Risking Human Security: Attachment and Public Life

by Marci Green

Overview

Most research in the field of attachment is on the experiences of attachment, separation and loss, and their developmental course and effects. This book widens our vision to the public domain, to consider the ways in which social institutions, culture and social policy may diminish our ability to make and maintain secure attachments. It argues that collective human security depends in part on the quality of attachments amongst individuals, a quality which, in turn, is conditioned by the structures of public life. The book invites its readers to reflect on those social processes that put our security at risk and to explore the prospects for enabling change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781855755970
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/13/2008
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Marci Green is a senior lecturer in sociology, at the University of Wolverhampton. During the course of her career, she has specialized in the sociologies of work and inequality, labor migration, racism, gender, and labor relations, and has published on the political economy of racialization and immigration. She was drawn to the ideas of Attachment Theory in the mid-1990s, and has since then developed her work on Attachment and in conjunction with Politics and Sociology. In 2003, she co-edited and authored the book, Attachment and Human Survival.

Table of Contents

Introduction — The Basic Principles of Attachment Theory — The social construction of the human brain — The Connections between Public Life and Personal Attachment — Attachment and loss of community — Labour to love — Unsettling policies: unanticipated consequences for migrant Afro-Caribbean families — Seeking asylum: the struggle for a new secure base — Compassion deficit disorder? The impact of consuming culture on children’s relationships — Primitive justice: who pays the price? — Strategies for Enabling Change — Human security and conflict — Enabling change

Editorial Reviews

”This is a book we have been waiting for. Within a framework of proposing that threats to attachment are threats to human security, Marci Green has assembled a team of contributors analysing the risks to secure attachments that arise from both the extraordinary and routine conditions of everyday life. Contributions from clinicians, researchers, political activists and educators enable Green’s book to explore the direct effects of political conflict, forced migration, and the aftermath of environmental disaster. In addition the book makes valuable contributions to our understanding of the indirect damage done to attachments by our social arrangements, by considering the organisation of our workplaces, the effects of aggressive marketing practice on children’s capacity to empathise with others, and the disastrous undermining of communities caused by the U.S. 'War on Drugs' and imprisonment practices. This is a fine book and essential reading.

Joseph Schwartz

"Risking Human Security is an important book. Written for both a professional and wide lay audience, this volume seeks to bring the issues of attachment into the public domain. What makes it unique, is its exploration of how policy decisions, culture and politics can undermine–or support–the conditions on which human survival and security depend. Using case studies written by scholars and by activists with anthropological and psychological insights, Green demonstrates that our abilities to bond with others can be weakened or shattered by more than what is popularly understood as ‘trauma’. Contributors demonstrate that like all structural violence, consumer and industrial cultures can be as destructive of attachments as are wars and forced migration. Embracing, and going beyond, traditional academic analysis, Risking Human Security provides corrective and necessarily subversive lenses to make the human condition more visible. Green’s book makes a valuable contribution to all who are working to alleviate human suffering and to create a more life-affirming world.

Joseph Gerson

"Risking Human Security is an important book. Written for both a professional and wide lay audience, this volume seeks to bring the issues of attachment into the public domain. What makes it unique, is its exploration of how policy decisions, culture and politics can undermine–or support–the conditions on which human survival and security depend. Using case studies written by scholars and by activists with anthropological and psychological insights, Green demonstrates that our abilities to bond with others can be weakened or shattered by more than what is popularly understood as ‘trauma’. Contributors demonstrate that like all structural violence, consumer and industrial cultures can be as destructive of attachments as are wars and forced migration. Embracing, and going beyond, traditional academic analysis, Risking Human Security provides corrective and necessarily subversive lenses to make the human condition more visible. Green’s book makes a valuable contribution to all who are working to alleviate human suffering and to create a more life-affirming world.”

”This is a book we have been waiting for. Within a framework of proposing that threats to attachment are threats to human security, Marci Green has assembled a team of contributors analysing the risks to secure attachments that arise from both the extraordinary and routine conditions of everyday life. Contributions from clinicians, researchers, political activists and educators enable Green’s book to explore the direct effects of political conflict, forced migration, and the aftermath of environmental disaster. In addition the book makes valuable contributions to our understanding of the indirect damage done to attachments by our social arrangements, by considering the organisation of our workplaces, the effects of aggressive marketing practice on children’s capacity to empathise with others, and the disastrous undermining of communities caused by the U.S. 'War on Drugs' and imprisonment practices. This is a fine book and essential reading.

From the Publisher