Discourses of Anxiety over Childhood and Youth across Cultures

“In an age of heightened anxiety over children’s digital media practices, this book offers a valuable collection of studies from various countries around the world that bring us a wide selection of approaches, concerns, methods, and voices of young people which are often absent in the public discourse. From sexuality, crime, and stranger-anxiety, to gaming and quantification of babies, this book provides significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the key moral panic debates and scholarship.”

--Dafna Lemish, Rutgers University, UK
This volume interrogates public debates about children and media across cultures, while taking fully into account the emotional baggage that accompanies the notion of moral panics. Contributors explore the social construction of discourses of anxiety surrounding childhood and youth, as well as the cultural histories that frame these discourses and their broader consequences in shaping public policy regarding children and young people. The collection is divided into four sections that respectively address neoliberal notions governing children and youth; research on media discourses of children and their cultural practices; anxieties related to sexual health and children’s consumption of popular culture; and parental concerns about children’s media practices.
Liza Tsaliki is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Media Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is the author of Children and the Politics of Sexuality: The Sexualization of Children Debate Revisited (Palgrave, 2016).

Despina Chronaki (Dr) is an adjunct lecturer at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Hellenic Open University.