Moral laboratories: family peril and the struggle for a good life, paperback/cheryl mattingly

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.