Dr. Damien W. Riggs

I’ve been invited to blog for Psychology Today. My blog focuses on diversity and representation in psychology. Topics posted already cover transmasculine people and pregnancy loss, LGBT people and their animal companions experiencing domestic violence, and fertility preservation for transgender and non-binary people. Blogs are posted monthly, so be sure to check it out regularly 🙂

A new book by Clemence Due and myself – bringing together and building on our work over the past seven years on surrogacy – has just been released by Routledge, and is available now for purchase. Part of the Critical Approaches to Health series edited by Kerry Chamberlain and Antonia Lyons, the book offers a novel theoretical framework for thinking about reproductive desires and demands as they circulate within the context of compensated surrogacy arrangements.

This comprehensive text makes an important contribution to the study of surrogacy by developing a novel theoretical framework through which to understand the broader social contexts as well as individual decisions at play within surrogacy arrangements.

Drawing on empirical research conducted by the authors and supplemented by secondary analyses of media, legislative, and public accounts of surrogacy, this book engages with the key stakeholders involved in the practice of surrogacy. Specifically, the book canvases the standpoints of women who act as surrogates, intending parents who commission surrogacy arrangements, children born through surrogacy arrangements, clinics that facilitate surrogacy arrangements, and politicians and journalists who engage with the topic of surrogacy.

Through a focus on capitalism as a means of orientating ourselves to the topic of surrogacy, this book highlights the vulnerabilities that potentially arise in the context of surrogacy, as well as the claims to agency invoked by some parties in order to mitigate vulnerability. In so doing, this book demonstrates that the psychology of surrogacy must be broadly understood as an orientation to particular ways of thinking about children, reproduction, and economies of labor.

Very excited that my new book with Professor Elizabeth Peel – Critical Kinship Studies: An Introduction to the Field – is available to purchase from Palgrave Macmillan. Below is a summary of the book.

This book draws together research on posthumanism and studies of kinship to elaborate an account of western human kinship practices. Studies of kinship have increasingly sought to critique the normative assumptions that often underpin how caring relationships between humans are understood. The categorisation of ‘human’ and ‘kinship’ is brought into question and this book examines who might be excluded through adherence to accepted categories and how a critical lens may broaden our understanding of caring relationships. Bringing together a diverse array of analytic foci and theoretical lenses, Critical Kinship Studies opens up new avenues for understanding what it means to be in relationships with others, and in so doing challenges the human exceptionalism that has often limited how we think about family, loss, love and subjectivity.

I am pleased to be giving a seminar on the privileging of genetic relatedness in the context of kinship, in conjunction with the Centre for Child and Family Research. Please do come along if you can 🙂

Organised by Dr Naomi Moller, Dr Victoria Clarke, Dr Nikki Hayfield and Dr Fiona Tasker, this seminar series funded by the British Psychological Society explores the psychological implications of new family forms. I will be giving a keynote at the final seminar in the series, at the University of the West of England in Bristol, on June 7. Please do come along if you can, registration details here 🙂

Very excited to have publication details for a book that I became involved with late last year, written largely by the wonderful Samantha Hardy and Olivia Rundle. Focused on sex, gender, and sexuality diversity and the law, the book makes a significant contribution to Australian writing in the area, and will be a wonderful resource for practitioners.

Very pleased to have been invited to give a seminar at JCU Cairns campus next month. Please do come along if you are in the area.

A great opportunity to think about what it means to achieve permanency and stability in the context of child protection, and the need for more adequate resourcing so as to reduce removal rates and improve outcomes for children who are removed. Read the full piece here.

Very exciting to see my new book available on the Karnac website 🙂 It is also available as a kindle book, on google books, and via all good academic book sellers.

There is also a blog post here that i have written about the book.