Ethics Of Ethnography Research Articles

Introduction to ethics in ethnography: The practical politics of predictability

This introduction to the ‘Ethics in ethnography’ special issue analyzes a crisis facing anthropology and especially ethnography, its primary research method. It highlights how an outdated and parochial ethics model, strengthened by fears of litigation and simplistic views of ethnographic research, threatens the spontaneity and investigative freedom necessary to the method's exploratory character. Contributors to the discussion explore the spectrum of strategies – from compromise to confrontation – for addressing the challenges posed by the bureaucratic oversight of ethics, unrealistic expectations of predictability in fieldwork, the impact of legitimate post‐colonial critique and funding constraints on research freedom. They variously address the arbitrariness of bureaucratic procedures and the potential stifling of anthropological enquiry under the guise of ethical oversight. Drawing on the range of experience in anthropology and related fields represented here, the introduction opens the collection with a call to maintain ethical sensitivity while challenging attempts to police fieldwork using inappropriate conceptions of science and ethics.

Fieldwork

Fieldwork, a term frequently employed in religious studies to describe qualitative research with contemporary subjects in their own milieu, is a concept inextricably linked with the ethnographic project. Anthropologists have for years challenged and pushed the limits of what fieldwork is, where fieldwork takes place, and how fieldwork is conducted by asking productive questions about where exactly “the field” is located and what precisely constitutes “the work”. In religious studies, debates about ethnographic fieldwork, per se, are less advanced. Traditional notions of fieldwork in anthropology assume long-term engagement with folk and their communities. This often means living and working with research subjects for years, even decades. A critical reflection on the method and idea of fieldwork in religious studies brings to the fore important issues of legitimacy, accuracy and comprehensiveness in the study of “lived religion” and raises anew enduring questions about the ethics of ethnography when time, access and intimacy are ever-shifting and precarious.

In the groove and in the moment: epistemology and ethics in ethnography with Sudanese musician revolutionaries

This study discusses the methodological component of a research project with Sudanese musicians and their associated activist groups. The methodology included song-writing and, as such, is an example of collaborative creative research practice. Proponents of collaborative creative practice argue that the combination of aesthetic methods with ethnographic and participatory research methods brings both epistemological and ethical dividends. This paper considers whether these alleged epistemological and ethical advantages bore out in this research project. While confirming some benefits, my study also shows evidence of underlying tensions between aesthetic ‘micro-methods’ and ethnographic and participatory traditions of knowledge production. In relation to the alleged epistemological dividends, I argue that autoethnographic embedding in collaborative creative practice is alone insufficient. It requires a theoretical framework which theorises the relationship between one player’s musical experience and another’s. Only with this, can the sensory experiences of the researcher be used to inform analysis of participant observations and interviews. The autoethnographic experiences of the researcher are not findings in themselves. In relation to the ethical dividends, unlike other arts-based research, I found that the aesthetic micro-methods in this study did not naturally lend themselves to participant empowerment. The pursuit of aesthetic goals has its own division of labour which can lead to the deprioritisation of self-expression and co-learning which constitute the primary aims of classical participatory research. Overall, collaborative creative practice did enhance this research project but there are important caveats. To reflect these, I aruge that creative collaboration should not be considered as a simple sub-set of either ethnographic or participatory research but as a method in its own right.

What Do We Want to Tell? And to Whom Do We Wish to Tell It?: The Ethnographer’s Ethical Dilemma

On the Run has spurred public debates about the ethics of ethnography. The controversy surrounds the fact that the sociologist/ethnographer drove a participant who was armed with a gun and the intent to commit murder. Ethical concerns are not new to ethnography. A previous generation of sociologists and ethnographers faced similar dilemmas: Did those who studied jazz bands also take drugs with the band members? Did those who studied gangs have knowledge of criminal activity to which the police might prefer to be privy? And yet, with new technologies and media-sharing platforms, ethnographers face increased scrutiny. The paper, as a result, focuses on debates regarding perennial ethical conundrums: what to tell, whether to tell, and to whom it might be told.

Navigating the grey areas of law and ethics in ethnography

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to argue that the use of legally and ethically dubious methods in ethnography can sometimes be justified in the pursuit of new knowledge. The paper offers reflections on the risks that participatory methods of enquiry can bring upon both researcher and research participants, particularly in terms of the physical and reputational risks that researchers must face when adopting ethnographic methods in unwelcoming research environments.Design/methodology/approachEthnographic methods, specifically participant observation (PO), were adopted to penetrate a gang of criminal ticket touts in the UK through a gatekeeper who provided access to knowledge and experience.FindingsPushing the legal and ethical boundaries of research is not only justifiable, but sometimes necessary in the discovery of new, socially valuable and otherwise unobtainable knowledge. Ethnographic research and PO are the only methods through which it is possible to gauge an understanding and appreciation, and thus present a valid depiction, of deviant and hard to access groups. As such, the use of these methods can sometimes be justified, within certain parameters.Originality/valueThis research adopts ethnographic methods in the under-researched and topical area of black market ticket touting in the UK. Ethnography alone, through an “internal” understanding of the participants’ viewpoints, can reveal that much of what is discussed in the media and in Parliament is inaccurate. The paper builds on the existing literature on touting and on conducting illegal research, and offers reflections on why these methods can sometimes be justified.

