Tamara Kay, "Sesame Street Around the World: Culture, Politics, and Transnational Organizational Partnerships" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mar 7, 2026

Tamara Kay, sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh who studied Sesame Workshop through seven years of ethnography. She describes how Sesame Street is co-produced with local partners, the phases of disassembly and reconstitution, how teams navigate sensitive cultural topics, and the logistical, funding, and alliance-building work that lets a US cultural icon become locally resonant around the world.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Transnational Co-production Produces Local Sesame Street

Sesame Workshop uses a transnational co-production model that forms mixed teams to create local versions of Sesame Street.
Local producers, writers, musicians, and education experts lead production while New York provides oversight and coaching early on.

ANECDOTE

Dubbing Failed; Brazil's Vila Sésamo Thrived

Early attempts to dub the U.S. show failed because visuals (like U.S. flags) revealed it as clearly foreign.
Mexico, Brazil, and Germany moved quickly to local co-productions; Brazil's Vila Sésamo became culturally iconic.

INSIGHT

Three Stages Turn Sesame Into A Hybrid Local Product

Kay outlines three stages: disassembly (explain Sesame), reconstitution (customize into hybrid product), and dissemination (local rollout).
Reconstitution relies on exchanging cultural knowledge so the show reads as both local and Sesame-like.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Given the sometimes extraordinary politicization of culture, it is surprising that Sesame Street has gained acceptance and legitimacy in more than fifty countries. Sesame Street's global success raises two questions. First, how does a US icon like Sesame Street spread around the world, gaining acceptance as a local cultural product? Second, how does the nonprofit that created it, Sesame Workshop, and its partners around the world navigate cultural differences, manage conflicts, and construct shared collective representations to create Sesame Street programs that resonate with local audiences?

In Sesame Street Around the World: Culture, Politics, and Transnational Organizational Partnerships (Oxford UP, 2025), Dr. Tamara Kay answers these questions using data from seven years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork and 200 in-depth interviews with Sesame Workshop staff and international partners-including their real-time interactions-from seventeen countries within four regions around the world.

Dr. Kay argues that Sesame Workshop's secret is its engagement in coproduction, meaning it works with partners as a transnational team to create local Sesame Street programs together. Through coproduction, Sesame Workshop and its partners create new collective identities by constructing value to align their interests and exchanging complex cultural knowledge to both customize and build alliances. She traces the successive processes of coproduction, beginning with the imagination of the cultural product, to its disassembly, reconstitution, and dissemination. Coproduction privileges the creation of new knowledge that emerges from transnational interaction, and uses that new knowledge to create a hybrid cultural product. The Sesame Street case grapples with and illuminates culture in transnational interaction, providing insight into a range of other transnational organizational partnerships and different kinds of hybrid cultural products.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology