Feminist research and methodology
Although feminist research has been a central concern of Burman’s writing on developmental psychology, she has questioned cultural assumptions in "second wave" feminism, and she has often drawn on anti-racist debates. She has drawn attention to the way the position of women is closely connected with the position of cultural minorities. Burman is best known as a developmental psychologist and theorist of women’s studies, but many of her publications have been concerned with radical developments in methodology (see, for example, her analysis of the way debates on child labor can be used to show the limits of mainstream models in developmental psychology in the 2006 FQS online reference). Her study of different ways of carrying out research has been a powerful resource for feminist psychologists, but beyond that the impact has been felt in "discourse analysis" and in "critical psychology" (see for example the 2004 DAOL online reference) and in critical mental health.
She is sometimes criticized for being too political because her work crosses academic disciplinary boundaries. She is less an exponent of how psychology can help people than a critic of psychology, and so her work is dismissed as irrelevant by some mainstream developmental psychologists.
Erica Burman also trained as a group analyst, and much of her work has been in collaboration with a new generation of researchers working in psychology and in adjoining disciplines, and with practitioners. Apart from edited books, Burman has produced a number of collaborative books on the position of women (in 1995, Challenging Women: Psychology's Exclusions, Feminist Possibilities) and discursive research (in 1996, Psychology Discourse Practice: From Regulation to Resistance). This collaborative research and writing has continued in recent years in publications on suicide and self-harm and on domestic violence and "minoritisation", in which her concerns with the position of women and children connect with asylum and immigration issues. Burman was a co-founder (with Ian Parker) of the Discourse Unit at Manchester Metropolitan University, and the website of this research unit provides open access to a number of publications.
Critical responses to Erica Burman’s work have been in the fields of policy and ethics around work with children in the UK (e.g., Dahlberg et al., 2005; Mac Naughton, 2005). Her work has been acclaimed and used in teaching of alternative approaches to developmental psychology in New Zealand (e.g., Bird and Drewery, 2000) and South Africa (e.g., Hook et al., 2002).
Critical psychology is a perspective on psychology that draws extensively on critical theory. Critical psychology challenges the assumptions, theories and methods of mainstream psychology and attempts to apply psychological understandings in different ways.
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Biological psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.
Discursive psychology (DP) is a form of discourse analysis that focuses on psychological themes in talk, text, and images.
Transnational feminism refers to both a contemporary feminist paradigm and the corresponding activist movement. Both the theories and activist practices are concerned with how globalization and capitalism affect people across nations, races, genders, classes, and sexualities. This movement asks to critique the ideologies of traditional white, classist, western models of feminist practices from an intersectional approach and how these connect with labor, theoretical applications, and analytical practice on a geopolitical scale.
Mary Dinsmore Ainsworth was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in the development of the attachment theory. She designed the strange situation procedure to observe early emotional attachment between a child and their primary caregiver.
Ian Parker is a British psychologist and psychoanalyst. He is Emeritus Professor of Management in the School of Business at the University of Leicester.
The notion of the 'discursive complex' was developed by Ian Parker to tackle the twofold nature of psychoanalysis in Western culture. In his 1997 book Psychoanalytic Culture, Parker defines the 'discursive complex' as a 'methodological device. The term 'complex' is used quite deliberately to evoke the peculiarly Freudian and post-Freudian nature of the subjectivity people in the West live so much of the time. On the one hand the concepts that psychoanalytic texts employ are relayed through culture as components of a discourse, as objects that are circumscribed by definitions in academic and professional writing and used in advertising. In this sense, the discourse constitutes places for subjects to come to be, whether as a child with problems separating from the mother, as a teenager filled with frustration and resentment at authority, or as an older adult reflecting on an unfulfilled life and needs. The discourse thus positions the subject who is addressed by or who is employing the discourse to understand themselves or their troubling relationships. On the other hand, the discourse touches an already existing shape of subjectivity for those who write and speak about themselves and others, whether that is in the form of autobiography or in an advice column, in a television interview or on the couch with a therapist. It chimes with a theory of self that the subject has been invited to elaborate for themselves in this culture, and so it reconfigures each time some of the emotions that are available to them.
Florence Laura Goodenough was an American psychologist and professor at the University of Minnesota who studied child intelligence and various problems in the field of child development. She was president of the Society for Research in Child Development from 1946-1947. She is best known for published book The Measurement of Intelligence, where she introduced the Goodenough Draw-A-Man test to assess intelligence in young children through nonverbal measurement. She is noted for developing the Minnesota Preschool Scale. In 1931 she published two notable books titled Experimental Child Study and Anger in Young Children which analyzed the methods used in evaluating children. She wrote the Handbook of Child Psychology in 1933, becoming the first known psychologist to critique ratio I.Q.
