Moral Atmospheres

Lahore’s Hall Road is the largest electronics market in Pakistan. Once the center of film and media piracy in South Asia, it now specializes in smartphones and accessories. For Hall Road’s traders, conflicts between the economic promises and the moral dangers of film loom large. To reconcile their secular trade with their responsibilities as devoted Muslims, they often look to adjudicate the good or bad moral “atmosphere” (mahaul) that can cling to film and media. Timothy P. A. Cooper examines the diverse and coexisting moral atmospheres that surround media in Pakistan, tracing public understandings of ethical life and showing how they influence economic behavior. Drawing on extensive ethnographic work among traders, consumers, collectors, archivists, cinephiles, and cinephobes, Moral Atmospheres explores varied views on what the relationship between film and faith should look, sound, and feel like for Pakistan’s Muslim-majority public. Cooper considers the preservation and censorship of film in and outside of the state bureaucracy, contestations surrounding heritage and urban infrastructure, and the production and circulation of sound and video recordings among the country’s religious minorities. He argues that a focus on atmosphere provides ways of seeing moral thresholds as mutable and affective, rather than as fixed ethical standpoints. At once a vivid ethnography of a market street and a generative theorization of atmosphere, this book offers fresh perspectives on moral experience and the relationship between religion and media.

First published in 1985. Kohlberg and his colleagues claimed that all one need do in moral education is change the stage or structure of an individual's moral reasoning, and changes in moral behavior, ego and personality style would occur. As moral education entered the 1980s, many important problems remained. The question of the legitimacy of the highest stage is still being considered. The problem of the relationship between judgment and action is receiving much attention and reformulation as well. The role of affect in moral functioning has been sorely overlooked until very recently. A further issue is the implication of the particular realm of one's life (family, school, peer group, workplace, church) for the form and effectiveness of moral education. Finally, how can self-acknowledged moral transgressions in typical individuals be incorporated into the theory? This volume reflects these problems.

This classic bestseller, now updated for today's diverse teaching force and student populations, explores the benefits of sociomoral practices in the classroom. The authors draw on recent research to show how these approaches work with children ages 2–8. They focus on how to establish and maintain a classroom environment that fosters children's intellectual, social, moral, emotional, and personality development. Extending the work of Jean Piaget, the authors advocate for a cooperative approach that contrasts with the coercion and unnecessary control that can be seen in many classrooms serving young children. Practical chapters demonstrate how the constructivist approach can be embedded in a school program by focusing on specific classroom situations and activities, such as resolving conflict, group time, rule making, decision making and voting, social and moral discussions, cooperative alternatives to discipline, and activity time.

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

There is widespread agreement that schools should contribute to the moral development and character formation of their students. In fact, 80% of US states currently have mandates regarding character education. However, the pervasiveness of the support for moral and character education masks a high degree of controversy surrounding its meaning and methods. The purpose of this handbook is to supplant the prevalent ideological rhetoric of the field with a comprehensive, research-oriented volume that both describes the extensive changes that have occurred over the last fifteen years and points forward to the future. Now in its second edition, this book includes the latest applications of developmental and cognitive psychology to moral and character education from preschool to college settings, and much more.

Volume IV looks at the development of moral education, with particular relation to the context of cultural pluralism. Taking a theoretical approach, it discusses philosophical issues of moral relativism as well as the application of theory to good practice.