I have conducted participant observation ethnographic fieldwork focused on the intimate experience of social inequality and the struggle for human dignity in violent settings plagued by political/ethnic/economic conflicts, hunger, addiction and human rights violations spanning from the Central America civil wars of the 1980s, to contemporary US inner-city drug corners, homeless encampments, jails and hospital emergency rooms. I strive to document the moral economies and searches for meaning/human dignity and ethical logic among victims/perpetrators that can help us develop upstream public interventions to address urgent social problems by promoting human solidarity and reducing the brutal effects of social inequality.