Erica Burman

'Culture' as a barrier to service provision and delivery: domestic violence services for minoritized women

This paper addresses how domestic violence services to women of African, African-Caribbean, South Asian, Jewish and Irish backgrounds are structured by assumptions about ‘culture’ which produce barriers to the delivery of domestic violence services. Phoenix’s (1987, ‘Theories of Gender and Black Families’, pp. 50-61 in G. Weiner and M. Arnot (eds) Gender Under Scrutiny. London: Hutchinson) discussion of the representation of black women is applied more generally to analyse how discourses of gender and racialization function within accounts of domestic violence service provision. Discourses of both cultural specificity and generality/commonality are shown to intersect to effectively exclude minority ethnic women from such services. Domestic violence emerges as something that can be overlooked or even excused for ‘cultural reasons’, as a homogenized absence; or alternatively as a pathologized presence, producing heightened visibility of minoritized women both within and outside their communities - since domestic violence brings them and their communities under particular scrutiny. Such configurations also inform discourses of service provision to minoritized women. Finally key implications are identified for service design, delivery and development, including the need for both culturally specific and mainstream provision around domestic violence, and the need to challenge notions of ‘cultural privacy’ and ‘race anxiety’ in work with minoritized communities.

Deconstructing feminist psychology

Deconstructing Feminist Psychology - Erica Burman Feminist Psychology or the History of a Non-Feminist Practice - Margot Pujal i Llombert Rethinking Role Theory and Its Aftermath - Heidi Sarriera Figueroa The Reciprocity of Psychology and Popular Culture - Mary Crawford Dances with Feminism - Lise Bird Sidestepping and Sandbagging Questions concerning Methods in Feminist Research of the Everyday - Frigga Haug Moving beyond Equality and Identity - Lenora Fulani Towards a Communicative Feminist Psychology - Gordana Jovanovi[ac]c Through a Lens, Darkly - Ann Levett and Amanda Kottler

Local, Global or Globalized?: Child Development and International Child Rights Legislation

This article elaborates a conceptual framework for examining international child rights legislation and the concept of childhood that underlies it. The distinctions between local, global and globalized conceptions of childhood are analysed as central to consideration of the success, and limitations, of international policies and programmes. Drawing on analyses of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, conceptual limitations of a shift from generalization to naturalization are identified. These culminate in a globalization of childhood that is particularly evident in models of psychological development. The article outlines how assumptions about the separation of individual and society, and development from culture, play a key role in this process. At the level of practice, therefore, the article argues for the need to maintain a critical vigilance on the adequacy of the conceptual resources that inform policy and programmes for children. The article concludes by suggesting that, in seeking to promote childrens well-being and welfare across the world, there is no escape from treading the difficult path between the globalizations of cultural imperialism and the cultural relativism of localized conceptions. While important and necessary, rights legislation on its own can work to obscure the inevitability and pervasiveness of such issues.

From difference to intersectionality: challenges and resources

In this paper I take up the theme of enabling difference in terms of the challenges and resources posed by taking the intersectional character of differences seriously. Drawing in particular on feminist debates, current discourses that address questions of structural, especially racialized, inequalities through notions of difference are critically evaluated as limited in their analysis of power relations and practices around the transformation of power inequalities. Applying this to questions of service design and delivery, I introduce the concept of intersectionality – in particular the intersection of ‘race’ and gender – to illustrate four key problems that this framework allows to come into focus: discourses of cultural autonomy as reflecting those of liberal individualism; ‘race anxiety’ as a form of obsessional undoing of the effort to challenge racism; how attending to ‘race’ and culture typically works to privilege ‘race’ over gender; and how discourses of specialization (whether around diagnosis or cultural background) can paradoxically work to exclude women from, rather than to extend, service provision. It is suggested that, rather than difference, intersectionality could be a more promising starting point for critical thinking and practice.

Beyond 'emotional literacy' in feminist and educational research

Educational research has a long history of engagement with emotions. Together with feminist research, it has championed the legitimacy of research approaches that not only admit but also analyse researcher reflexivity. The articles author cautions against subscription to emerging cultural discourses promoting the validity and expression of emotions—distinguishing between a feminist agenda and appropriations of a pseudo‐feminist discourse that now permeate neo‐liberal governmentality. First, the article analyses the assumptions underlying the ‘emotional literacy’ paradigm, before, secondly, addressing some specifically educational developments related to the shift towards ‘life span’ and ‘lifelong learning’ within university assessment strategies in the form of ‘personal development profiles’. It is argued that we need to attend very closely to the epithet ‘emotional literacy’ as a process of schooling for the production of discourse about emotion, rather than the discovery or recognition of some essentia...

