Research Focus Group Talk: Outside the Box: Cardboard in Contemporary Children’s Culture

The cardboard box has long been regarded as the imaginative plaything par excellence. In 2005, the box was inducted into the Toy Association’s Toy Industry Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY—institutionalizing a decades-old association between cardboard and children’s creative play. On the page and onscreen, in museum galleries, schools, toy aisles, and at home, today cardboard occupies a privileged position within children’s material culture where the promises of environmental and STEAM education coalesce. Its accessibility makes it an equitable choice; its recyclability makes it a sustainable one. This talk will examine cardboard’s recent ascendence in children’s sustainability and STEAM cultures. Through a series of case studies, including documentary film, fiction, curricular materials and kids’ material cultures, it will identify the optimistic futures projected by proponents of cardboard play and interrogate their underpinning logics. Cardboard sits at the intersection between the local and the global in children’s everyday lives—at once emblematic of transnational flows of labor and capital and the material stuff of hyper-specific embodied engagements. As such, this talk will trace cardboard’s function as a material, discursive, and aesthetic phenomenon deployed to address—though not necessarily resolve—a range of concerns related to children’s economic, environmental, and educational futures.

Meredith A. Bak is an Associate Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. She is the author of Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture (MIT Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in journals including Ninth Letter, The Journal for Cinema and Media Studies, Early Popular Visual Culture, The Velvet Light Trap, and Film History, and in several edited collections. She is at work on a project about the role of cardboard in children’s STEAM and environmental pedagogies.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group, Department of Film and Media Studies, the Carsey-Wolf Center, Graduate Center for Literary Research, and Comparative Literature Program, and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center