Breaking Bread: Loving Critique as Praxis in Scholarship, Collaboration, and Peer Review

If educators and researchers are serious about affirming the fullness of others and moving toward humanizing regard, then they must commit to trusting that people are always in process. Love, on these terms, is bound up with process. In this manuscript, we think with Black dialogic exchange—particularly the 1971 conversation between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin—to develop a theory of loving critique as praxis for scholarship, collaboration, and peer review. We ask: how might Black dialogic praxis engender deeper engagement with academic teaching, research, and study practices in the service of holistic regard? Through an interdisciplinary-intersectional reading practice, we identify four praxes of loving critique—attentiveness, generosity, generativity, and principled reply—that resist the extractive, competitive, and objectifying logics that often shape academic evaluation. Instead, these praxes cultivate modes of regard that linger with complexity, expand interpretive possibility, and hold open space for transformation. Situating loving critique within the longer genealogy of Black study and kitchen table ethos, we argue that it offers educators and scholars an alternative evaluative orientation that is as ethical as it is intellectual. Ultimately, loving critique challenges dominant paradigms of peer review and scholarly assessment, calling for academic communities to imagine evaluative practices that are rigorous, relational, and restorative.