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Developments

Child, Image, Nation

• By Erica Burman

• Price: $90.00
• Binding: Hardback (also available in Paperback)
• Pages: 336
• Published by: Routledge
• Publication Date: 21st December 2007
• ISBN: 978-0-415-37791-1

About the Book

How does developmental psychology connect with the developing world? What do cultural representations tell us about the contemporary politics of childhood? What is the political economy of childhood?

This companion volume to Burman's Deconstructing Developmental Psychology helps us to explain why questions around children and childhood - their safety, their sexuality, their interests and abilities, their violence - have so preoccupied the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this increasingly post-industrial, post-colonial and multicultural world, this book identifies analytical and practical strategies for improving how we think about and work with children. Drawing in particular on feminist and postdevelopment literatures, the book illustrates how and why reconceptualising our notions of individual and human development, including those informing models of children's rights and interests, will foster more just and equitable forms of professional practice with children and their families.

The book brings together completely new, previously unpublished material alongside revised and updated papers to present a cutting-edge and integrated perspective to the field. Burman offers a key contribution to a set of urgent debates engaging theory and method, policy and practice across all the disciplines that work with, or lay claim to, children's interests.

Developments presents a coherent and persuasive set of arguments about childhood, culture and professional practice so that the sustained focus across a range of disciplinary arenas (psychology, education, cultural studies, child rights, gender studies, development policy and practice, social policy) strengthens the overall argument of each chapter. It will be invaluable to teachers and students in psychology, childhood studies and education as well as researchers in gender studies. It will also be a must-read for professionals working with children and adolescents.

Reviews

"Developments expands on the critical work of scholars in education, sociology, psychology, and other emergent fields of critical social science to address the relationship between discourses of developmental psychology and economic development. Those of us who are concerned with critique, power, and justice will consider it a major contribution." - Gaile S. Cannella, Tulane University, USA

"This book traverses terrain usually thought of as distinct and challenges us to think in complex ways about complex issues. It's a provocative read for anyone engaged in debates (and entangled in action!) to do with developments of childhood, (inter)national dynamics and re-presentations of these realities." - Professor Jill Bradbury, School of Psychology, University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa

"This book exhibits the strengths that I have come to admire in Burman: originality and creative imagination; an impressive erudition; boldness in crossing disciplinary boundaries; and and a distinctive verve in exposing oppressive structures. This is a seminal, highly original book that is bound to inspire the growing number of students and young academics interested in global childhood research." - Olga Nieuwenhuys, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

"With this book the reader has in their hands the synthesis of one of the most powerful and deepest thinkers in the field of childhood that we have today." -Christian Dunker, University of São Paulo, Brazil

"Powerfully written from page one to the last, this is a devastating intellectual blow to both post-modernist and modernist discourses in the social sciences. This is a book that should open the eyes of reflexive practitioners who take their work seriously and are interested in people with whom they work." - Jaan Valsiner, Professor of Psychology, Clark University, USA

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments. Introduction. Part I: Children and Development: What is at Stake? Dis/Placing Development. The Child, the Woman and the Cyborg: (Im)possibilities of Feminist Developmental Psychology. Pedagogics of Post/Modernity: The Address to the Child as Political Object and Subject. Part II: Developing Images. Childhood, Sexual Abuse, and Contemporary Political Subjectivities. Sexuality: Contested Relationships around the control of Desire and Action. Appealing and Appalling Children. Part III: International Development. Beyond the Baby and the Bathwater: Postdualist Developmental Psychologies for Diverse Childhoods. Developing Differences: Gender, Childhood and Economic Development. The Abnormal Distribution of Development: Policies for Southern Women and Children. Part IV: After-Words: What Follows Post-Development? Rhetorics of Psychological Development: From Complicity to Resistance. Between Two Debts: Points of Suspension in Childhood and Economic Development. Between Two Deaths: Reconfiguring Metaphorics and Ethics of childhood. References.

About the Author(s)

Erica Burman is Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is an internationally reknown researcher, teacher and activist, as well as group analyst, bringing critical methodological and interpretive resources for the re-evaluation of the uses of developmental psychology in health and educational contexts and social policy. Her work supports critical and reflexive professional practice with and for women and children.