I look for ways of knowing and counting knowledge that would judge....in the light of the pleasures they offer, the love they make possible, the care they provide, and the justice they observe.
Sara Ruddick, 1996
Sara Ruddick, 1996
ABOUT FRIENDSHIP: MY RESEARCH
A Rebel Band of Friends: Women’s Narratives of Friendship, Identity, and Moral Agency.
(My dissertation, 2000) Friendship is, I believe, one of life’s assignments, and friendship’s dynamic shaped my dissertation. Four women with whom I became long-time friends during my 35 years in Barbados were my co-participants in this inquiry. Over a two-year period, I taped our conversations on the substance and meaning of friendship, and of its relationship to identity and to moral agency. My friends’ narratives, which attest to a grounding of the moral imagination in friendship, constitute the data for my research. I argue that practices arising from and tested by friendship—empathy, trust, reflexivity, and narrative connection—are ways in which we may strive to understand ourselves and our world; they enable us to bring an emotional and reflective fullness into our relational, social, academic, and political lives. A Rebel Band of Friends was first runner-up in the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies’ award for Outstanding Dissertation for 2000. ABOUT FRIENDLIER RESEARCH WRITING I have continued to apply that framework of friendship to subsequent research writing, including a tribute to the remarkable scholar Dwayne Huebner, Surpassing the technical: A friendlier discourse, and an article co-written with colleagues: Sounding curriculum voices. 
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Photos by Leah Fowler
EDUCATION
Ph.D. University of Victoria 2000 Diploma Heritage Conservation, University of Victoria 1992 BFA, University of Victoria 1983 M.Phil., University of the West Indies 1981 Diploma of Education, University of the West Indies 1977 BA, University of the West Indies 1971
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