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- Convenor:
-
Neely Myers
(Southern Methodist University)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 9 April, -
Time zone: America/Chicago
Short Abstract:
Moral agency supports human flourishing in various social contexts. This panel will explore experiences of moral agency for our marginalized interlocutors to ask how fresh approaches to research design, methods, writing, theory building, and publishing in psychological anthropology can help.
Long Abstract:
Moral agency, or a person's ability to act in a way that is perceived as "good" and so be recognized as a "good" person is an important part of human flourishing (Mattingly, 2014). Having moral agency makes possible intimate connections with desired others (e.g., intimate partners, elders, community groups, employers). For example, in some Euro-American social contexts, access to autobiographical power, the social bases of self-respect, and other people who are willing to let a person try and fail, are key components of moral agency (Myers, 2015). When a person's moral agency has been depleted through various forms of systemic and overt oppression (current and historical), one's ability to be recognized by others as a "good" person can break down. For example, persons who have experienced incarceration, poverty, addiction, mental illness, homelessness, racism, and refugee status have all been exposed to conditions that can deplete moral agency. A person with diminished moral agency is often ostracized and marginalized. This panel will explore some of the diverse ways that moral agency is nourished or diminished in our fieldsites for the people we engage. Our papers attend to the methods, theoretical commitments, or dissemination strategies of psychological anthropology projects to: 1) describe forms of moral agency that are relevant for our interlocutors; 2) critically and self-reflexively explore ways that anthropologies (ours or others) have depleted or can help replenish moral agency for our interlocutors; and 3) what attending to moral agency means for psychological anthropology going forward.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 9 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Moral agency can be subtle and implicit, existing in simple forms of accountability and participation in health monitoring activities. Psychological anthropologists can engage more directly with both immediate and longer-term experiences of what moral agency means in biomedical treatment settings.
Paper long abstract:
A diagnosis of schizophrenia comes with significant threats to one’s moral agency, including through experiences of institutional treatment regimens. This is especially the case for those who have been socially and systematically marginalized throughout their lives. Access to the medication clozapine, prescribed for ‘treatment-resistant schizophrenia,’ is contentious due to its serious side effects, which require intensive monitoring. Yet clozapine clinic treatment can also facilitate moral agency. Doing fieldwork in two clozapine clinics in Australia and the UK, I observed how moral agency can be subtle and implicit, existing in simple forms of accountability and participation in health monitoring activities. This paper argues that psychological anthropologists can engage more directly with both immediate and longer-term experiences of what it means to be seen as a “good” person in biomedical treatment settings. First, I discuss how ethnographers can attune themselves to small, mundane details of sociality to contribute to the making of moral agency without introducing anything not already available. Second, drawing on the case of one Indigenous Australian participant in my research, I discuss the importance of not concealing additional structural oppressions in our written work even if the ethnographic present did not invite such active acknowledgements. I reflect on what differences in access to psychopharmaceutical treatments mean in terms of widening health disparities, on the one hand, and prospects for building moral agency, on the other hand.
Paper short abstract:
Based on three years of ethnographic research with clients of a drug treatment network that serves as an alternative to incarceration in Philadelphia, this paper paper considers the moral journey “out of the hole” as a form of ethnographic praxis.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropologists have long argued that structurally violent conditions of poverty, racism, and incarceration can all constrain agency and thwart human flourishing (Bourgois 2009; Powder-Maker 1939). As Neely Myers (2015) has demonstrated, these same conditions can limit moral agency, or the opportunities to develop meaningful and reciprocal relationships that reflect back “goodness” onto social actors. For those who are in the space of breakdown, as Myers puts it, or in the throes of active addiction, incarceration, or mental illness, the path back is not easy. Based on three years of ethnographic research with clients of a drug treatment network that serves as an alternative to incarceration in Philadelphia, this paper explores the relational development of moral agency as a fraught and complex method. Specifically, I explore the political and methodological dimensions of reckoning with moral injury and accountability, two concepts that became relationally critical when supporting interlocutors in their journey to escape cycles of street-based crime and addiction. In so doing, this essay reckons with a dark shadow of mainstream academic and political discourse that emphasizes the structural constraints on agency, yet often effaces the intimate process of grappling with the moral injury incurred as a result of engaging marginalized social and economic systems to survive structural dislocation and abuse. What role can ethnographic relationships play in this intimate process of reckoning? And further, what unique forms of fraught positionality come with this commitment? This paper considers the moral journey “out of the hole” as a form of ethnographic praxis.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how community mental health patients understand and locate the cultivation of moral agency within and between sites of care. Focusing on patients with the dual diagnosis of substance use disorder and serious mental illness, I analyze the entanglement of medicated subjectivity and the pursuit of human flourishing.
