R Duschinsky
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 15937 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | R Duschinsky |
| NOMBRES | R |
| APELLIDO | Duschinsky |
| FIRMA | DUSCHINSKY R |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2023-5328 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 91 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 147 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 91 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2006 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Attachment theory and research
Attachment theory is one of the core theories proposed for child and family social work, but concerns have been raised regarding misunderstandings and misapplications. Misinformation about attachment is widespread, and texts and teaching on attachment theory often emphasise aspects of the theory that have limited value for applied practice while other elements with greater practice value are often overlooked. As an international group of social w…
Practitioner Review
Attachment theory, with its core concepts, perspectives, and insights developed over the past five decades, is influential for professionals working with young children. However, practitioners face challenges translating attachment theory and research into practical applications. This manifests in attachment myths, theoretical misinterpretations, and inconsistency of application. This state‐of‐the‐art review is authored by 47 attachment researche…
Which Factors in a Child Welfare Worker’s Environment Influence Their Decision-Making About Neglect? A Systematic Narrative Literature Review
This paper systematically reviews literature to date about how child welfare workers’ decisions about neglect are influenced by their environments. We conducted a systematic search of Web of Science, Embase, PsycInfo, Scopus, and Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts, looking for studies in English of any methodology, published since the 1989 Children Act, in which statutory thresholds in England are defined. We used child welfare workers’ de…
Intersex medical guidelines in the UK and Germany
The medical care of infants born with atypical sex characteristics sits at a peculiar ideological intersection. While many healthcare practitioners hold biologically essentialist views on sex development, the history of intersex medical management also illustrates the ways in which the sexed body is socially constructed. In practice, this meant that children born with an intersex trait or difference in sex development (DSD) were often subjected t…
Affects and strategies of maternal optimism
This article draws on the critical feminist argument that women are encouraged to desire forms of life that are limiting and sometimes cruel. It asks: what can we learn about motherhood if we view it not simply as a set of normative practices, but as an assemblage of projections and negotiations about what life could and ought to be? To address this question, we analyse the accounts of 15 mothers with experiences of anxiety and/or depression. We …
Representations of motherhood in the media
We undertook a systematic review to understand (i) how motherhood is represented across different media, (ii) how the modalities of media domains influence the motherhood representations that they offer, (iii) the gaps in recent research on the subject.We searched 7 databases for all studies investigating the representation of motherhood in media texts, in any geographical location, published after 31 December 2016.We identified 55 studies as rel…
A Bibliometric Analysis of Publication Trends of Empirical Studies Over the Past 50 years Using the Child Attachment Studies Catalog and Data Exchange (Cascade)
This study describes the historical trends and gaps of attachment research through a bibliometric analysis of past research on observational measures of child-parent attachment. Given the substantial amount of research that has been amassed on child-parent attachment since the publication of Bowlby and Ainsworth’s seminal work in the 1970s, this study provides an important synthesis of the state of child attachment research. This analysis leverag…
In practice we don’t use that much theory’
There have been many calls for the use of attachment theory in children’s social work practice. Yet, some commentators claim that attachment theory has been uncritically adopted by social workers and has become an unhelpfully dominant perspective. Empirical evidence to support such claims is limited, however. We therefore sought to examine these claims in a qualitative vignette and interview study with twenty-three children’s safeguarding social …
The social must be stabilised
In Donzelot's landmark The Policing of Families, he traced the rise of the "social" sector in the 18th century, where institutions like social work, education, and healthcare regulated families, shaping norms of deviance to justify intervention. Social scientists continue to debate the impact of post-2008 austerity measures on the relationship between the social sector and family life in contemporary society. This study aims to contribute to thes…
Constructing a Mothers' Culture
