Developments

How does developmental psychology connect with (what used to be called) the developing world? What do cultural representations indicate about the contemporary politics of childhood? How is concern about child sexual exploitation linked to wider securitization anxieties? In other words: what is the political economy of childhood, and how is this affectively organized? This new edition of Developments: Child, Image, Nation, fully updated, is a key conceptual intervention and resource, reflecting further on the contexts and frameworks that tie children to national and international agendas. A companion volume to Burman's Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (third edition, 2017) this volume helps explain why questions around children and childhood, including their safety, welfare, their interests, abilities, sexualities and their violence, have so preoccupied the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, showing how the frames for these concerns have extended beyond their Euro-US contexts of origination. In this completely revised edition, Burman explores changing debates and contexts, offering resources for interpreting continuities and shifts in the complex terrain connecting children and development. Through reflection on an increasingly globalised, marketised world, that prolongs previous colonial and gendered dynamics in new and even more insidious ways, Developments analyses the conceptual paradigms shaping how we think about and work with children, and recommends strategies for changing them. Drawing in particular on feminist and post-development literatures, as well as original and detailed engagement with social theory, it illustrates how and why reconceptualising notions of individual and human development, including those informing models of children's rights and interests, is needed to foster more just and equitable forms of professional practice with children and their families. Burman offers an important 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. A persuasive set of arguments about childhood, culture and professional practice, Developments is an invaluable resource to teachers and students in psychology, childhood studies, and education as well as researchers in gender studies.

Erica Burman is Professor of Education at Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, UK. She is an internationally reknowned researcher, teacher, and activist, as well as group analyst and psychotherapist. Her work supports critical and reflexive professional practice with marginalised people, including children.

Acknowledgements to the First Edition. Acknowledgements to the Second Edition. Introduction. PART I Children and development: what is at stake? 1 Dis/placing development 2 The child, the woman and the cyborg: (im)possibilities of feminist developmental psychology 3 Pedagogics of post/modernity: the address to the child as political object and subject PART II Developing images 4 Childhood, sexual abuse and contemporary political subjectivities 5 Sexuality: contested relationships around the control of desire and action 6 Appealing and appalling children PART III International development 7 Beyond the baby and the bathwater: postdualist developmental psychologies for diverse childhoods 8 Developing differences: gender, childhood and economic development 9 The abnormal distribution of development: policies for Southern women and children PART IV What follows postdevelopment? 10 Rhetorics of psychological development: from complicity to resistance 11 Between two debts: points of suspension in childhood and economic development 12 Between two deaths: reconfiguring metaphorics and rhetorics of childhood Part V: Transnational Dynamics 13 Between Identification and Subjectification: Affective technologies of expertise and temporality in the contemporary cultural representation of gendered childhoods 14 'It shouldn't happen here': Cultural and relational dynamics structured around the 'poor child' 15 Contingent Connections: Between German and British Childhoods - Marion Daltrop References Author index Subject index