Changing Places: Feminist Essays on Empathy and Relocation in Bloomington, MN

The title of this collection balances Changing Places with Relocation and Empathy because, in each chapter, the authors bring closer the promise of change by reaching out to people who have been dispossessed. In doing so, they reject abstraction, preferring to hear out and come to terms with abuses and imbalances of power as they affect embodied experience and people who struggle. They avoid suppressing somatic and emotional ways of knowing the world, because that suppression makes whole groups of the "less skilled" or "less intelligent" into the less worthy, the less remunerated, and the less recognized members of society. Among the forms of identification and relocation involved in the work of empathy, the authors show awareness of multiple subjectivities, and of how selves and understandings might evolve if they were accorded a place and a voice in the processes by which researchers conceive of, and report on, the subjects of their enquiries. Where the authors of Changing Places convey, either by statement or implication, how they position themselves, they offer the possibility of new forms of knowledge and insight.