The fantasy of traditional motherhood, according to which women find fulfilment through family care, still dominates market texts. This tension is not immediately understandable; neither are its political and economic implications. We propose an explanation by deploying a Berlantian framework to analyse the new media presence of five brands targeting UK mothers. We identify a mothers' culture : a market where motherhood's difficulties are organis…
Configurations of mother–child and father–child attachment relationships as predictors of child language competence
An individual participant data meta-analysis was conducted to test pre-registered hypotheses about how the configuration of attachment relationships to mothers and fathers predicts children's language competence. Data from seven studies (published between 1985 and 2014) including 719 children (M age: 19.84 months; 51% female; 87% White) were included in the linear mixed effects analyses. Mean language competence scores exceeded the population ave…
‘Assessing my risk and that of my whānau is my right’
Risk identification has been at the heart of media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.Less consideration has been paid to the way that the media itself has (re)produced these risk categories, and how this has changed over the course of the pandemic. The aim of this article is to understand how risk has been constructed in the Aotearoa, New Zealand news media over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper reports findings from a longitudinal …
Fathers' mental Ill-health and child maltreatment
Social Workers’ Perceptions of the Nature of Child Neglect
Neglect is the most common form of child maltreatment in the UK and the USA. This article reviews research about how child neglect is perceived by social workers. We conducted a systematic review and identified fifty relevant studies, using a range of methodologies, published since the 1989 Children Act. The themes were identified iteratively and synthesised using a narrative method. The review found that despite evidence that neglect is associat…
Experiences of emotional eating in an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy based weight management intervention (SWiM)
BACKGROUND: Emotional eating is a barrier to weight management. Interventions based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) promote the acceptance of uncomfortable feelings, which can reduce the urge to use food as a coping mechanism. We aimed to explore how participants of an ACT-based weight management intervention (WMI) experience emotional eating and relevant intervention content. METHODS: We conducted semi-structured telephone interviews …
Attachment relationship quality with mothers and fathers and child temperament
0.19), suggesting that temperament plays a small yet significant role in child-mother/child-father insecure-resistant attachment relationships concordance. Taken together, results from this study prompt a more in-depth examination of the mechanism underlying the small yet significantly higher chance that children with increased negative emotionality have for developing multiple insecure-resistant attachment relationships. (PsycInfo Database Recor…
The gender variance scale
This paper discusses the development and testing of a new composite scale for measuring gender diversity, for use in survey research and statistical analysis: the Gender Variance Scale (GVS).The GVS measures gender diversity on a spectrum and can be used across both cisgender and trans populations to identify experiences of gender beyond a basic male/female sex binary.The GVS was piloted with a sample of 1,776 adolescents and young people ages 14…
Maternal and paternal sensitivity
19 [-.27, -.11]). For maternal sensitivity, associations were larger in studies that used the Attachment Q-Sort (vs. the Strange Situation), used the Maternal Behavior Q-Sort (vs. Ainsworth or Emotional Availability Scales), had strong (vs. poor) interrater measurement reliability, had a longer observation of sensitivity, and had less time elapse between assessments. For paternal sensitivity, associations were larger in older (vs. younger) father…
Does child-mother attachment predict and mediate language and cognitive outcomes? A series of meta-analyses
The Perspectives of Senior Researchers in Applied Disciplines on the Current State of Developmental Attachment Research
Based on interviews with leading researchers and researcher-clinicians in fields allied to attachment research, this paper describes participants’ perceptions of contemporary attachment research in the developmental tradition. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 13 research leaders in applied disciplines cognate to attachment research. Participants perceived attachment research as having played a foundational role for devel…
The first 20,000 strange situation procedures
The Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) was developed five decades ago to assess infant–parent attachment relationships. Although the procedure itself has remained relatively constant in over 285 studies (20,720 dyads) conducted to date, there have been vast sociological changes during this time, and research foci shifts to studying diverse populations. Since its inception, the SSP has also been adopted in over 20 countries. In this meta-analysis, …
Trauma and loss in the Adult Attachment Interview
