History, entertainment, education and jiaoyü

Abstract

Cultural citizenship is a concept that allows analysis of media product to acknowledge differing modes of reception and interpretation within a single nation-scape. When complemented by the notion of cultural competency, it is possible to use this concept to examine the levels of interpretative entry into dominant but implicit versions of the citizen in national media. This argument claims that first-generation migrant children in a settler society, such as Australia, are important negotiators between different cultural competencies and, by implication, different formulations of cultural citizenship. In the case study presented in this article, first-generation children of Chinese mainland migrant parents are both negotiators and sites of parental anxiety in relation to the new place of residency, its value systems and its measures of cultural and civic competency. History, education and remembered cultural norms become bones of contention in the process of media consumption.