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In this article, we report on a follow-up session that was organised to share findings with children about a participatory research project they had been involved in a few months earlier. This was motivated by the ethical concern that it is the children’s right to be informed about the results of the research. In the process of reflecting on the research project, however, the children diverted the researcher’s focus onto aspects of the research that mattered to them. Rather than discussing the results and the benefits of the research, the children were keen to discuss issues of representation, questioning the researcher about pseudonyms, transcribing and their role and presence in the dissertation. The follow-up session opened up a transformational space where both the child participants and the adult researchers gained new understandings about research processes and relationships. We argue that such retrospective reflection can be a beneficial tool to explore children’s post hoc interpretations about the research, while developing researcher reflexivity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the lasting impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on research ethics in social sciences by focusing on the concept of vulnerability. We unpack the current conceptualisations of vulnerability and their limitations and argue for the need to reconceptualise vulnerability as multidimensional, consisting of both universal and contextual dimensions, as well as their dynamic interplay. Multidimensional vulnerability is inspired by and relevant to social science research during the pandemic but can also be useful in other contexts such as climate change or conflict. The paper puts forwards several considerations about how this revised concept of vulnerability may be useful when evaluating ethical dimensions of social science research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how solicited paper diaries, and the accompanying materials, are carefully handled over the course of one research project. It foregrounds the value of attending to mundane moments with research materials, by tracing tangible material encounters together with intimate fieldnote reflections. Through drawing upon theories of materiality with feminist and relational ethics of care, this article centralises paper diaries as a key mediator of relationships and care within research. It considers the micro processes of choosing diaries, posting them, receiving and storing them and tracing the emotionally charged moments as a researcher in everyday research situations. Such reflections, from the perspective of the researcher, look to offer insights into research relationalities and care. It argues that these momentary fieldwork reflections extend understandings of material methodologies by emphasising relational intimacies as a researcher and connects material and sensory understandings with feminist ethics of care and researcher reciprocities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of critical research, there is significant interest about the extent and forms of the researcher's proactive engagement with marginalized and excluded communities being researched. However, it is not always clear what makes this involvement part of the research, or how much it serves as a moral position located in the process of building relationships with the community being researched. Based on a retrospective and reflexive observation of extended ethnographic fieldwork, between 2005 and 2016, with Israel's Mountain Jewish Community, this paper presents an analysis of Research from an Active-Involved Critical Stance (RAICS). In the conceptual-theoretical dimension, this position is anchored in the theory of intersubjective relationships, critical ethnography, and community-based participatory research. With respect to the structural aspect, RAICS will be explicated through the various positions taken up by the researcher within the field, and across three stages in the development of the relationship with the community during the study, namely: the store-windows; behind the scenes; and onstage. Eight principles of RAICS will be presented. Finally, RAICS will be discussed in the context of developments in the critical research field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are participants and researchers agreeing to when they consent to having data archived and what do they imagine the future life of their data to be? In this paper, we reflect on a project that deliberately started rather than ended with the archive. The Everyday Childhoods project invited children and their families to take part in the creation of an open access public archive documenting everyday childhoods using a range of multimedia data. Families and researchers were invited into the archive, encouraged to imagine different kinds of secondary use and to speak directly to future user of their data through short films and postcards. This paper raises questions concerning the place of the archive in different disciplinary traditions; the roles of researcher and archivist in safekeeping, gatekeeping and caring for data collections; and the place of qualitative longitudinal research as a site of innovation within a new data landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses David Graeber's work on the moral grounds of economic relations as a vantage point from which to reflect on the ethics of giving back in field research, drawing on my own fieldwork experiences in Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka as well as examples from existing literature. I argue that Graeber's exposition of different moral logics for economic relations – hierarchy, exchange and communism – provides a valuable set of conceptual distinctions for thinking through what is owed by, and to, researchers in different research interactions. In addition to a recognition of the incommensurability of what is often being exchanged, this approach responds to the danger of researchers setting the terms of ethical interaction, through distant institutional processes and practices built on logics of exchange, in ways that might constrain the ability of interlocutors to meaningfully articulate their own positions in fieldwork relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on a sensitive and potentially stigmatising topic such as 'radicalisation' begs for a robust ethical framework. Ethical procedures, issuing from an institutional ethics commission, are not sufficient to manage these