Ethics of Ethnography with Families: A Geographical Perspective

This paper contributes to debates on geographies of family and intimate relations, and research ethics in ethnographic research by addressing the ethics of doing ethnography with families. Drawing on debates in human geography, anthropology, and sociology, I argue that the intimate nature of both ethnography and familial relations presents particular challenges to using an ethnographic approach to studying families. Using experiences from two years of ethnographic research with six families in the UK, the ethics of confidentiality (within and between families, and in published materials), and disengagement (following long-term involvement, transforming relationships, and staying in contact with participants) are explored. In addition, the paper sheds light on the geographical and ethical complexities of doing ‘ethnography on your doorstep’. The conclusions outline the contributions of the paper to discussions within and beyond geography, family studies, and ethnography.

Informed Consent as Process: Problematizing Informed Consent in Organizational Ethnographies

This article examines the implications of informed consent in organizational ethnographies, where the research site is a bounded and formal institution that has its own sets of rules which govern action and membership. While there is considerable scholarship on the issue of ethics in ethnography in general, very little has been written about informed consent in organizational ethnographies where researchers often simultaneously observe managers, “studying” up according to Nadar, and employees referred to as “studying down”. Organizational researchers tend to discuss ethics in terms of obtaining informed consent for individual interviews or in terms of access to an organization as a research site. This essay examines ethical dilemmas experienced in fieldwork studying participatory work arrangements in a Mexican garment firm. By discussing practical issues of gaining access, problems of maintaining access and consent, and concerns of how gatekeeper consent affects subordinates, I problematize the practice of obtaining informed consent in organizations. I argue that thinking of informed consent as an on-going process that requires an active reflexivity on the part of the ethnographer will help researchers to navigate the ever-shifting web of power dynamics present in organizations.

Return journey: ‘snakes in the swamp’

In 1985 Falmer Press published my first book, a classroom ethnography entitled Initial Encounters in a Secondary School, which helped establish me as an academic. However, it has long concerned me that the decade-long Victoria Road Lower School Project (as it came to be called) contained two resounding ‘silences’: • Silence 1 concerned the changing autobiographical, authorial ‘selves’ that lay behind it. • Silence 2 concerned the unknown impact ‘Initial Encounters’ had upon Lower School and the subsequent careers of the teachers who had featured in it. To investigate this last year I managed to trace and interview some 60% of the staff (15 in total) who had featured in the original study. ‘Return Journey’ is best regarded as an experiment in ‘retrospective ethnography’, raising issues relating to both the autobiographical self and the ethics of ethnography, neither of which were accorded much significance in the late 1970s at the time of the initial research.

Ethnography/ethics

This paper situates discussion of the ethics of ethnographic research against the background of a theoretical and methodological debate about the relationship between ethics and method, and about the relationships between research methods and their objects. In particular, the paper investigates the implications of folding together the ethical and the empirical in research and argues that this requires the development of new ethico-ethnographic methods for the investigation of ethico-moral objects. The paper falls into three main parts. The first considers calls for what has come to be known as empirical ethics, that is, for a more empirically informed bioethics, by way of an exploration of the integration of ethnographic methods in bioethics, and concludes that approaches which see the ethical and the empirical as ‘complementary’ do not do justice to the methodological implications of enfolding the ethical and the ethnographic. The second part juxtaposes this with calls for the integration of ethics in ethnography and, similarly, argues that the enfolding of the ethical and the empirical in ethnography calls for the development of new methods. The paper goes on to problematise the ‘negotiational’ approaches to informed consent preferred by many ethnographers, arguing that the concept of negotiation, rather than offering a solution to the problem of consent, is itself ethically complex and in need of analysis. The paper argues that, in the context of ethnographic research, the possibility of negotiational forms of consent depends upon engagement between researchers and researched, with unavoidably ‘ethical’ concepts such as ‘respect’, ‘recognition’, ‘dignity’, ‘justice’ and so on, and that this poses methodological challenges to ethnography. The paper's third section explores the implications of these arguments for research practice, using The Genethics Club as an example.

Meta-Jeopardy

Multiple discourses create this experimental piece: televisual culture, cultural studies as a discipline, sociology as a discipline, feminist-poststructuralism, mother as a social category, mother as lived experience, mother as "current event,"familial contexts, ethics in ethnography, emotions, and writing as transformative.