The idea of children's agency is central to the growing field of childhood studies. In this book David Oswell argues for new understandings of children's agency. He traces the transformation of children and childhood across the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and explores the dramatic changes in recent years to children's everyday lives as a consequence of new networked, mobile technologies and new forms of globalisation. The author reviews existing theories of children's agency as well as providing the theoretical tools for thinking of children's agency as spatially, temporally and materially complex. With this in mind, he surveys the main issues in childhood studies, with chapters covering family, schooling, crime, health, consumer culture, work and human rights. This is a comprehensive text intended for students and academic researchers across the humanities and social sciences interested in the study of children and childhood.

This book, the first academic study of its kind, uncovers a history of the child television audience. Looking in detail at children's television and its audience in Britain in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the book shows how an audience literally came into being, how it was given substance, and how it became the site of intervention.

The idea of children's agency is central to the growing field of childhood studies. In this book David Oswell argues for new understandings of children's agency. He traces the transformation of children and childhood across the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and explores the dramatic changes in recent years to children's everyday lives as a consequence of new networked, mobile technologies and new forms of globalisation. The author reviews existing theories of children's agency as well as providing the theoretical tools for thinking of children's agency as spatially, temporally and materially complex. With this in mind, he surveys the main issues in childhood studies, with chapters covering family, schooling, crime, health, consumer culture, work and human rights. This is a comprehensive text intended for students and academic researchers across the humanities and social sciences interested in the study of children and childhood.

David Oswell has written a comprehensive introduction to cultural studies that guides the reader through the field's central foundations and its freshest ideas. This book:

- grounds the reader in the foundations of cultural studies and cultural theory: language and semiology, ideology and power, mass and popular culture;

- analyzes the central problems: identity, body, economy, globalization and empire;

- introduces the latest developments on materiality, agency, technology and nature.

Culture and Society is an invaluable guide for students navigating the dynamic debates and intellectual challenges of cultural studies. Its breadth and unparallelled coverage of cutting-edge theory will also ensure that it is read by anyone interested in questions of materiality and culture.

Too often cultural studies discourse seems cut off from wider developments in social theory. As a sociologist with a strong cultural studies sensibility, David Oswell is ideally placed to put this right. Through a series of well-judged and historically nuanced readings of cultural, social theory and critical philosophy, this book provides just the bridge between cultural studies and wider debates that we need' -" Nick Couldry, Redaer in Media, Communications and Culture, London School of Economics and Political Science"