Presence as Politics in Qualitative Research Ethics: Feminist Engagements With “Risk” and Vulnerability

Abstract

Qualitative researchers have critiqued Anglophone institutional ethics procedures as individualistic, rigid, and inattentive to complex power dynamics. From our positions as researchers, educators, and ethics reviewers in a U.K. institution, we argue that engaging with a “politics of presence” in situational and procedural ethics produces more ethically engaged qualitative research. By this we mean researchers and ethics committees opening themselves to power, discomfort, and challenge rather than the “absences” of risk management and governance-heavy ethics. Using autoethnographic reflections, we develop this argument through three themes: embracing vulnerability; relational presence; and honoring. The principle of presence is a tool and a political orientation that qualitative researchers and ethics committees should embed into their current practice to produce braver and more ethically engaged work.