Beyond ‘the West to the Rest’: A roundtable on global children’s media flows

The special issue takes up questions about constructions of childhood and the place of children in national and transnational media contexts. Central to this topic is a guiding enquiry as to whether or not there is, as is often claimed, a pervasive West–Rest flow that is particularly impactful with regards to children. Questions of children as consumers, as proto-national and global citizens, religious subjects, independent thinkers and so on are also central to this topic. While these questions play out in scholarly debates taking place in journal articles, book manuscripts, and conference papers, the editors for this journal issue set out to include a component in these pages that could provide a similarly useful forum for exploring such issues beyond the scope of traditional print essays. With this in mind, we put together a roundtable discussion about children in a globalized media environment among some of the area’s leading scholars, particularly those whose regional focus might bring an important diversity of perspective to the geographic areas examined throughout this issue.