The moral ecology of South Africa's township youth

Abstract

The voices of young people who live in a context of poverty are largely unheard in the study of morality. Instead, moral debates are dominated by strictly bounded academic discourses, official calls for "moral regeneration" and moral panics. In addition, the emphasis on individual moral development has neglected the socio-cultural contexts of young people's moral formation. In contrast, this book offers a complex youth ethnography of the moral sphere that explores how young people living in a context of poverty understand the concept of morality and how this construction facilitates their processes of moral formation. In doing so, it aims to push forward the discipline of moral education by challenging researchers, educators, and policy makers to add a critical dimension to its study. Furthermore, it provides a conceptual framework for doing so by describing young people's moral culture, the interactions of different systems in a moral ecology and the ways in which morality...