In person icon Navigating and Re-Imagining Ethics Architectures When Working with Research Participants in Situations of Vulnerability

Abstract

Working with research participants who are (considered to be) in situations of vulnerability poses a wide range of complex ethical challenges that researchers have to constantly renegotiate. While highly complex and context specific, one attempt at addressing these challenges has come from academic and funding institutions requiring researchers who work with these research participants to develop elaborate ethics protocols that cover a broad range of (potential or real) challenges. Because of the disciplinary origins of many of these protocols in the bio-medical and health realm, their far-reaching degree of standardization and formulaic approaches, and their (not so) unforeseen effect of turning ethics assessments into box-ticking exercises, these institutional ethics approaches have come under close scrutiny, and scholarship is teeming with critical assessments that highlight the many shortcomings of these standardized approaches. While valid and necessary, these critiques should not overshadow the extent to which these proposals for and requirements of sound formal ethics protocols respond to a real need and risk, and may continue to offer real protections when developed in a responsive and context-sensitive manner. At present, however, there is a dearth of scholarship that constructively examines how these highly standardized ethics processes and protocols may be re-imagined as actionable tools that simultaneously protection and capacitate. This roundtable starts from the position that such an exercise is best rooted in a multi-perspectival and self-reflexive exercise that reflects the experiences of researchers across a spectrum of positions and localities, and that examines how they navigate these complex protocols in practice, how they use and mobilize them in different ways, how they are differently hampered or empowered by them depending on their professional and personal positionality, etc. In this session, rather than presenting finished papers, we seek to engage in a multi-vocal conversation that includes all round table members as well as the audience. The conversation will start from a reflection on how each one of the round table participants navigated the very complex and highly formalized and standardized ethics and data-management architecture of an ERC-funded project, and how they sought to bridge the requirements contained in these protocols with the reality on the ground through a relational approach to ethics. We then seek to identify certain core principles that can help bridge these relational ethics and practices and turn them into foundational principles that can feed into and complement the more formal ethics procedures. Speakers occupy a range of positions across the academic realm, and all had different relations to the formal ethics protocols. The interventions during this round table are structured along 4 organizing themes - The meaning of consent and how to communicate about this - The encounter with stories of violence and trauma - The balancing of agency and vulnerability through a multi-layered understanding of their identities - The balancing of benefits and burdens throughout the process The aim is to engage in an exercise of constructive collective exchange, based on own experiences across a range of contexts, and to reflect on how these experiences may contain starting points for more responsive and context-sensitive ethics protocols. The session will briefly introduce a co-authored article by all panel participants discussing these topics, and will then offer a space for exchange between the panel members and the audience, in an attempt to co-create knowledge about these topics.

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