Tourist discourse and carnivalesque humour in children's television narratives: learning travel from Thomas, Peppa and the Go Jetters.

This paper extends academic debates occurring in the discursive intersections between childhood studies and tourist studies. Drawing on theoretical concepts devised by Mikhail Bakhtin and Erving Goffman, it employs a critical discourse analysis that focuses on the representation of tourists in selected travel-themed episodes of three popular children's television series. This study investigates how travel experiences and practices of touristic consumption are discursively constructed and interrogates how this tourist discourse is implicated in relationships performed by children and adults or authority figures in these narratives. The findings imply that children's travel-themed television narratives both challenge and reinforce cultural assumptions about tourist behaviour. This paper highlights how literary devices such as carnivalesque humour and anthropomorphism are employed to convey cultural messages and touristic themes. It also demonstrates that critical discourse analysis is an effective framework for explaining and understanding the various social interactions, roles, and relationships portrayed in these narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]