This article examines how 'trauma' has been conceptualised in the unresolved state of mind classification in the Adult Attachment Interview, introduced by Main and Hesse in 1990. The unresolved state of mind construct has been influential for three decades of research in developmental psychology. However, not much is known about how this measure of unresolved trauma was developed, and how it relates to other conceptualisations of trauma. We draw …
Experiences of emotional eating during an acceptance and commitment therapy based intervention to support weight loss maintenance (SWiM)
Feasibility and acceptability of an acceptance-based guided self-help programme for weight loss maintenance
Domestic violence and abuse in local child safeguarding policy
Within the United Kingdom, domestic violence and abuse (DVA) is the most commonly identified factor within child in need assessments, with rates increasing in recent years in addition to 'lockdown'-related spikes. This article examines the representation of DVA in local child safeguarding policies using Bacchi's (2009) 'What is the problem represented to be?' approach. Policies were collected from the websites of all the child safeguarding partne…
Sexualisation's four faces
This paper explores the considerations of sexualisation and gender stereotyping in the recent UK government report Letting Children be Children. This report, the Bailey Review, claimed to represent the views of parents. However, closer reading reveals that, while the parents who were consulted were concerned about both the sexualisation and the gender stereotyping of products aimed at children, the Bailey Review focuses only on the former and dis…
The Emergence of Sexualization as a Social Problem
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society - Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2013
The Politics of Attachment
Research on attachment is widely regarded in sociology and feminist scholarship as politically conservative - oriented by a concern to police families, pathologize mothers and emphasize psychological at the expense of socio-economic factors. These critiques have presented attachment theory as constructing biological imperatives to naturalize contingent, social demands. We propose that a more effective critique of the politically conservative uses…
Flat Affect, Joyful Politics and Enthralled Attachments
What does sexualisation mean
Sexualisation' has been dismissed by some as no more than yet another moral panic about youth and sex. However, it is striking that the term appears to have helped galvanise feminist activism, speaking in some way to the experiences of young people. Building from a history and analysis of the term, I propose that 'sexualisation' has served as an interpretive theory of contradictory gender norms, using the figure of the 'girl' to gesture towards a…
Wait Up
Sociologists and feminist scholars have, over many decades, characterised attachment as a social construction that functions to support political and gender conservatism. We accept that attachment theory has seen use to these ends and consider recent deployments of attachment theory as justification for a minimal State within conservative political discourse in the UK since 2009. However, we contest that attachment is reducible to its discursive …
Abjection and Self-Identity
Kristeva describes abjection as 'the repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck'. Her account of the 'abject' has received a great deal of attention since the 1980s, in part due to high demand for theoretical attention to themes of purity and impurity, which remain important in contemporary society. Yet Kristeva herself has noted that 'my investigation into abjection, violence and horr…
The ‘toxic trio’ (domestic violence, substance misuse and mental ill-health)
Maternal and paternal sensitivity
19 [-.27, -.11]). For maternal sensitivity, associations were larger in studies that used the Attachment Q-Sort (vs. the Strange Situation), used the Maternal Behavior Q-Sort (vs. Ainsworth or Emotional Availability Scales), had strong (vs. poor) interrater measurement reliability, had a longer observation of sensitivity, and had less time elapse between assessments. For paternal sensitivity, associations were larger in older (vs. younger) father…
The emergence of the disorganized/disoriented (D) attachment classification, 1979–1982
This article examines the emergence of the concept of infant disorganized/disoriented attachment, drawing on published and archival texts and interviews. Since this new classification was put forward by Main and Solomon (1986), "disorganized/disoriented attachment" has become an important concept in clinical and social intervention contexts. Yet whereas Main and Solomon have often been misunderstood to have introduced disorganized/disoriented att…
Doing the möbius strip
In media and policy discourses on sexualisation, there has been an apparent split. Some have constructed young women as innocent children, incapable of meaningful sexual and commercial choices; others have treated young women as neo-liberal adults, agentic and savvy choice-makers. We analyse how the Bailey Review on the Sexualisation and Commercialisation of Childhood (published by the UK Department of Education) attempts to manage the tensions a…
Sexual dysfunction and paraphilias in the DSM-5
