Valerie Walkerdine - Böcker

This book provides an innovative approach to the relation of psychology to the media for media and cultural studies students. Drawing on post-structuralism, discursive psychology, postcolonial theory and feminism, the book explores the regulation of the masses and its place both in the project of psychology and of media studies. By means of a number of innovative case studies, the book demonstrates the centrality of images of Otherness in constituting the relation between the normal and pathological that lies at the heart of the relationship between psychology and the media. The book establishes a way beyond the present impasse and looks forward to a different way of thinking about psychology and the media. Essential reading for all media and cultural studies students and for those interested in media psychology.

Set against a backdrop of deindustrialisation, rising male unemployment and the feminisation and casualisation of the labour market, Growing Up Girl graphically explores the complexities of gender and class during a period of massive social change. It tells the story of today's 'I can have everything' girls who face unprecedented shifts in the organisation of family, education and work, and yet who continue to struggle with the not always visible but always palpable pressures of wealth, poverty, class and ethnicity.Drawing on data spanning nearly twenty years, the authors of this ground-breaking study provide a sobering antidote to commonplace platitudes about 'girl power' and a feminine future. They reveal the hidden price of middle class girls' apparently effortless achievements - obsessive hard work, guilt and devastating feelings of inadequacy - and they trace how the labour market cruelly sets material limits on the disappointed hopes and ambitions of working class girls.Vividly illustrating their arguments with quotations from the research participants, they show how young women's practices of self-invention are regulated both by unconscious processes and real social and economic constraints. Their insistent conclusion is that class is far from dead. Indeed, it is centrally important to our understanding of what it is to be a young woman in today's complex and challenging world.This important and grippingly written book is essential reading for students and scholars alike in sociology, cultural studies, women's studies, education and psychology. It will also be of interest to anyone else struggling to make sense of the position of women in society today.

A companion volume to Mass Media and Society, this textbook is an introduction to cultural studies, written by influential scholars and researchers in the field. It offers a critical guided tour through the key debates raised by feminism, postmodernism, the politics of identity and theories of ideology. It goes beyond a narrow definition of cultural studies in terms of the audience to consider the entire communication circuit from production to consumption within a wider theoretical framework.

Changing the Subject is a classic critique of traditional psychology in which the foundations of critical and feminist psychology are laid down. Pioneering and foundational, it is still the groundbreaking text crucial to furthering the new psychology in both teaching and research. Now reissued with a new foreword describing the changes which have taken place over the last few years, Changing the Subject will continue to have a significant impact on thinking about psychology and social theory.

Changing the Subject is a classic critique of traditional psychology in which the foundations of critical and feminist psychology are laid down. Pioneering and foundational, it is still the groundbreaking text crucial to furthering the new psychology in both teaching and research. Now reissued with a new foreword describing the changes which have taken place over the last few years, Changing the Subject will continue to have a significant impact on thinking about psychology and social theory.

The question about girls' attainment in mathematics is met with every kind of myth, false 'evidence', and theorizing about the gendered body and the gendered mind. The 'Girls and Mathematics Unit' led by Valerie Walkerdine has, over a period of ten years, carried out a detailed theoretical and empirical investigation in this area. The book tackles issues and prejudice and examines and puts into perspective many claims that have been made about women's minds. It also probes the relationship between evidence and explanation: why are girls still taken to be lacking when they perform well, but boys are credited even when they do not?

The question about girls' attainment in mathematics is met with every kind of myth, false 'evidence', and theorizing about the gendered body and the gendered mind. The 'Girls and Mathematics Unit' led by Valerie Walkerdine has, over a period of ten years, carried out a detailed theoretical and empirical investigation in this area. The book tackles issues and prejudice and examines and puts into perspective many claims that have been made about women's minds. It also probes the relationship between evidence and explanation: why are girls still taken to be lacking when they perform well, but boys are credited even when they do not?

Throughout the Western world our social fabric is being transformed, leaving few lives untouched. Girls growing up today face huge changes in the organization of family, education, and work.Growing Up Girl explores the lives of girls who have grown up in the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. It explores the complexities of class transformation as young women approach a radically altered labor market and examines the profound but different regulation to which young women of all social positions are subjected. Tracing three groups of girls from their early childhood to young adulthood, the volume sheds light on the social, cultural, and psychological dynamics confronting young women today. It highlights the fragility and the fiction of the "I can have everything" girls, providing a ground-breaking and sobering antidote to platitudes about a feminine future. Growing Up Girl is essential reading for all those concerned with the lives of girls and women today.

