The moral ecology of South Africa's township youth

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, poverty, and social reproduction may be related. Consequently, it contributes to a social psychology of morality and initiates (or reignites) a discussion about the sociology of morality and moral education. The study was conducted in Langa, a periurban township (ikasi) near Cape Town, South Africa, and follows 37 young men and women aged between 14 and 20, over the course of a year. The majority of these youth were in Grade 9 at the beginning of the study and attended a township school. while a small group attended a nearby suburban school. The research design combines the usual elements of ethnography (participant observation and interviewing) with multiple creative methods designed to engage youth over the course of a year. Included in these methods are the use of autophotography (photo-voice), free lists, mind maps and a rank ordering activity. Drawing on Urie Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems framework, the study describes the conceptually valuable notion of a moral ecology in which young people's moral codes, positionings, processes, and visual narratives of moral influence are considered in the light of their social, historical, and political contexts. Serge Moscovici's social representations theory is also used to help distinguish between individual understandings of morality and the social representations that lie behind these. The study produces findings in three main areas. On a descriptive level, it provides and account of the moral lives of vulnerable young people from within the context of partial-parenting, partial-schooling, pervasive poverty and inequality, and the aftermath of the moral injustices of Apartheid. It shows how these young people exhibit conventional values (substance use, violence, crime)in some areas, contested values in others (money and sex) as well as postmodern values