Abstract
To break a cycle of repetition, it becomes necessary at some point to go past the edge of the familiar and enter a place that is truly unknown…in the absence of the willingness to risk relationship—the experience of really hearing and taking the other’s voice into oneself—the talking just goes on and on, because in the absence of relationship, change is impossible. Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
The book speaks to the notion of responsibility—the need to understand from a personal, global, and relational perspective, very much grounded in an ethic of care (Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1984). Moreover, it speaks to the need for virtues of care, empathy, compassion, and benevolence to play an active role in our practice as evaluators and methodologists. We are interconnected, in relation to one another—we are relational beings, whether we recognize it or not. While these spaces between us can be fraught with tension, misunderstanding, even fear, we need to build bridges and not walls, understanding instead of intolerance, if we are to move beyond the current politics of the day. In these times, caring is a political act. As Maxine Greene (2001) reminds us, we need to develop empathy through our “capacity to see through another’s eyes, to grasp the world as it looks and sounds and feels from the vantage point of another” (p. 102). In many ways, Evaluation for a Caring Society is a rallying cry for evaluators, methodologists, and social inquirers to wake up to the possibility of meaningful change. It is an eye-opener, as Greene (2001) states, “the more perspective, the more viewpoints that you can internalize, the more eyes you can look through, the more people you feel are your brothers and sisters” (p. 9).
Inspiration for Evaluation for a Caring Society came from early conversations with Jennifer Greene, where discussions centered on notions of humanization in evaluation. Later, conversations shifted to conceptions of justice and equity, care ethics, and ways of incorporating connections of these concepts to evaluation as a praxis of care. The culmination of these conversations has led to a highly thoughtful edited book that explores the intersection of evaluation and care ethics, a book that critically reflects on our connection to others and that positions evaluation as a deeply relational and ethical practice, with a view to nurturing a caring society. A caring ethic positions evaluation as a political, moral, and critical practice that nurtures democratic engagement of people in relationship to one another. The editors, Merel Visse and Tineke Abma, both professors at universities in the Netherlands, write that their goal is “to contribute to new imaginaries of society, particularly a caring society where evaluators not only critically question but also nurture sociopolitical practices of care when evaluating policy and programs” (p. 226).
To establish both evaluation and our work as methodologists as a caring praxis, the volume includes pictures of women working in a community kitchen that puts care at its center. The pictures tell a story of women preparing community meals together in a context deeply saturated by societal pressure, politics, and, of course, an exploration of the value of caring. There is also a coauthored poem by one of the editors and one of the women pictured in the book. The poem is a beautiful reminder that there are many ways of doing research with others, of conveying lived experiences and perspectives, of capturing personal stories. The poem resonates a caring ethos, as Zaitone Osman, a woman from Iraq now living in the Netherlands and the poem’s coauthor, recounts her early life, her motivations, her time in the West, her hopes, and her dreams. Its beauty lies in the simplicity and honesty of its telling.
The introduction to the book sets the stage for the 10 main chapters, arranged across four sections, with each section elucidating a key aspect of care. Part 1 provides a theoretical reflection and foundation on which to build a caring society, with the first two chapters focused on elaborating upon the central philosophical tenets of what it means to build a caring society. Part 2 brings the focus to democratic approaches to evaluation and interconnections with a caring society, and what the authors in Chapter 4 refer to as “democratic caring.” Part 3 provides two chapters on ethics and evaluation for a caring society, with authors focused on a notion of “empirical ethics” and a three-pillar model of democratic care. Part 4 focuses on responsive evaluation and what that means in terms of practicing evaluation from a care perspective and building a caring society. A final chapter brings the book to a close and lays out foci for evaluators interested in practicing from a caring perspective.
Most of the chapters use case descriptions to illustrate what a caring ethos might look like in evaluation practice, with compelling programs described in diverse program settings (e.g., health care, immigration, individuals with intellectual disabilities, African American teens, and elderly LGBT residents). While all of the programs provide a fitting context in which to conceptualize evaluation as a caring practice, one might wonder what a caring ethos in evaluation might look like in contexts less explicitly oriented toward caring and caring professions and perhaps even in contexts focused on more impact-oriented outcomes. For example, how might care look in an Academic Success Coaching program evaluation? Or in the context of evaluating a K–12 technology integration initiative? Really, no evaluation can be seen through a lens without care in its periphery. Evaluation for a Caring Society calls to evaluators to make care more focal, more explicit; it is a timely reminder that the practice of evaluation is fundamentally a moral, political, and relational practice, very much attuned to the needs of society. The book’s sections progress from theory to application and then to reflection on care in evaluation practice.
