Intergenerational Reading in Increasingly Mediatised Contexts: An Inquiry With Chilean Tweens and Parents

ABSTRACT Reading is increasingly situated within mediatised assemblages: dynamic configurations of people, devices, platforms, texts and domestic spaces that together shape what reading means in everyday family life. In this article, we propose the concept of intergenerational reading to capture how reading functions as a relational practice across generations, moving beyond both the book/digital binary and deficit frameworks that have long dominated family literacy research. Drawing on interviews with tweens (aged 8–12) and caregivers from the Chilean #EstoTbn project, we analyse how parents and children negotiate reading and cultural consumption in contexts of rapid mediatisation. Our analysis identifies two dynamics. First, the physical book retains a near‐inescapable normative centrality, anchoring dominant ideals of the ‘good reader’ and the ‘good parent’ within an assemblage that includes furniture, home libraries and reading routines as much as texts themselves. Second, what we call ‘family taste’—a collectively negotiated aesthetic disposition—operates across media formats as a site of intergenerational connection and contestation, shaped by peer culture, algorithmic environments and parental curation alike. We argue that intergenerational reading, understood as a more‐than‐human relational practice, opens an analytical space where the value of shared cultural engagement lies not in measurable learning outcomes but in the affective, reciprocal and present‐oriented bonds that reading, in its broadest sense, makes possible. These bonds become especially visible in moments when tweens invite adults into their own media worlds, reversing conventional flows of cultural authority and generating a different kind of intergenerational space.