How does developmental psychology connect with the developing world? What do cultural representations tell us about the contemporary politics of childhood? What is the political economy of childhood?

This companion volume to Burman's Deconstructing Developmental Psychology helps us to explain why questions around children and childhood - their safety, their sexuality, their interests and abilities, their violence - have so preoccupied the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this increasingly post-industrial, post-colonial and multicultural world, this book identifies analytical and practical strategies for improving how we think about and work with children. Drawing in particular on feminist and postdevelopment literatures, the book illustrates how and why reconceptualising our notions of individual and human development, including those informing models of children's rights and interests, will foster more just and equitable forms of professional practice with children and their families.

How did the cosmos, and our own special part of it, come to be? How did life emerge and how did we arise within it? What can we say about the essential nature of the physical world? What can be said about the physical basis of consciousness? What can science tell or not tell us about the nature and origin of physical and biological reality?

Science and Certainty clears away the many misunderstandings surrounding these questions. The book addresses why certain areas of science cause concern to many people today in particular, those which seem to have implications for the meaning of human existence, and for our significance on this planet and in the universe as a whole. It also examines the tension that can exist between scientific and religious belief systems.

Science and Certainty offers an account of what science does, in fact, ask us to believe about the most fundamental aspects of reality and, therefore, the implications of accepting the scientific world view. The author also includes a historical and philosophical background to a number of environmental issues and argues that it is only through science that we can hope to solve these problems.

This book will appeal to popular science readers, those with an interest in the environment and the implications of science for the meaning of human existence, as well as students of environmental studies, philosophy, ethics and theology.

Research on small groups is highly diverse because investigators who study such groups vary in their disciplinary identifications, theoretical interests, and methodological preferences. The goal of this volume is to capture that diversity, and thereby convey the breadth and excitement of small group research by acquainting students with work on five fundamental aspects of groups. These are: group composition (the number and type of people who belong to the group); group structure (the status systems, norms, and roles that constrain interactions among group members); group conflict (arising from competition among members for scarce resources, both tangible and intangible); group performance (cooperative efforts among members to create joint products and achieve common goals); and group ecology (the physical, social, and temporal environments in which the group operates). Although these five aspects of groups are all important, they have not received equal research attention. In an effort to reflect this relative interest, more space has been devoted to conflict and performance than to composition, structure, and ecology.

The volume also includes an introductory chapter by the editors which provides an overview of the history of and current state-of-the-art in the field. Together with introductions to each section, discussion questions and suggestions for further reading, make the volume an ideal text for senior undergraduate and graduate courses on group dynamics.

This book brings together for the first time the emerging literature that employs economics to analyze the implications of constitutional protections of individual rights and freedoms, including freedom of speech and of the press, the right to bear arms, the right against unreasonable search, the right against self-incrimination, the right to trial by jury, and the right against cruel or unusual punishment.

Several of the papers included in the book employ economic theory to analyze the efficiency of policies related to the constitutional protections, and others formulate empirical models to estimate the effects of these policies on observable outcomes. Many of the results are immediately relevant to current debate and policy-making. Contributors include Sendhil Mullainathan, Albert Breton and Daniel Seidmann.