Heart Work and Hard Choices

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

A hopeful and critical study of how community-based service providers navigate emotional, ethical, and structural challenges in their work supporting criminalized women.

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Forthcoming September 2026
ISBN: 9781773638201
224 pages
CA$32.00
For sale worldwide

About the book

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.

Class Inequality Crime & Law Feminism, Gender & Sexuality Public Policy Social Work Sociology

What people are saying

Elizabeth Comack, distinguished professor emerita, University of Manitoba
“A significant contribution to feminist criminology, with relevance for both academics and practitioners who work with criminalized women.”

Catherine Bryan, School of Social Work, Dalhousie University
“This important contribution to the scholarship offers vital insight into the challenges and barriers faced by criminalized women and the incredible effort of service providers in assisting their clients in navigating and overcoming those challenges and barriers.”

Author

Person with shoulder-length brown hair and glasses wearing a black shirt, smiling at the camera against a blurred white background.

Katharine Dunbar

Katharine Dunbar is a sociologist whose research examines how gender, health inequities, substance use, and criminalization shape everyday life in Atlantic Canada and beyond. Working through community-engaged and mixed-methods projects, she foregrounds the emotional and ethical complexities of community work in supporting criminalized women and families, with a focus on harm reduction and FASD-informed practice. She holds a PhD in social and cultural analysis from Concordia University. Dunbar has held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at Wilfrid Laurier University and is currently a McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at Mount Allison University, where her work contributes to community-based harm reduction, FASD prevention, and equity-focused policy initiatives with government and non-profit organizations. Over the past decade, she has worked for fasdNL, leading provincial and Atlantic-wide initiatives. An award-winning educator, she has taught at multiple Canadian universities and is committed to feminist mentorship, experiential learning, and public scholarship that bridges academic research with tangible policy and practice change.