Welcome to the Children’s Media Symposium 2019
The CMS is organised by Associate Professor Anna Potter, from USC’s School of Creative Industries, and Dr Inez Mahony. The biennial CMS was established as part of Anna’s Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship ‘International Transformations in Children’s Television 2013-18’. Its purpose is to highlight research into how children are engaging with media, both for learning and entertainment, while allowing leading storytellers to share their creative practices. If you are a researcher, educator, practitioner or just interested in the relationship between children, the media and creativity, we’d love to see you at this hybrid industry/academic event in November 2019.
The 2019 Children’s Media Symposium once again offers opportunities for productive collaboration between the creative sector and the academic community. While the inaugural 2017 CMS focused on adaptation, this time participants are invited to consider the concept of ‘creativity re-booted’. The reboot is a ‘unique adjunct to the regenerative processes that have historically existed to revitalise, reinvent and recycle textual forms’ (Proctor 2013). Further, the term ‘reboot’ describes broader industrial and institutional efforts to adapt and remake media content, policies and platforms for 21st century audiences.
Reboot encompasses imaginative creative practice that seeks to innovate in, and transform children’s media, including but not limited to screen texts, television-like content, computer games and various online sites, and similarly disrupt more traditional texts including illustrated books, comics, young adult fiction, magazines, and graphic novels.