Evaluation for a Caring Society speaks directly to us as human beings, and as evaluators whose work resides in moral, social, cultural, and political contexts. Considered a distinct moral theory, an ethic of care focuses on the moral significance of our relationships, interactions, and dependencies, on who we are and who we become through our interconnections with others (Robinson, 2011; Sander-Staudt, 2019). While the concept of caring is certainly not new (see Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1984), elevating the concept beyond its once gender-specific meaning to more of a moral precept, what Fisher and Tronto (1990) have referred to as a “life-sustaining web” (p. 40), challenges the status quo. Caring, as Tronto (1993) has intended, is deeply political, both at the interpersonal level between caregivers and others, as well as societally, in terms of our institutional structures and laws.
The politicization of care is evident in a number of the chapters in this volume, as authors struggled with implementing democratic, responsive, or transformative approaches in their work amid the current emphasis on evidentiary standards of practice. In Chapter 5, Pols makes clear that current approaches to evaluation are antithetical to approaches that privilege care, where the focus shifts from “does it work?” to “does it work in the context it is being used in?” (p. 136). In Chapter 6, Kohlen contrasts hierarchical models of evaluation with democratic, more participatory practices of care, pointing to existing structural conditions that challenge caring practices. In their work with LGBT elderly (Chapter 9), Leyerzapf, Visse, de Beer, and Abma describe their experience implementing a responsive evaluation, as well as their attempt to open up a space for dialogue and reflection within a structurally and ideologically closed space. Informed by their work with people with intellectual disabilities, Bos and Abma (Chapter 7) highlight the questions “what is our responsibility as evaluators to understanding otherness?” and “how do we create spaces of encounter?” (p. 175). In their chapter on democratic evaluation, Simons and Greene refer to the “politics of care” (p. 91), highlighting questions of representation, power, and voice. Dahlberg, in her chapter on understanding, talks about the need for openness and vulnerability, what she calls the need for “attentively dwelling” in our quest to understand others, highlighting an existential quality to care. The ethics of care, perhaps especially when applied conceptually in an evaluation context, is inevitably political, as it calls attention to the tension between care as a dimension of practice and the technification of the field of evaluation, with values of interconnection, empathy, and caring, on the one hand, and impartiality, detachment, and neutrality, on the other.
In the final chapter, the editors state that they seek to create “new imaginaries of society” (p. 226), a society with an ethic of care at its center. Whether the challenges are local and interrelational or more broadly conceptualized at an institutional level, Visse and Abma acknowledge the liminality of care—its in-between quality characterized as performative, transformational—as residing somewhere outside of the so-called normal spaces of evaluation. We are reminded of Ermine’s (2007) use of the concept of an “ethical space of engagement” (borrowed from Roger Poole in his book Towards Deep Subjectivity), which he uses to describe what is essentially a liminal space dividing disparate world views, intended as a meeting place for dialogue and cross-cultural engagement. This ethical space can also be conceptualized as a meeting place that connects often polarized and contrasting spaces. The ethical space is all about engagement, dialogue, and negotiation, a performative space for people who seek to collaborate and who position their work as a caring praxis. Today, more than ever, we need to create ethical spaces of engagement, so that we can begin mending what are ultimately polarizing positions that merely serve to sever us from each other, and more importantly, from our own humanity.
Conclusion
We need to be awake, as Maxine Greene (2001) might say. Wide awake to our own sensemaking, an awareness that requires imagination that is rooted in ethical actions of connection, relationship, and dialogue, to what is essentially the multitextured and multihued fabric of a caring society. This sentiment, echoed in the entirety of Evaluation for a Caring Society, is in stark contrast to Dahler-Larsen’s (2012) metaphor of a routinized “evaluation machine”: Evaluation machines are intended to work automatically, like little robots, without the intervention of human subjectivity, interpretation, and emotion. Evaluation machines are supposed to work predictably and reliably. They are an integrated ingredient in the type of rational, procedure-based organization that strikes back with full force in the audit society.…When predesigned evaluation machines succeed, they not only (by definition) operate with well-defined indicators and procedures but also pre-structure the reality they are intended to describe (p. 170).
How we work the “hyphen,” how we build relationships with others, what and who we pay attention to, all speak to our work as evaluators, and more importantly, to who we are as human beings. Evaluation for a Caring Society points a finger at you, the reader, to be a more caring and purposeful evaluator, just as the Lorax does in the quote that opens this review. These are trying times in society and trying times call for caring evaluators.
