Paper short abstract:

This paper theorizes moral/ethical crises of care parents face over how to support their emerging adult with Borderline Personality Disorder. I suggest coupling anthropological methods of attending to struggles with moral agency with dissemination to broad audiences identifying problems and aids.

Paper long abstract:

This research theorizes crises of care parents face concerning how to morally/ethically support their emerging adult diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). The study, grounded in interviews with involved parents and five years attendance at a monthly support group for families living with BPD, asks: How do parents narrate critical moments and transformations of parenting? How does care for a young adult with BPD affect parents’ well-being, sense of self as “good” parents and moral agency? These parents describe anguished struggles over what they ought to do in contexts where risks to their young adults are high and nothing parents do seems right or helpful. Their dilemmas dialogue with Brodwin’s (2011) work documenting the experiences of “futility” among community psychiatrists, and Myers’ (2019) research on how young people, following first episode psychosis, seek ways to recuperate moral agency and personhood. Like Myers, I find Zigon’s (2007) concept of “moral breakdown,” particularly, the need to resolve the ethical demand, characterizes parents’ experiences. Dwelling in the moral breakdown indefinitely is, as Zigon instructs, untenable, yet parents persist in demoralizing caregiving. I argue that parents cannot resolve the moral breakdown while subject to (culturally imposed) unlimited self-sacrifice and while they lack trusted voices and structures supporting their own well-being. For this project, anthropological methods of attending to struggles with moral agency, identifying possible aids and disseminating findings to audiences beyond ourselves (to mental health care professionals, to parents) can be a starting point toward care for young people, and their families, with BPD.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how moral agency operates in the therapeutic experiences of Khmer Rouge survivors undergoing a form of Testimonial Therapy in Cambodia. It argues that symptom improvement is related to feelings of "productivity" engendered through dissemination of therapeutic narratives.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how moral agency operates in the therapeutic experiences of Khmer Rouge survivors undergoing an imported form of “Testimonial Therapy” (or “TT”) in Cambodia. TT was initially introduced to local NGOs in 2009 by a Danish psychologist as a form of reparation associated with the country’s transitional justice efforts. Local counselors worked with Buddhist monks to adapt the therapy to the Cambodian context and include a merit transfer ceremony into the public readings of testimonies. Since that time, the therapy has been administered to survivors throughout Cambodia.

From 2017 to 2019, the author followed 35 Khmer Rouge survivors as they underwent TT, as well as 27 survivors who relied solely on traditional healing methods to address symptoms of psychological distress. Assessments conducted three and six months after therapy with a locally-derived mental health instrument showed symptom improvement in the TT group relative to the non-TT group. Extensive participant observation and interviews with survivor family and community networks revealed that continued narration of therapeutic testimonies elicited both sympathy and admiration (sasoe) for those who underwent the therapy. The author argues that continued symptom improvement is related to feelings of productivity and usefulness (mien brayoch) engendered by repeated narrative dissemination. Through sharing therapeutic narratives – which often include moral lessons – elderly Khmer Rouge survivors are able to serve an active role in society and strengthen bonds with their familial and community networks. The author considers the role anthropological research specifically can play in both documenting and informing such interventions.

Paper short abstract:

Asylum seekers must learn what it means to be a “good” person in a new environment as they apply for protection and build new lives. Focusing on the NGO space as an essential locus for this learning process, this paper examines how asylum seekers demonstrate that they are “deserving” of asylum.

Paper long abstract:

Subject to constant and pervasive suspicion, asylum seekers in the Global North often must expend great energy to assert their moral agency and be perceived as “good” refugees who are not only worthy of asylum but also capable of becoming “good” citizens in the future. Navigating these difficult waters requires a keen awareness of what makes an individual “deserving” of asylum in the local context as well as a distinct ability to shift between different modes of presentation as required. Specifically, asylum seekers must be vulnerable enough to meet the requirements of refugee status, and yet also capable enough not to be perceived as a burden on society. The NGO space provides a fertile environment for observing and learning how to do this both from other asylum seekers and from NGO workers. In this paper, I examine these dynamics within an international NGO that serves as an official refugee and asylum seeker reception site in Madrid, Spain—a country that has seen dramatic increases in asylum applications over the past five years along with rising far-right nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment. In this space, asserting moral agency involves not only gaining asylum and achieving socioeconomic stability but also developing normative practices surrounding everyday social and family life in Spain. Finally, I reflect upon the importance of centering asylum seekers’ own perspectives in theoretical discussions of migrant deservingness, and I discuss how I seek to promote my interlocutors’ moral agency through my research framing, my methodology, and the dissemination of my findings.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how young adults in Lagos challenge the depletion of their moral agency in different moral laboratories, hereby creating new meanings of the ‘good’. It also investigates how the moral entanglement of the ethnographer and interlocutor can both restore and deplete moral agency.

Paper long abstract:

Based on blended ethnographic research (Kozinets 2010) among young adults with depression in Lagos, Nigeria, I show how young Nigerians actively and consciously resist marginalization and challenge people, institutions and narratives that deplete their moral agency by creating or using alternative social spaces. In these transformative social spaces or “moral laboratories” (Mattingly, 2014), such as online platforms like Twitter or peer groups, they challenge the "social bases of self-respect" (Myers, 2015), thus creating new meanings of what it means to be ‘good’.

The intersubjective space between an ethnographer and their interlocutor can also become such a moral laboratory where moral agency is replenished (Myers, 2019) and where new meanings of the ‘good’ are created. The ethnographer and the interlocutor are morally entangled and their involvement with one another offers both an opportunity for moral repair and healing (Myers, 2019). It does, however, also present risks, especially when they share the experience and memories of depression. In data analysis and writing, the personal experience and interpretations of the ethnographer might blend with the narratives of the interlocutor, thus depleting their autobiographical power. In the case of such a shared experience, auto-ethnographic elements in writing can help to discern between the lifeworlds of the interlocutor and the ethnographer.

In conclusion, the focus on moral agency helps to capture new, alternative meanings of the ‘good’. Simultaneously, it pushes the ethnographer to critically reflect on the moral entanglement of themselves and their interlocutor to ensure that their research restores rather than depletes moral agency.

Paper short abstract:

Mental illness in a child threatens parents’ moral agency, and parents undertake various strategies to mitigate that threat. I explore these strategies of “relational repair” to emphasize their social, rather than biomedical, character, and to highlight the intersubjective nature of moral agency.

Paper long abstract:

The devastating effects of psychiatric diagnoses have been well documented by anthropologists and other scholars. Furthermore, anthropologists have long demonstrated the harm compounded by a mental healthcare system that stigmatizes and dehumanizes individuals with mental illness. A recent special issue of Ethos (2019) has brought attention to the direct threat posed by the mental healthcare system to “moral personhood,” or “the shared and culturally derived sense that one is a good and valued person” (Myers and Yarris 2019:4). Drawing from these recent discussions, and based on my ethnographic research among Japanese families with mental illness, I suggest the need to attend to the moral status not only of diagnosed individuals but also of close relations. Following psychiatrist Elizabeth Bromley’s observation that “[a] focus on the suffering subject sometimes seems to depopulate the social and institutional contexts around that subject” (2019:110), I seek to repopulate the “suffering subject’s” context by attending to how the emergence of mental illness affects the family, especially parent-child relations. I explore parents’ strategies for regaining a sense of moral agency in the wake of their children’s illness. I argue that, taken together, these strategies form a sort of “relational repair” that works on the social, rather than biomedical, consequences of diagnosis and treatment.