Paper long abstract:
Where is the locus of moral agency in the space between the methadone clinic and the inpatient psychiatric ward? How do the increasing number of service users with the dual diagnosis of opioid dependency and psychotic mental illness understand this overdetermined relationship to their various medications as they move through ever-more labyrinthine networks of care? This paper seeks to answer these questions by exploring the practical and ethical entanglement of two ostensibly distinct regimes of mental and physical health within the space of a single life.
Drawing on fieldwork in the community mental health network of Dublin, Ireland, and following my interlocutor’s own thoughts on the matter, I analyze the moral dimensions of opioid use disorder as they are understood in the context of psychiatric dual diagnosis. I go on to examine how various apparatuses of psychiatric coercion and care apprehend and govern patients who are thought to be both addicted and mad, simultaneously enthralled by one form of the pharmakon and dangerously out of control when another form of medicine is absent or neglected. Most importantly, I ask: how are patients’ own engagements with the ethics of their care made possible and, perhaps more often, delimited by virtue of their proximity with substances that are understood to affect their will and capacity for self-governance? In the space of such a medicated subjectivity, I argue, a curious form of clinical authority about the intended and unintended effects of a polypharmaceutical approach to treating dual diagnoses takes shape.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the phenomenology of rape among US military male veterans. Drawing upon 2 years of clinical treatment data, this paper explores rape victimhood as an instance of racial and moral trauma, and reviews the relevance of ethnographic methods in the clinical sphere.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the phenomenology of rape among US military male veterans. Drawing upon 2 years of clinical treatment data collected by the author, this paper explores rape victimhood as an instance of racial and moral trauma. Through analysis of PTSD symptom presentation and supplemental qualitative interview data, this paper reviews the lived experience of shame, loneliness, and anger, and considers how these experiences are simultaneously efforts to maintain and impede masculinity, human dignity, and cultural belonging. It reviews literature from the Recovery Movement as an alternative conceptualization to standard treatment models, and questions what recovery means in the context of sexual and racial trauma. The paper will conclude to explore the limits clinical psychology faces in its capacity to respond to trauma (that focus on symptom reduction is insufficient to respond to the distress that brings veterans to treatment) and highlights the utility of mobilizing ethnographic methods for the purposes of psychological healing (facilitating a healing environment centered on meaning-making).
Paper short abstract:
The Sikh ethic of seva, service, was drawn upon as a guiding principle for my interlocutor’s engagement with me as an ethnographer. By framing their involvement in my research as service, this allowed my interlocutors opportunities to reflect on, interrogate, and cultivate their moral agency.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I describe how moral agency can be cultivated through the Sikh ethic of seva, service or voluntary care, for members of the historically marginalized Sikh community in Delhi, India. The Sikh ethic of seva is based on ideologies of equality, dignity, and wellbeing for all, and this practical ethic often takes the form of free medical clinics and distribution of free food in contemporary urban India. Based on 19 months of ethnographic research with sevadars, voluntary social workers from the Sikh faith, in Delhi, I describe how the ethic of seva offers an ethnographic approach that was not only relevant to my interlocutors but also offered my interlocutors an approach to reflect on moral agency. The ideological framing of service, equality, and dignity within the practice of seva allows sevadars to cultivate moral agency within themselves, by doing something that makes living possible for themselves and others. Additionally, my interlocutor’s understood their participation in my research as a form of seva, or service, which shaped their relationship with me, the ethnographer, and provided opportunities for them to transform their moral agency with respect to the project. I conclude by suggesting that psychological anthropology should continue to understand how people grapple with and strive to live ethically, that is how they try to make living possible for themselves and others. In doing so, we set up conditions that put at the forefront opportunities for our interlocutors to reflect on and interrogate moral agency.