ETHNO+GRAPHY AND RESEARCH ETHICS IN AUSTRALIA

Abstract

Ethnography often presents to Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) as irredeemably risky. This is because most ethnographers have serious concerns about deploying the so-called ‘god trick’ (i.e., seeing the social landscape from the stratosphere and mapping everything in advance). This chapter grapples with who and what is the object of ethnographic research, and how participants themselves take on an agency in shaping that research agenda over the course of what is a typically very long-term and intimate relationship with a fieldworker. I argue that protocols that pre-define exactly how an ethnographic project will unfurl; exactly how many partners or participants will be enrolled in the study; who they are; and exactly how they will engage the project, should raise red flags for HRECs. Instead, ethnographers should cultivate awareness of how interactions develop and work to handle various exigencies, but without pre-judging the ethical values that configure social life in fieldwork locations. Ethics committees should ask hard-nosed questions about how ethnographers will approach risk and harm—acknowledging that some of the details will emerge in the dialogic process of participant observation. Ethnographers should be able to discuss their approach, how they will go about building this into research partnerships, what reporting mechanisms there are, and how those findings will be iteratively incorporated into the ethical design of the project. Show more