Dr. Hardesty's current research project is an ethnographic study of frontline child welfare workers at a concurrent planning foster care and adoption agency. She focuses both on the nature of the job and on the micropolitics of assessing parents on behalf of the state. She argues that frontline child welfare casework is a quintessentially ethical mode of labor, not only because it entails assessing, intervening in, and sometimes reconfiguring actual families. It is also ethical because, in working on real world people and families, child welfare workers are key participants in the definition and ideation of "family" as a cultural concept. As representatives of the state, workers frequently grapple with institutionalized and often naturalized ideations about American family, and many of these ideations are bound up with economic, gender, and racial inequality. Day-to-day casework is, ultimately, a fraught job that requires workers to continually navigate ethical quagmires.