In the forthcoming 5 th Edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), as in previous editions, there are two overarching types of sexual problems. The first type is the ‘sexual dysfunctions’. Animating this category, we would argue, is a concern to address sexual experiences and behaviours understood as insufficiently intense in duration, magnitude or frequency. The disorders included in the category…
Purity, power and cruelty
One of the most significant theoretical paradigms for understanding themes of purity and impurity available to researchers is that of Mary Douglas. However her account is problematic: it neglects the analysis of power-relations and subjectivity due to its universalizing, structural-functionalist scope. By contrast Primo Levi's writings offer an example of a particular cultural economy of purity, and shed light on how a contingent form of purity j…
The infant disorganised attachment classification
Since its introduction by Main and Solomon in 1990, the infant disorganised attachment classification has functioned as a predictor of mental health in developmental psychology research. It has also been used by practitioners as an indicator of inadequate parenting and developmental risk, at times with greater confidence than research would support. Although attachment disorganisation takes many forms, it is generally understood to reflect a chil…
Filming disorganized attachment
This essay critically explores the role of film in shaping conceptualizations of attachment. It focuses on how the influential ‘disorganized/disoriented attachment’ classification of infant behaviour emerged as a consequence of film technologies and has subsequently been mummified by the way these media have been interpreted. In this way, the essay examines how tensions between the readability and unreadability of a child’s gesture on film have c…
Childhood, Responsibility and the Liberal Loophole
Feminist media discourses on 'sexualisation' have set out a critique of sexist cultural forms in contemporary society, using the figure of the 'girl' to show how women are socialised in harmful ways. This is an ingenious move - discussing the interplay between sexism and commercialism through discourse on minors can circumvent retorts to feminist claims about the harms of sexist culture that 'well, that's her choice'. Yet such discourses also nec…
Managing the Tensions of Essentialism
This article proposes a new interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu, as a theorist of purity and impurity. Bourdieu's writings indicate that through the adjudication of things or people as relatively impure or pure an image is constructed of their essential truth. Building from Bourdieu, we will show how themes of purity and impurity can be used to manage the tensions associated with attempts to impute an essence to human nature or to reality, ensuring…
Feminism, Sexualisation and Social Status
New formulations and responses to classic questions have emerged in recent feminist thinking on the relationship between gender and consumption. One instance of this is the work of Abigail Bray on the damage caused by the media sexualisation of girls. She offers important insights into some problems with the discourse of media and sexual empowerment, and also critically considers the social distinction that such an discourse tends to confer. This…
Experiences of emotional eating in an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy based weight management intervention (SWiM)
BACKGROUND: Emotional eating is a barrier to weight management. Interventions based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) promote the acceptance of uncomfortable feelings, which can reduce the urge to use food as a coping mechanism. We aimed to explore how participants of an ACT-based weight management intervention (WMI) experience emotional eating and relevant intervention content. METHODS: We conducted semi-structured telephone interviews …
Students’ experiences of the Cambridge supervision system
Drawing on the dramaturgical theory of Erving Goffman, this paper explores undergraduate students’ differing experiences of the Cambridge supervision system. Semi-structured interviews with fifteen undergraduate students were analysed to examine the dramaturgical demands of the supervision and students’ perceived abilities to meet these. Findings that suggest that female students and those from working-class backgrounds felt less able to deliver …
Attachment and the archive
ArgumentThis article explores historical sociology as a complementary source of knowledge for scientific research, considering barriers and facilitators to this work through reflections on one project. This project began as a study of the emergence and reception of the infant disorganized attachment classification, introduced in the 1980s by Ainsworth's student Mary Main, working with Judith Solomon. Elsewhere I have reported on the findings of c…
Disorganization, Fear and Attachment
In 1990, M. Main and J. Solomon introduced the procedures for coding a new “disorganized” infant attachment classification for the Ainsworth Strange Situation procedure (M.D.S. Ainsworth, M. Blehar, E. Waters, & S. Wall, 1978). This classification has received a high degree of interest, both from researchers and from child welfare and clinical practitioners. Disorganized attachment has primarily been understood through the lens of E. Hesse and M.…