The Maternal in Creative Work examines the interrelation between art, creativity and maternal experience, inviting international artists, theorists and cultural workers to discuss their approaches to the central feminist question of the relation between maternity, generation and creativity.This edited collection explores various modes and forms of art practice which look at mothers as subjects and as artists of the maternal experience, and how the creative practice is used to accept, negotiate, resist or challenge traditional conceptions of mothering. The book brings together some of the major projects of maternal art from the last two decades and opens up new ways of conceptualizing motherhood as a creative and communicative practice. Chapters include intergenerational discussion of art practices in the 20th and 21st centuries, representations of breastfeeding and infertility in creative projects, the notion of the ‘unfit mother’ and childlessness, together with the experiences of women and men that take on maternal identities through many forms of kinship and social mothering. The Maternal in Creative Work will be essential reading for interdisciplinary students and scholars in cultural studies, gender studies and art theory and will have wider appeal to audiences interested in maternity, childcare, creativity and psychoanalysis.

The Maternal in Creative Work examines the interrelation between art, creativity and maternal experience, inviting international artists, theorists and cultural workers to discuss their approaches to the central feminist question of the relation between maternity, generation and creativity.This edited collection explores various modes and forms of art practice which look at mothers as subjects and as artists of the maternal experience, and how the creative practice is used to accept, negotiate, resist or challenge traditional conceptions of mothering. The book brings together some of the major projects of maternal art from the last two decades and opens up new ways of conceptualizing motherhood as a creative and communicative practice. Chapters include intergenerational discussion of art practices in the 20th and 21st centuries, representations of breastfeeding and infertility in creative projects, the notion of the ‘unfit mother’ and childlessness, together with the experiences of women and men that take on maternal identities through many forms of kinship and social mothering. The Maternal in Creative Work will be essential reading for interdisciplinary students and scholars in cultural studies, gender studies and art theory and will have wider appeal to audiences interested in maternity, childcare, creativity and psychoanalysis.

Originally published in 1988, The Mastery of Reason is, on one level, a study of children’s cognitive development. It engages with debates about the ‘individual’ and the ‘social context’ in accounts of children’s mathematical development at the time. However, Valerie Walkerdine seeks to go beyond these debates to establish the empirical and theoretical base for a different kind of understanding of the social and psychological production of reason and rationality. She does so by presenting empirical material concerning children’s learning of mathematics, both at home and in the early years of schooling. The book is packed with fascinating inter-changes between mothers or teachers and children. However, an analysis of the apparently innocent subject of children’s mathematical development can also offer profound and disturbing insights into the way in which our bourgeois democracy is maintained. Valerie Walkerdine shows how notions of rationality and the triumph over unreason, which are encouraged in the teaching of mathematics, are an early induction into the fantasy of control over a calculable universe, necessary to sustain our present social and political order.This book is unique in its relevance both to educational practice and to psychological and social theory. It is an important contribution to the literature available to students of developmental and social psychology, sociology, social theory, and education.

First published in 1985, this book brings together recent work on women and children from the nineteenth-century to the present. The contributors explore in different ways, and from different points of view, the way in which issues of language have been — and are still — central to the history of women and their relation to domestic and educational practices. A crucial issue is the contrast between what it spoken about girls and women, and what girls and women can speak about. The contributors relate this theme specifically to women’s position as mothers and the education of girls and women.

First published in 1985, this book brings together recent work on women and children from the nineteenth-century to the present. The contributors explore in different ways, and from different points of view, the way in which issues of language have been — and are still — central to the history of women and their relation to domestic and educational practices. A crucial issue is the contrast between what it spoken about girls and women, and what girls and women can speak about. The contributors relate this theme specifically to women’s position as mothers and the education of girls and women.

This book sheds new light on the complex inter-relations that make up class, power, local history and space. It will appeal to researchers of sociology, social policy, politics, public health and geography, as well as those involved in public policy design and implementation.

This book examines subjectivity and neoliberalism in Latin America. The chapters, first published in the journal Subjectivity, cover a range of topics, from work to childcare to violence to university education In the Introduction, Julian Medina Zarate and Flavia Uchoa point out the complex history of the arrival and take-up of neoliberalism across the continent, the deep-seated role of colonial and post-colonial violence, thus the specificity of modes of governance in the complex relationship between the North and the South. The chapter by Antar Martinez Guzman considers the role of neoliberalism in the huge rise in male violence across the country, exploring hyper-violent masculinities in the context of social precarity. Antonio Stecher and Alvaro Soto Roy discuss the transformations in work identities and thus the consequences for subjectivity for workers in three kinds of employment in neoliberal Chile. Fabio d’Oliviera studies phsychologists operating in an increasingly precarised service sector in public assistance programmes in Brazil. Hernan Pulido Martinez explores the role of artefacts in the introduction of discourses and practices related to quality within a university in Colombia. Ana Vergara discusses parent-child relations in the context of neoliberal Chile.