them (Kandil 2010, 53), but still allo...