This book highlights views on responsive, participatory and democratic
approaches to evaluation from an ethos of care. It critically
scrutinizes and discusses the invisibility of care in our contemporary
Western societies and evaluation practices that aim to measure
practices by external standards. Alternatively, the book proposes
several foci for evaluators who work from a care perspective or wish
to encourage a caring society. This is a society that sees evaluation
and care as a continuously unfolding relational practice of
moral-political learning contributing to life-sustaining webs. ‘At
one level is the evaluator’s immediately responsive and
interpersonal encounter with the personal troubles of social actors,
most visible, as Mills originally pointed out, in an individual’s
biography and in those social settings directly open to the
individual’s lived experience. (...) At another level, the
sociological and political level, the evaluator operates at what Mills
called the arena of public issues where immediate personal troubles
are seen not only as problems encountered by individuals but as the
result of structural and political arrangements in society (...)
evaluation for a caring society is thought to operate at both
levels’ (Thomas A. Schwandt, Professor Emeritus, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). ‘The intricate relationship between
evaluation and care is hardly addressed by evaluators or caregivers.
This book fills a gap, as it focuses on the relationship between
evaluation and care and provides a multitude of examples of evaluation
as a caring practice (...) the book can serve as an antidote to the
present-day haste in social practices, and contribute, in form and
content, to developing an evaluation practice which may foster a
caring society’ (Guy Widdershoven, Professor of Philosophy and
Ethics of Medicine and head of the Department of Medical Humanities at
VU University Medical Center, VU University Amsterdam).
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781806608140
Publisert
2026
Utgiver
Emerald Publishing Ltd.
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter