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Waging Love is a documentary podcast examining power, care, and governance in early childhood education in the United States. This series explores how care became underfunded, feminized, racialized, and normalized as sacrifice — and why what we call a “workforce crisis” is actually a design problem.

Through history, research, and lived experience, Waging Love traces how Indigenous care was removed, Black care was extracted, Latina care governed through precarity, Asian American and Pacific Islander care governed through invisibility, immigrant care governed through legal vulnerability, and white women positioned as stabilizers within a system shaped by proximity to power.
This is not a story about shortage.

It is a story about structure.

If the system is designed, then change is governance.

Foundational Thinkers & Works Referenced Across the Series

Audre Lorde — Sister Outsider; The Cancer Journals

Robin Wall Kimmerer — Braiding Sweetgrass

bell hooks — Teaching to Transgress

Gloria Anzaldúa — Borderlands/La Frontera

Grace Lee Boggs — The Next American Revolution

Toni Morrison — Playing in the Dark

Ruha Benjamin — Race After Technology

Kimberlé Crenshaw — “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”

Antonio Gramsci — Selections from the Prison Notebooks

Chrishana Lloyd et al. — Mary Pauper (Child Trends, 2022)

Lea J.E. Austin — Early Childhood Workforce Index (CSCCE)

Maurice Sykes — Doing the Right Thing for Children

Films & Documentaries That Inform This Work

We Still Live Here – Âs Nutayuneân (2011) — Wampanoag language revitalization

Language Is Life (PBS, 2023) — Indigenous language revival

Reflecting on Anti-Bias Education in Action (2021) — Anti-bias practice in early childhood

13th (2016)

I Am Not Your Negro (2016)

Make A Circle (PBS, 2025) — Early childhood educators organizing for structural reform

About This Series

Everything shared in this podcast is grounded in documented history, policy analysis, and lived expertise. This work centers Indigenous, Black, Latina, Asian American and Pacific Islander, immigrant, and other historically marginalized voices in early care and education — not as anecdotes, but as scholarship and leadership.

Full transcripts, extended reading lists, and research references are available at waginglove.org

If you believe care deserves structural accountability, you can support the continuation of this work there.

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