A guidebook for thinking about care work across a variety of disciplines and careers
Attending to the wisdom that emerges through care work, Practice Dialogues uplifts the complexity, creativity, and interconnection of care across fields of endeavor. Written by a collective of practitioners, Practice Dialogues calls readers to learn from, not simply about, care work and those dedicated to it. Recognizing the need to understand care work as practice that furthers people’s survival and thriving, this volume advances a method of research rooted in radical presence, mutual listening, and collaborative writing. Centering care work as and through co-authorship, the essays spotlight fields including medicine, somatic practice, teaching and school leadership, martial arts, organizing, the arts, and family caregiving. In the framing chapters, Practice Dialogues draws on scholarship from education, postcolonial cultural studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies, social work, trauma studies, and critical feminist studies. The volume creates an exchange among scholarship, questions of research methodology, and the ecosystems of care work, pushing the limits of what is possible within and beyond conventional boundaries.
Prologue: Reasons and Ways to Read this Book
Chapter 1: Reading Across the Dialogues: Cross-Connecting Themes and
Takeaways, The Practice Dialogues Collective
Chapter 2: Care Work as Knowledge Work, Research as Listening: Challenging
Hierarchies of Labor
Chapter 3: Methods and Methodology, Alice Lesnick & Kira Wu-Hacohen
Chapter 4: Problem Wrestling, Loretta Dugan & Alice Lesnick
Chapter 5: A Formula for Limitlessness, Kamau Blakney & Alice Lesnick
Chapter 6: Attention: To Walk a Fine Line, Steven Volk & Alice Lesnick
Chapter 7: By the Success of Others, Carla R. Glover & Alice Lesnick
Chapter 8: Radical Partnership: No More, No Less, Suzy Roman Quinn & Alice
Lesnick
Chapter 9: Watching Both, Shira Cohen & Alice Lesnick
Chapter 10: The Harsh Path to Excellence (But It Doesnt Have To Be This
Way), Xuan-Shi Lim & Alice Lesnick
Chapter 11: Everyone In This Room Has Power, Ellen Stevenson & Alice
Lesnick
Chapter 12: Memory Is Presence, Lauren Lattimore & Alice Lesnick
Chapter 13: Power With the Flow, Morgan Cook-Sather & Alice Lesnick
Chapter 14: A Student of the (Changing) Details, Susan Moyer, Loretta Dugan,
& Alice Lesnick
Epilogue: Loretta Dugan & Alice Lesnick
The Practice Dialogues Collective are co-authors of this book who come from the fields of education, social work, youth development, family caregiving and archiving, somatic practice, medicine, cultural arts, and organizing. All see themselves as care work practitioners.