Feminism and Discourse in Developmental Psychology: Power, Subjectivity and Interpretation

The meeting of feminism with post-structuralism has brought issues of multiplicity of meanings to the fore. However, attention to difference threatens to disperse politics. This paper explores how these issues are played out in developmental psychological research. The concerns of feminist research with issues of reciprocity, consultation and accountability challenge developmental research conducted within the structural power relations of adult-child, experimenter-subject encounters. Equally, the feminist project of social transformation both draws upon and renders problematic developmental psychology. Drawing on examples from my interviews with children, I argue that attending to the power relations that are conferred by structural research practices and subject positions set up within discourse not only highlights previously unacknowledged diversity of meaning, but also closes off total interpretive relativism. What we need is a feminist realism that does not resort to positivism, that ties discourse to politics, and that makes politics more than discursive.

Beyond the Baby and the Bathwater: Postdualistic Developmental Psychologies for Diverse Childhoods.

SUMMARY Developmental psychology as a modern, western (minority-world) discipline has been wedded to an individualist model of child development that treats the baby or child as an isolated unit of development. Heir to both romantic and functionalist traditions within its Euro-American context of formulation, within this paradigm the child develops according to regular, predictable patterns (sometimes described as stages) that are presumed to be largely universal in their structure. Yet this universality is actually culturally specific: it represents the cultural white, western, middle class, masculine subjectivity of the mid twentieth century. As a result cultural diversity is subordinated to this naturalised and normalised linear model of development. The challenge is therefore to find ways of opening up discussions of how children develop within diverse cultural, class and geographical contexts that both draws on the strengths of available theories without reproducing their cultural privileges and globalisation. Drawing upon examples from diverse cultural contexts, I argue that this involves departing from the prevailing isolationist research and policy focus on young children. Instead we should analyse how diverse contexts and environments not only support or surround childrens development but also how the cultural ‘bathwater’ enters into the shaping and elaboration of the baby it supports.

Childhood, neo‐liberalism and the feminization of education

This paper brings together analyses from childhood and gender studies with macro‐economic analysis to offer new perspectives on current educational debates, including the current role of education within broader discussions. Girls’ recent (supposed) educational success is situated within economic and cultural contexts to explore how discussions of gender, childhood and development both express and, paradoxically, obscure these. Analysis of popular discourses surrounding children and childhood is used to suggest that the sentimentalized (girl) child has come to represent a new neo‐liberal subject, such that contemporary discourses of childhood and feminization typically distract attention from more meaningful structural analyses ‐ that would crucially include further analyses of gender and childhood.

Emotions and Reflexivity in Feminised Education Action Research.

The paper addresses contemporary relations between emotions, gender and feminist action research. Starting from analysis of the increasing emotionalisation of everyday life, it explores the quasi‐feminist—or what the author calls ‘feminised’—forms of incitement to reflexive confession that are increasingly gaining favour within professional and higher educational contexts and draws on literatures and sets of debates that inform education action research, including: childhood and governmentality; feminist research; and international development critiques. The author proposes that reflexivity as an educational and research practice has come to stand in for, and thereby limits, the contemporary focus on ‘participation’ to reduce its radical collaborative and action agenda and instead incite researchers to work on ourselves, and only on ourselves. The paper warns against underestimating the speed and flexibility by which neo‐liberalism absorbs and co‐opts creative strategies—such as reflexivity—for its subversion, and returns them to old‐style individualism.

Deconstructing neoliberal childhood: Towards a feminist antipsychological approach

This article analyses child development as text to highlight newly emerging contemporary tropes of northern, normalized childhoods in relation to gender, racialization and familial organization. A recent UK marketing campaign for the washing powder Persil is analysed for the ways it mobilizes discourses of childhood and child rights. This indicates some key consolidations, especially around the configuration of gendered and racialized representations as ushered in through recent modes of psychologization and feminization. Discussion focuses on how text such as this deconstructs the opposition between popular cultural and expert (developmental psychological) knowledges to mediate their mutual elaboration and legitimation. The article ends by reflecting on the consequences of the focus on psychologization and feminization in relation to possible alliances and antagonisms of inter- and cross-disciplinary approaches to childhood, and their contributions to challenging wider development discourses.