Table Of ContentScreen Media for Arab
and European Children
Policy and Production Encounters
in the Multiplatform Era
Naomi Sakr
Jeanette Steemers
Screen Media for Arab and European Children
Naomi Sakr • Jeanette Steemers
Screen Media for Arab
and European
Children
Policy and Production Encounters in the
Multiplatform Era
Naomi Sakr Jeanette Steemers
Westminster School of Media and Department of Culture, Media &
Communication Creative Industries
University of Westminster King’s College London
Harrow, UK London, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-25657-9 ISBN 978-3-030-25658-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25658-6
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A
cknowledgements
This book is one of numerous publications that have resulted from research
undertaken as part of two projects funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities
Research Council (AHRC). The first, which ran between 2012 and 2016,
bore the title Orientations in the Development of Pan-Arab Television for
Children. As authors we wish to acknowledge the AHRC research grant
(AH/J004545/1) and to thank all those who helped with the grant and
the project.
The second, which ran between October 2017 and November 2018, is
linked to the first as a follow-on project for impact and engagement.
Entitled Collaborative Development of Children’s Screen Content in an Era
of Forced Migration Flows: Facilitating Arab-European Dialogue it was
designed to share knowledge from the first project, but also stimulate dia-
logue between European and Arab stakeholders around European screen
content for and about young children of Arab heritage who are living in
Europe. It was this project that stimulated us to explore more deeply the
many cross-cultural connections between Arab and European countries
around policy for and production of children’s screen media, which form
the focus of this book. Again we wish to acknowledge the AHRC research
grant (AH/R001421/1) and thank all those who offered guidance and
support. We especially thank Dr Christine Singer for her expert research
assistance and our project partners: BBC Children’s, BBC Media Action,
CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, the Danish Film Institute, the International
Central Institute for Youth and Educational Television (IZI) in Munich
and the Public Media Alliance. The second project consisted of three
workshops in different locations (Manchester, Copenhagen and Munich)
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
and a symposium in London on 14 September 2018 under the title
Invisible Children: Children’s Media, Diversity and Forced Migration. It
generated five separate briefing reports and one final report that consoli-
dates all five, which can be accessed at www.euroarabchildrensmedia.org.
We also thank Mala Sanghera-Warren, Lucy Batrouney and Heloise
Harding at Palgrave Macmillan, and the anonymous readers of our pro-
posal and manuscript, for their encouragement and assistance. This vol-
ume is a companion to Pivot title Children and Screen Media in Changing
Arab Contexts: An Ethnographic Perspective by Tarik Sabry and
Nisrine Mansour.
c
ontents
1 Local, Regional and Global Media at a Time of Forced
Migration: Evolving Geometries of Power 1
2 Joining the Dots: How Arab and European Children Are
Connected by Screen Media 19
3 Towards Well-Being? Stimuli for Shared Practice on Policy
and Regulation 45
4 Face-to-Face: Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Provision
and Delivery 73
5 Arab Children in Europe: Managing Diversity on
Children’s Television 101
6 Children’s Visibility as Stakeholders: From Provision to
Participation 127
Index 137
vii
A A
bout the uthors
Naomi Sakr is Professor of Media Policy at the Communication and
Media Research Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminster. She is the
author of three books about Arab media, editor of two others, and
co-editor of two, including Children’s TV and Digital Media in the Arab
World (2017, with Jeanette Steemers).
Jeanette Steemers is Professor of Culture, Media and Creative Industries
at King’s College London. She has published widely on European media
industries and media policy, including numerous articles and a book on
children’s media industries in the UK and internationally. Before
becoming an academic, she worked in children’s television distribution.
ix
CHAPTER 1
Local, Regional and Global Media at a Time
of Forced Migration: Evolving Geometries
of Power
Abstract Highlighting gaps in our understanding of processes underpin-
ning the making and circulation of children’s screen content across the
Arab region and Europe, this chapter explains how this book sets aside
Euro- or Arab-centrism to engage with an outward-looking version of
what might be called child-centrism in respect of policy and production.
We consider recent disruptive shifts in regional geopolitics and large-scale
population movements, before discussing production initiatives for dis-
placed and anxious children in Arab and European countries. We contem-
plate the challenges of terms like “local” and “global” in relation to the
Arab world and Europe, before setting out a framework informed by the
concept of “power-geometries” (Massey, Power-Geometry and a
Progressive Sense of Place. In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global
Change, ed. Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and
Lisa Tickner, 59–69. London: Routledge, 1993), and questions about
who has the power to initiate flows and who is on the “receiving end.”
Keywords Convention on the Rights of the Child • Ethnocentrism •
Child migration • Local and global • Power-geometries • Sesame
Workshop
Ethnocentrism is a recurring feature of both the industries that produce
children’s screen content and scholarship on children and media. Timothy
© The Author(s) 2019 1
N. Sakr, J. Steemers, Screen Media for Arab and European Children,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25658-6_1
2 N. SAKR AND J. STEEMERS
Havens analysed some time ago (2007) how the “vibrant business cul-
ture” of North American and European “children’s television merchants”
privileges an “industry lore” 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 children’s media. Revealing that only 14 per cent of articles
published in the Journal of Children and Media between 2005 and 2018
had studied the “processes of production, political-economic forces, or
the institutional policies and practices in the media with which children
engage” (Lemish 2019, 121)—namely processes related to the phenom-
enon articulated by Havens—the journal’s founding and outgoing editor,
Dafna Lemish, recalled her efforts to correct an “underlying ethnocen-
trism” in submitted manuscripts, whereby the “American context was
assumed to be the default position” (ibid., 123). She noted that her pre-
ferred practice of always naming the place where research had been con-
ducted 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 “case
studies” 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
“centrisms” 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 “isolat[ing] children into child-centred areas
and concerns away from such matters as politics, economics or law”
(Anderson 2016, 6). The book’s “wide-angle” approach to geographical,
political-economic and childhood concerns is prompted by recent disrup-
tive shifts in regional geopolitics and large-scale population movements,
which have occurred simultaneously with global shifts in delivery plat-
forms for children’s screen media content.
Shifts of this magnitude call for new insights into how children’s screen
media policy and production proceed across divides of language and cul-
ture. 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 “young children” we mean those aged under
around 12 years since they are the focus of most industry attention. The
