Children, the media, and the epistemic imperative of embodied vulnerability

Abstract

The world over, very young children are navigating the hazards of war, criminal activity, terrorism, torture, natural disasters, disease, hunger, and poverty. In media studies, the trends of the past decade or so have focused on children’s agency and empowerment—but many scholars of children tend to elide embodiment in their epistemological approaches. I argue in this essay that children inhabit what Ulrich Beck termed a “risk society”, and that they experience societal risks as embodied beings. Foregrounding children’s embodiment reorients us to the realities of the connections between the vulnerability of human embodiment and the precarious nature of social institutions. Using Beck’s theory of risk as a starting point, I offer a reparative reading of vulnerability as guiding us toward an activist program of research on corporeality and embodiment that needs to be taken up by children’s media scholars.