Natalie Coulter, Director of IRDL. Natalie is an associate professor in York’s Communication Studies department and is also in the graduate programme, Communication and Culture. Natalie is interested young people’s media culture, particularly in that ways that advertising, marketing and the media construct framings of young people, and how young people respond, engage and negotiate with these framings.
Natalie completed her PhD from Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication where she wrote a dissertation on the Tween girl. While Vancouver was an amazing place to live, Toronto called her back home. She has two young daughters, both now tween girls themselves, and spends much of her time hanging out with them. She spent the past summer bringing fairy doors to her neighbourhood in the east end of Toronto.
Her research interests are in girls’ studies, critical advertising studies, children’s media, and consumer culture. Her book “Tweening the Girl: The Crystallization of the Tween Market” was published in Peter Lang’s Mediated Youth series in 2014. She has recently published in the Canadian Journal of Communication, Journal of Children and Media, and Jeunesse. She is a founding member of ARCYP (Association for Research on the Cultures of Young People).
Research
She presently has two research projects underway, one on the history of children’s cultural industries in Canada, which will attempt to filled the void in the dearth of scholarship on the rich industry of children’s media that we have in Canada. Natalie’s second project entitled the embodied tween, living girlhood in global and digital spaces looks at how the cultural industries of girlhood (advertising, marketing, media, and retail industries) currently conceptualize the tween and the stage of being a tween (“tweenhood”) in relation to how girls weave “tweenness” as a potential resource of subjectivity, offered to them by the marketplace, in to and out of their experiences of their everyday lives.
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