Implications for Research, Classrooms, and Communities

Abstract

I began this book by referring to Pierre Bourdieu’s description of “Anglo-American ideology” that suggests the poor are both intellectually and morally deficient: “The poor are not just immoral, alcoholic and degenerate, they are stupid, they lack intelligence” (1998, p. 43). This study has attempted to move away from such an ideological analysis by providing a rich and complex youth ethnography of the moral sphere. I also called attention to the way in which the study of human morality in general and young people’s morality in particular has been individualized and atomized along strictly bounded academic lines. Throughout this book I have made a case for a sociocultural understanding of morality that privileges young people’s own constructions of right and wrong and their moral decision-making processes. In this final chapter I turn to how such contextual knowledge can be applied to community and school interventions, and the extent to which a multimethod, ethical ethnography can inform academic research on morality.