The moral career of a humanitarian aid worker Sit back. This one may take a while. The goal of this post is to meaningfully apply the concepts of ‘moral career’ and ‘looking-glass self’ to better understand the lives of aid workers as they move through their professional lives. In this post I want to emphasize the overall journey of a career as opposed to a snapshot of single moment. This will make it possible to consider the evolution of self identity that occurs over the course of an aid worker’s career. Moral career and self identity I borrow the phrase ‘moral career’ from sociologist Erving Goffman. His classic book Asylums was published in 1961 as a “collection of essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates”. Goffman defines moral career as “…any social strand of any person’s course through life…the regular sequence of changes that career entails in the person’s self  and in his imagery for … Continue reading The moral career of a humanitarian aid worker