The final arbiter of everything”
Experiences and views of nursing home nurses in England regarding occupational role and status
On the margins of the child protection system
In the UK, a threshold divides between two categories of children, child protection (CP) and child in need. Each category tends to be treated as a homogeneous entity, despite containing heterogeneous levels and forms of risk and need. CP practice, accompanied by regulation, protocols and procedures, aspires to achieve a coordinated multi‐agency response to identified concerns with available resources targeted towards this category. However, it is…
The First Great Insurrection against Global Systems
Methodological Issues of Interpretation
Feminism, Sexualisation and Social Status
New formulations and responses to classic questions have emerged in recent feminist thinking on the relationship between gender and consumption. One instance of this is the work of Abigail Bray on the damage caused by the media sexualisation of girls. She offers important insights into some problems with the discourse of media and sexual empowerment, and also critically considers the social distinction that such an discourse tends to confer. This…
Ideal and unsullied
Slaughtered innocents
Throughout the course of the early years of the Second Intifada, discourses of innocent child victimhood were in frequent use in statements to the western media from both Israeli and Palestinian groups, and in American and British media commentary on the conflict. This discourse has had important political consequences within and beyond the region. This paper will explore the social and political context of these discourses and the diverse actors…
Nietzsche
In remarks scattered across his corpus of writings, Nietzsche offers a fascinating analysis of the theme of purity. In this article I systematize these fragments into a genealogy and draw out conclusions relevant to philosophy and cultural criticism. Nietzsche argues that the Christian use of purity, as both an ideal and a means of achieving self-martyrdom of the will, has been retained in modern Western culture. He is generally quite skeptical o…
Childhood and Governance
Purity, power and cruelty
One of the most significant theoretical paradigms for understanding themes of purity and impurity available to researchers is that of Mary Douglas. However her account is problematic: it neglects the analysis of power-relations and subjectivity due to its universalizing, structural-functionalist scope. By contrast Primo Levi's writings offer an example of a particular cultural economy of purity, and shed light on how a contingent form of purity j…
Fundamentalism and the changing religious field
Drawing on sources from across the sociology of religion, this article argues that processes associated with modernisation have facilitated the emergence of fundamentalist movements by transforming the religious field. First, an increase in certain forms of reflexivity has disrupted the close fit between the field and the disposition of individuals, causing them to look for new narratives that can give authenticity to their lives. Second, in ever…
The 2010 UK Home Office ‘Sexualisation of Young People’ Review
This paper offers a discursive policy analysis of the 2010 UK Home Office Sexualisation of Young People Review , authored by Linda Papadopoulos (2010a). It will scrutinise the narrative presented by the text of the danger posed by cultural representations to healthy development, and trace the way that the text links this danger to catastrophic outcomes: child sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking. Examining this narrative, the article will p…
The Emergence of Sexualization as a Social Problem
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society - Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2013
Sexualisation's four faces
This paper explores the considerations of sexualisation and gender stereotyping in the recent UK government report Letting Children be Children. This report, the Bailey Review, claimed to represent the views of parents. However, closer reading reveals that, while the parents who were consulted were concerned about both the sexualisation and the gender stereotyping of products aimed at children, the Bailey Review focuses only on the former and dis…
Pure and Impure in the Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben
Metaphysics, including the metaphysics of justice, is forgetting or blinding oneself to the violence of the pure. Arkady Plotnitsky1 Without a master, one cannot be cleaned. Purification, whether by fire or by the word, by baptism or by death, requires submission to the law. Dominique Laporte2
Managing the Tensions of Essentialism
This article proposes a new interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu, as a theorist of purity and impurity. Bourdieu's writings indicate that through the adjudication of things or people as relatively impure or pure an image is constructed of their essential truth. Building from Bourdieu, we will show how themes of purity and impurity can be used to manage the tensions associated with attempts to impute an essence to human nature or to reality, ensuring…
