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Moral Laboratories

Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life

Cheryl Mattingly author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:4th Nov '14

Should be back in stock very soon

Moral Laboratories cover

Moral Laboratories is an engaging ethnography and a groundbreaking foray into the anthropology of morality. It takes us on a journey into the lives of African American families caring for children with serious chronic medical conditions, and it foregrounds the uncertainty that affects their struggles for a good life. Challenging depictions of moral transformation as possible only in moments of breakdown or in radical breaches from the ordinary, it offers a compelling portrait of the transformative powers embedded in day-to-day existence. From soccer fields to dinner tables, the everyday emerges as a moral laboratory for reshaping moral life. Cheryl Mattingly offers vivid and heart-wrenching stories to elaborate a first-person ethical framework, forcefully showing the limits of third-person renderings of morality.

"Mattingly convincingly bolsters her claims ... an excellent demonstration of ethnographic and theoretical work." -- Ezelle Sanford III Center for Medical Humanities

ISBN: 9780520281202

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 20mm

Weight: 408g

280 pages