'Beyond a tick-box exercise': Navigating ethics and social justice in research - an event report

Ethical questions are central to academic research, but ethics approval procedures can make questions of care, harm, fairness, and accountability into a bureaucratic process that centres institutional liability. As Global Lives Research Centre members working in the Department of Social and Political Sciences recently planned and delivered a two-day workshop about research ethics for PhD researchers in Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences disciplines. The event, held in central London and online 31 October-1 November 2023, was co-sponsored by Global Lives and the Techne AHRC-funded Doctoral Training Partnership.

In designing the workshop, we began with the recognition that university ethics processes with which PhD candidates are required to engage are necessary but not sufficient to ensure that research does no harm. Therefore, we aimed to challenge workshop participants to consider a broader sense of research ethics in their projects. Thinking about the ethics of academic research in a political context in which the value of critical scholarship in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines is doubted and undermined, we focused on the research and analysis of scholars who are the most often marginalised and silenced by the power dynamics and politics of academic knowledge production.

The speakers

We invited speakers from within and outside academia, whose research spanned literature, feminist theory, history, linguistics, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and critical disability studies. Some were early career academics and others were more established scholars, but the research of all provided creative and challenging solutions to ethical questions: Professor Sunny Singh (London Metropolitan University), Dr Chrystie Myketiak (Brighton), Dr Naomi Lawson Jacobs (independent), Dr Tammy Wilks (University of Cape Town), Dr Kavita Maya (RHUL), and Dr SM Rodriguez (LSE). Each gave a talk as well as participating in a roundtable dialogue at the close of the workshop. We are grateful to Professor Singh, discussions with whom helped us to clarify the language we used to describe the purpose of the workshop in conversation while we were planning the event.

Two primary ethical ideals informed our choices when planning the workshop: inclusivity and horizontal dialogue. The workshop was organised with both online and offline sessions to enable participants who live at a distance from London to join. A fully accessible venue was chosen to ensure there were no barriers to participation. To aim for a workshop structure that counteracted the power hierarchies of academic institutions, we set aside long breaks to provide time for relationships to be formed and discussions had between and among participants. We also invited the participants to join the roundtable discussion alongside the speakers, at which the agenda would be set based on their discussions in the closing seminar on Day 1. We return to inclusivity and horizontal dialogue below to reflect on the degree to which our efforts towards these ideals were successful.

 

Insights about research and ethics

Professor Singh reminded us in the first session that decolonisation is neither comforting nor comfortable; that there is never a state that can be achieved that is ‘decolonised’, and that instead decolonisation is ‘an ever-expanding circle of justice’. This highlighted the central idea that ethics is not simply a process, but is an ongoing and dynamic dimension of research, and one that prompts change. Prof Singh also offered a series of succinct questions about motivation, power, purpose, benefits and harms for the reflexive analysis of our projects – a list that proved very helpful and which participants referred to throughout the workshop.

Dr Myketiak spoke of how she changed her approach to researching mass shooter manifestos, from case studies of specific shooters to treating a number of manifestos as a dataset: thereby reducing the extent to which her research could play into these violent individuals’ hopes for notoriety. In the same session, Dr Jacobs related how they had changed the presentation of their research, by involving participants in the publication process and orienting the outputs to what participants would find more accessible and useful.

Dr Maya reflected on her changing relationships with the people with whom she conducted her research as she developed critical perspectives on some problematic dimensions of their ideas and practices. Dr Wilks considered changing perspectives on the epistemic foundations of what participants tell researchers, as well as recognition of their agency and agendas, and Dr Rodriguez described and encouraged a ‘methodology of connection’ which allowed research participants to change the kinds of questions asked in research.

These talks highlighted the fact that while there might be a desire for ethics to be finished, resolved and put away – an institutional ethics form filed away with a stamp of approval at the beginning of the process – and a wish for ethics to be clear and unambiguous, this might not always be the case. Several speakers and participants discussed situations where institutional ethics processes – which may give the appearance of being clear – fit awkwardly with other approaches to ethics, reminding us of the messiness and constant work of approaching each part of research with an ethical care.

Reflections and potential new directions

1. Dr Myketiak’s talk raised the issue of the researcher’s ethical commitments to themselves, when dealing with violent rhetoric in association with real violent acts, and further perspectives were offered on this in all the talks on the second day. The nature of the discussion of this issue suggests the value of developing a future session on the subject of ethics of care to the self as a researcher.
2. The focus on language might have been expanded to acknowledge and explore other ways of knowing (e.g. embodied, material, musical…). This would have brought new perspectives to ideas about epistemic contestation, epistemic disobedience and methodologies of connection.
3. There could have been more interactive space for participants to discuss the issues as there were many challenging ideas to think about. Our efforts towards inclusivity were at least partly successful. Meeting in person on Day 1 perhaps facilitated conversation better than meeting online for Day 2, but our decision to prioritise accessibility was appreciated by those participants who were only able to join us online.
4. Our concern for horizontal dialogue was in tension with the practice of addressing speakers by their academic titles; a tension which is not easily resolved with a blanket rule. As Prof Singh reminded us in her talk, only 2.7% of Britain’s 22,850+ professors are women of colour. We accepted the importance of recognising those hard-won achievements and positions of influence, while maintaining that the academic hierarchy often harms PhD candidates, who should likewise be recognised as colleagues and equals.

Discussion and interaction between participants, especially on Day 1, highlighted both that PhD candidates value opportunities to think deeply and solve shared problems together, and also that they need more such opportunities. The feedback we received from speakers and participants positively confirmed this, with PhD students telling us that they went away with lots to think about regarding their projects and the communities with which they do research.