Heart Work and Hard Choices

Service Providers' Emotional-Ethical Dilemmas in Working with Criminalized Women

By: Katharine Dunbar

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Paperback | 29 September 2026 | Edition Number 1

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Heart Work and Hard Choices brilliantly tackles urgent debates around the interlocking crises of criminalization, social inequality, and care by drawing on the collective knowledge and experience of community service workers. Through vivid storytelling and grounded research, Katharine Dunbar draws on her experience in community service and formidable talents as a public sociologist to reveal how providers manage compassion, frustration, burnout, and hope in order to build and sustain relationships and remain effective in their roles. In taking an innovative sociology-of-emotions approach, Dunbar connects individual feelings to broader themes of neoliberal policy that shift responsibility for harm from the state onto marginalized women and the organizations that serve them. In centring emotions, the book exposes hidden forms of control and care, as well as the emotional and ethical dilemmas that arise when community organizations are asked to enact both support and surveillance. This book is a hopeful and critical look at what genuine support for community service provision should look like. This is essential reading for anyone seeking a practical and radical way forward for a sector in turmoil.

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