Developments could be a useful textbook for any postgraduate course that takes a critical perspective on developmental concerns. There is such a breadth and depth to the questions Burman raises in this book that I think postgraduate students - including experienced educators, psychologists, counsellors, community workers and policy makers from a range of countries - will find a great deal to extend their current thinking and reflexivity in their work with children and young people. - Lise Bird Claiborne, University of Waikato, New Zealand, in Feminism & Psychology
This is an important book that Educational Psychology Services cannot justly ignore. ... As a profession and as individual practitioners we need to know and share how we position ourselves against Burman's analysis. - Janet Phillips in Educational Psychology in Practice
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
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 Sao 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
The book is a brave and groundbreaking contribution from within developmental psychology ... It should be mandatory reading for child psychologists and sociologists but also for all professionals and researchers working from the now increasingly popular children's rights perspective. I can only hope that developmental psychologists will prove willing to engage on the path Burman sets out for them. - Mergot Pels, University of Amsterdam, in Childhood
Developments offers us a convincing and expansive critical engagement with a range of developmental debates. This is authentic scholarship - erudite and rigorous - and although the language is correspondingly academic, it never lapses into the dogged obscurantism that typifies postcolonial theory. The book succeeds stylistically precisely because the exactness of the language exemplifies the meticulousness of the research. But it works too because the densely theoretical arguments are animated by moments of lighter conceptual play, that act equally well to upset long-held assumptions. ... Developments shows us that there are ways to use theory, and interrupt practice, to arrive at more ethical-political (anti)developmental conclusions. Above all, it urges us to try. - Pauline Whelan in Cultural Studies
Developments could be a useful textbook for any postgraduate course that takes a critical perspective on developmental concerns. There is such a breadth and depth to the questions Burman raises in this book that I think postgraduate students - including experienced educators, psychologists, counsellors, community workers and policy makers from a range of countries - will find a great deal to extend their current thinking and reflexivity in their work with children and young people. - Lise Bird Claiborne, University of Waikato, New Zealand, in Feminism & Psychology
This is an important book that Educational Psychology Services cannot justly ignore. ... As a profession and as individual practitioners we need to know and share how we position ourselves against Burman's analysis. - Janet Phillips in Educational Psychology in Practice
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
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 Sao 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