Sexualization
I shall contend that avowedly feminist media and policy discussions of “sexualization” in the UK have risked inadvertently problematizing not sexism but propriety. As a result, these discourses on sexualization have contributed to what Wendy Brown has called a “state of injury”: a situation in which representations of wound or threat are mobilized within identity politics on behalf of a dominated group in society, and this strategy backfires by s…
Childhood innocence
This article will argue that representations of ‘childhood innocence’ do not express a prior and pure essence, but rather produce such representations performatively, through the separation of the pure and natural from the impure and corrupting. Innocence can be understood as a discourse constructing a relationship between subjectivities and their essence, whilst at the same time effacing the signs of this process of construction. Beginning with …
I've come on this course to learn how to be politically minded’
Small-group self-administered interviews were conducted with 80 students entering a social work degree in the UK, asking about their motivations, political engagement and perspectives on equality. Especially as the interviews went on, many students were found to identify structural constraints on agency and express a desire to learn more about the political stakes of social work. However, it was concluded that speakers had to contend with, and by…
Doing the möbius strip
In media and policy discourses on sexualisation, there has been an apparent split. Some have constructed young women as innocent children, incapable of meaningful sexual and commercial choices; others have treated young women as neo-liberal adults, agentic and savvy choice-makers. We analyse how the Bailey Review on the Sexualisation and Commercialisation of Childhood (published by the UK Department of Education) attempts to manage the tensions a…
Sexual dysfunction and paraphilias in the DSM-5
In the forthcoming 5 th Edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), as in previous editions, there are two overarching types of sexual problems. The first type is the ‘sexual dysfunctions’. Animating this category, we would argue, is a concern to address sexual experiences and behaviours understood as insufficiently intense in duration, magnitude or frequency. The disorders included in the category…
Postfeminist education? Girls and the sexual politics of schooling
by Jessica Ringrose, Foundations and futures of education series. London, Routledge, 2012, 200 pp., £24.99 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-415-55749-8 Faulkner (2010, 104) has suggested that the normative
The politics of purity
In Purity and Danger, Douglas theorizes purity and impurity in terms of the instantiation and disruption of a shared symbolic order. Purity/impurity discourses act, according to Purity and Danger, as a homeostatic system which ensures the preservation of this social whole, generally encoding that which threatens social equilibrium as impurity. There have been calls for new social theory on this 'under-theorized' topic. Presenting such further ref…
What does sexualisation mean
Sexualisation' has been dismissed by some as no more than yet another moral panic about youth and sex. However, it is striking that the term appears to have helped galvanise feminist activism, speaking in some way to the experiences of young people. Building from a history and analysis of the term, I propose that 'sexualisation' has served as an interpretive theory of contradictory gender norms, using the figure of the 'girl' to gesture towards a…
Abjection and Self-Identity
Kristeva describes abjection as 'the repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck'. Her account of the 'abject' has received a great deal of attention since the 1980s, in part due to high demand for theoretical attention to themes of purity and impurity, which remain important in contemporary society. Yet Kristeva herself has noted that 'my investigation into abjection, violence and horr…
Childhood, Responsibility and the Liberal Loophole
Feminist media discourses on 'sexualisation' have set out a critique of sexist cultural forms in contemporary society, using the figure of the 'girl' to show how women are socialised in harmful ways. This is an ingenious move - discussing the interplay between sexism and commercialism through discourse on minors can circumvent retorts to feminist claims about the harms of sexist culture that 'well, that's her choice'. Yet such discourses also nec…
Life is about choices, but external factors often affect outcomes’
It has been suggested that the emerging generation of social workers tend to be motivated primarily by a perception of the individual as the locus of ‘social problems’, ignoring the structural factors that shape and constrain the conditions of agency. Questionnaire research with 150 students on an undergraduate Social Work degree programme in the north-east of England investigated student perceptions of the origins and causes of social problems. …
Sociology (61 obras) · Psychology (57 obras) · Political science (43 obras) · Epistemology (33 obras) · Philosophy (30 obras) · Law (28 obras) · Social Psychology (26 obras) · Medicine (22 obras) · Gender Studies (20 obras) · Developmental psychology (18 obras)