Leonie Rutherford’s interdisciplinary body of research is unified by a consistent theme: children and the media world that shapes their future understandings. She is a leading scholar internationally and nationally, in the fields of children and media; public service broadcasting; digital reading cultures, and youth audiences. She has published on ecofeminist aesthetics in children’s animation and socially progressive themes in Australian children’s television. Her current project – Discovering a good book: Pathways to reading for Australian teens – has recently been awarded funding through the ARC Linkage Projects scheme. The research, which partners with stakeholders in the library and book industry sector, investigates the ways in which traditional and new cultural intermediaries and the digital ecology in which books are embedded enable young people’s participation in reading cultures.