Griselda Frances Sinclair Pollock is an art historian and cultural analyst of international, postcolonial feminist studies in visual arts and visual culture. Since 1977, Pollock has been an influential scholar of modern art, avant-garde art, postmodern art, and contemporary art. She is a major influence in feminist theory, feminist art history, and gender studies. She is renowned for her innovative feminist approaches to art history which aim to deconstruct the lack of appreciation and importance of women in art as other than objects for the male gaze.
The Canadian Children's Rights Council Inc. (CCRC); is a non-governmental organization that is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and was founded in 1991. The CCRC describe themselves as a nonprofit, educational and advocacy organization dedicated to supporting the rights and responsibilities of Canadian children and providing critical analysis of governments' policies at all levels of government in Canada.
Dorothy Riddle is an American-Canadian psychologist, feminist and economic development specialist. She is known as the author of the Riddle homophobia scale and published work on women's studies, homophobia, services and metaphysics.
Eleanor Emmons Maccoby was an American psychologist who was most recognized for her research and scholarly contributions to the fields of gender studies and developmental psychology. Throughout her career she studied sex differences, gender development, gender differentiation, parent-child relations, child development, and social development from the child perspective.
Rosalind Clair Gill is a British sociologist and feminist cultural theorist. She is currently Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at City, University of London. Gill is author or editor of ten books, and numerous articles and chapters, and her work has been translated into Chinese, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.
Louise Bates Ames was an American psychologist specializing in child development. Ames was known as a pioneer of child development studies, introducing the theory of child development stages to popular discourse. Ames authored numerous internationally renowned books on the stages of child development, hosted a television show on child development, and co-founded the Gesell Institute of Child Development in New Haven, Connecticut.
Feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (FPDA) is a method of discourse analysis based on Chris Weedon's theories of feminist post-structuralism, and developed as a method of analysis by Judith Baxter in 2003. FPDA is based on a combination of feminism and post-structuralism. While it is still evolving as a methodology, FPDA has been used by a range of international scholars of gender and language to analyse texts such as: classroom discourse, teenage girls' conversation, and media representations of gender. FPDA is an approach to analysing the discourse of spoken interaction principally.
The principle of male as norm holds that grammatical and lexical devices such as the use of the suffix -ess specifically indicating the female form, the use of man to mean "human", and similar means strengthen the perceptions that the male category is the norm, and that corresponding female categories are derivations and thus less important. The idea was first clearly expressed by 19th-century thinkers who began deconstructing the English language to expose the products and footings of patriarchy.
Lois Barclay Murphy was an American developmental psychologist who had an important impact on the study of normal child development. Murphy was instrumental in changing the ways in which children were viewed in psychology—previous work tended to focus on pathology, while Murphy emphasized more positive and social elements, including normal development and the development of empathy and ethics in children. She collaborated on 16 works with her husband, Gardner Murphy, published a book about his work after his death as well as several on her own work. She founded the Early Childhood Center (EEC), a college laboratory school focused on child development, at Sarah Lawrence College in 1937 which is still in operation today. Murphy was presented with the G. Stanley Hall Award in developmental psychology in recognition of her contributions to the field.
Virginia Braun is a New Zealand psychology academic specialising in thematic analysis and gender studies. She is particularly known for her scholarship on the social construction of the vagina and designer vagina cosmetic surgery, body hair and heterosexuality. She is perhaps best known for her collaboration with British psychologist Victoria Clarke around thematic analysis and qualitative research methods. Together they have published numerous papers, chapters, commentaries and editorials on thematic analysis and qualitative research, and an award-winning and best selling qualitative textbook entitled Successful qualitative research. They have a thematic analysis website at The University of Auckland. More recently - with the Story Completion Research Group - they have published around the story completion method.
Marie Skodak Crissey was an American developmental psychologist who specialized in intelligence testing, school psychology service administration, and special education. She authored several books and articles on these subjects, and her work has often been cited in research on the development and intelligence of children in relation to adoption and child care. She was an active member of several divisions of the American Psychological Association and served as President of the Division of Consulting Psychology and the Division on Mental Retardation.
Lillian Comas-Díaz is an American psychologist and researcher of multiethnic and multicultural communities. She was the 2019 winner of American Psychological Association (APA) Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Practice of Psychology. In 2000, she received the APA Award for Distinguished Senior Career Contribution to the Public Interest.
