Malena Janson

Teaching and supervising children's culture students and child and youth studies students on basic and advanced level.

Teaching areas: I) Children's film and television, especially the history of Swedish children's film and television, childhood discourses and children's film aesthetics; II) Film education; III) Moving images as normative discourses; IV) Images of the child and child stars in cinema; V) Adaptation studies, intermedia studies and transmediality in the area of children's culture.

My main research interests have included numerous perspectives on moving images for and about children; how children and childhood are depicted in film and television, how these depictions reflect society's childhood discourses, and how they can be analysed on both thematic and stilistic level. In my doctoral thesis Cinema of best intentions? 60 years of Swedish children's film as education and entertainment(2007) I investigated children's perspectives in Swedish children's films from different eras. Another area of interest has been film education, with a focus upon discourses on cinema as artform and/or educational tool. At the moment I'm looking into the area of I) Functions of of the figure of the child within moving images; II) Child-animal-relations in film and TV.

Janson, M. & Åberg, A. Women in Swedish children's television in the 1970s. In M. Jansson, M. Larsson, S. MacKenzie & A. Steport (Eds.), Women Filmmakers and the Welfare State. Transnational Film Cultures During the Long 1970s in Canada and Sweden. Amsterdam University Press. Forthcoming.

Janson, M. (2025). 'You cannot own an animal' Animals, agency and activism in Håkan Alexanderssons och Carl-Johan De Geers television series for children. In H. Asklund, L. Manderstedt & A-S Persson (Eds.), Interspecies Relations in Children's Cultures. Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings. DOI: 10.3384/ecp206.23-32

Janson, M. (2025). Breaking Taboos: Swedish Children's TV in the Radical Era of the 1970s. I N. Brown (Red.), Radical Children's Film and Television. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

Janson, M, (Ed.) Swedish Children's Cinema: History, Ideology, Aesthetics. Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan. 

Janson, M. Audiovisual empathy: Adopting a child's perspective in children's cinema. I M. Janson (Red.), Swedish Children's Cinema: History, Ideology, Aesthetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Janson, M. (2023). Challenging time, age, and power relations. The figure of the child in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 14 (1). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1386/jsca_00090_1

Jan

Janson, M. (2022). Book review: D. Buckingham, Youth on Screen. Representing Young People in Film and Television. YOUNG, 30(4), 419–420. https://doi.org/10.1177/11033088221074742

Janson, M. (2019). Moulding the democratic citizen of the future: On the discourses and practices of film education in Sweden. Film Education Journal volume 2:1 (2019).  https://doi.org/10.18546/FEJ.02.2.01

Janson, M. (2006). Through the eyes of a child. I S. Cropper (Red.), 1000 films to change your life. The movies that move us. London: Time out.

Janson, M. (2005). Elvis! Elvis!. I T. Soila (Red.), The Cinema of Scandinavia. London: Wallflower Press.