Towards a Posthuman Developmental Psychology of Child, Families and Communities

Tending, counting and fitting with post-developmental fat(s) in early childhood education

“…When I think with these scholars, I pick up the fibres of their work that aim to intervene in the normalizing function of child development as a knowledge that dominates and restrains relations in early childhood (Vintimilla et al, 2019). Developmentalism is a powerful logic in early childhood education (Burman, 2018), which becomes, I argue, amplified when discourses of childhood obesity mean that the linear temporal logics of childhood development echo – fat children make fat adults (Ward, 2016) – and entangle with status-quo early childhood curriculum. Thinking with fat(s) with post-developmental interventions is, I contend, an urgent proposition because fat(s) in early childhood education are often made within this doubled push of developmentalism, where normative development-promoting curriculum meets normative body-promoting childhood obesity-preventing discourses.…”

“…Pacini-Ketchabaw et al, 2016), and interrupting anthropocentric and masculinist ontologies and epistemologies (thinking with Barad and Braidotti, among others – e.g. Burman, 2018; Taylor, 2019). Importantly, post-developmental pedagogies do pedagogy as a constantly negotiated, intentional, demanding process (Iorio et al, 2017; Nxumalo, 2017; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al, 2016; Rautio, 2017); pedagogy is a practice of attending to what we must respond to, and how, within the accountabilities and answerabilities generated by a unique, momentary and situated array of pedagogical participants.…”

Dangerous drugs, dangerous mothers: Gender, responsibility and the problematisation of parental substance use

“…Working class or socially excluded mothering practices have, in particular, been framed as the antithesis of good parenting (Gillies, 2008(Gillies, : 1080, making more disadvantaged children ripe for 'early intervention' (Macvarish et al, 2015). For Erica Burman (2018Burman ( : 1600, the drive within policy discourses towards 'psychologisation', or the explanation of complex, social and political issues within exclusively individualist psychological terms, has helped to inform discourses of parent-blaming, thus rearticulating "familiar classed and misogynist strategies of blaming the poor for their poverty". As discussed further below, these developments have dovetailed with an increasing emphasis on parents as principal constituents of, rather than guardians against, the 'drug problem'.…”