Negotiating ethical procedures and the demands of ethnography: From research proposal to the field
Valerio Simoni, Senior Researcher at the Graduate Institute will draw onto his experience with the ERC funded project, BETLIV for his online keynote talk, ‘Negotiating ethical procedures and the demands of ethnography: From research proposal to the field’, for the Swiss Anthropology Association Workshop “Research ethics in anthropology: which good practices?’.
Online, Monday 22 March 2021 at 13:15
With the ongoing institutionalisation of research ethics in Switzerland and internationally, anthropologists increasingly have to engage with ethical guidelines defined by ethics commissions at university, regional or national level in order to undertake research, get funding and/or publish. Yet, these interactions often represent a challenge for anthropologists and qualitative social scientists at large. Procedural requirements differ considerably from the processual ethics favoured by the epistemological approach of our discipline and we feel that the latter are not given enough institutional credit. This, in turn, leads to misunderstandings and frustration on both sides, sometimes loosing track of the common aim which is to protect our research participants and ourselves. This workshop mainly addressed to young scholars aims to bring together anthropologists, qualitative social scientists and legal scholars working on research ethics to discuss appropriate ways to engage with procedural ethics. On the one hand, we wish to address the legal obligations concerning research ethics and how they are taken up by ethics commissions. On the other hand, we plan to discuss how anthropologists can deal with these requirements without betraying the processual ethics that characterises our discipline. To this end, the workshop combines inputs by specialists with spaces to exchange about experiences and to constitute a “reservoir” of good practices.