This article investigates account episodes in Italian family dinner conversations and illustrates how sequential patterns and participation are organized in terms of preferences indexical of moral ideology and moral order. Accounts have been mostly examined as speech acts abstracted from embedding sequential environment; this article shows that different design features of the priming move in account episodes retrospectively define different aspects of a situation as problematic and prospectively activate the relevance for distinctive remedial moves. On an ideological level, narrative elicitations (...) as priming moves and accounts as remedial moves index a moral perspective that promotes moral reasoning and thus the negotiation of norms. In addition, such moves realize a practice of morality that tends to be inquisitory vs condemnatory, offering the benefit of the doubt prior to guilt allocation. In conclusion, the discursive mechanics of accountability constitutes a medium for reproduction of, and innovation in, the moral order. (shrink)

Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking represents a great contribution to moral philosophy-in particular, by bringing women's "private" virtues into the public sphere. However, there remain problems in the analysis which need to be addressed: How can one possibly generalize about the practice of mothering from one, necessarily limited, perspective, given the facts of cultural diversity? Is Ruddick's normative account of mothering congruent with the reflective judgments of others? Is her account of the transformation of parochial mothering into feminist peace work viable? (...) After exploring these three questions, this reviewer calls, with Ruddick, for the telling of more maternal stories, from different cultural, racial and economic perspectives. (shrink)

This book demonstrates how children's imagination makes a continuing contribution to their cognitive and emotional development.