Honorable Mention given in relation to the award of the Fass-Sandin Prize for the best article (in English) on the History of Children and Youth published in 2013
The prize committee also felt strongly that a second article should be given Honorable Mention: Helle Strandgaard Jensen’s “TV as Children’s Spokesman: Conflicting Notions of Children and Childhood in Danish Children’s Television around 1968,” also published in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (vol. 6, Winter 2013). Jensen draws on archival, published, and audiovisual evidence to argue that Danish television around 1968 innovated a “radical viewpoint”: that children were a “social group who had the right to have its interests represented in the public sphere,” and that television should perform that function. Thus Jensen draws forward a subtle but profoundly useful distinction between children’s television that aims mainly to talk (or even to sell) to children, and that which aims to speak for them. Through this distinction, Jensen intervenes in models that reductively categorize children as empowered or exploited. The essay is perceptive and beautifully written, and its conclusions are simultaneously subtle and forceful.