risks. Arguably, collaborative and participatory research is best suited to overcome the risks of doing research on such a sensitive topic as well as the hierarchy and inequality in the relationship between researchers, gatekeepers and participants. To co-construct a participatory ethical framework in this context, 22 social workers were asked about the core ethical values of their own professional context. In this paper, these social work ethics are brought in tension with the practice of doing research. The paper concludes with the insight that social work ethics are not transferrable to the research context in a straightforward manner. Hierarchy and inequality (as well as much frustration) will persist if only this strategy is adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper lies at the intersection of discussions surrounding digitally mediated research methods and transnational research projects. It contributes to the current methodological debate surrounding online interviewing by focusing on tensions and affordances involved in Skype-to-phone interviewing in a transnational research context. While the Skype-to-phone facility does indeed increase further access to global participants, complex power hierarchies and ethical concerns continue to exist in relation to technological access/infrastructure, research governance regimes in different places and interpersonal research relations. We, therefore, propose that online researchers involved in transnational research projects using Skype methods move towards consideration of multiple competing constituencies and diverse social and spatial connectivities and power hierarchies in which they are researching. These social differences and spatial registers are not swept away through research conducted in a uniform virtual digital environment; rather transnational researchers must make explicit the multiple place-based contexts of their digitally mediated research, as they shape the research process in distinct ways. Thus, specific consideration must be given to ethical concerns that emanate from transnational online research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the literature on ethics in Participatory Research by looking at the Researcher-in-Residence model and its application within health services research in three East London boroughs. The Researcher-in-Residence is embedded in the organisation to enable knowledge mobilisation and knowledge coproduction. Whereas negotiation of different types of expertise to coproduce evidence might raise issues of power differentials, the embedded nature of the role also requires careful negotiating of relationships. As the researcher is immersed in the context under evaluation, the boundaries between the researcher and the participants' everyday working life can become blurred. The paper explores these ethical issues and suggests that, whereas the requirements of ethics committees, based on an ethics of principle, at times fail to offer appropriate guidelines for this methodological approach, an ethics of care based on relationships can offer a complementary framework to address some of the thorny challenges that emerge from everyday practice in participatory research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflexivity is continually called for as a marker of quality ethnographic research. In this paper we put reflexivity to 'work', providing a critical commentary on data generated through ethnographic fieldwork in high-performance disability sport. Drawing on Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, we situate the ethnographer in the field of disability sport, turning a reflexive lens onto the practices that are associated with occupying the role of coach and researcher simultaneously. We illustrate the centrality of researcher subjectivity – through the reflexive device of 'crossing fields' – as a productive resource for examining the social and intellectual unconscious embedded in the process of doing ethnographic research. In so doing, we provide a unique example of how reflexive practice can offer a rigorous, power-conscious reading of an ethnography of high-performance coaching in disability sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conducting research in the rapidly evolving fields constituting the digital social sciences raises challenging ethical and technical issues, especially when the subject matter includes activities of stigmatised populations. Our study of a dark-web drug-use community provides a case example of ‘how to’ conduct studies in digital environments where sensitive and illicit activities are discussed. In this paper we present the workflow from our digital ethnography and consider the consequences of particular choices of action upon knowledge production. Key considerations that our workflow responded to include adapting to volatile field-sites, researcher safety in digital environments, data security and encryption, and ethical-legal challenges. We anticipate that this workflow may assist other researchers to emulate, test and adapt our approach to the diverse range of illicit studies online. In this paper we argue that active engagement with stigmatised communities through multi-sited digital ethnography can complement and augment the findings of digital trace analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative researchers are compelled to use their personal judgements before, during and after interviews, particularly when their interview subjects are drawn from vulnerable groups. This paper discusses the dilemmas qualitative researchers encounter when collecting data that is ethically ‘sensitive’; and situates the discussion in the realm of the Australian Occupational Health & Safety (OH&S) legislative requirement of ‘duty of care’ using the Rapidly Degenerative Neurological Diseases Pilot Program in Western Australia as the case example. The paper is focussed upon the practicalities and ethical concerns of the researchers conducting qualitative data collections. The discussion seeks to provide practical reflections on lessons learned and suggestions for self-care practice for researchers in the field and calls for policies that instruct and protect them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the implications of qualitative research on migration in terms of reflexivity and positionality. In particular, it presents research as care, revolved around three main critical nodes of reflection: the epistemological importance of emotions, intersectional positionality and the ethics of care. Drawing upon the insights concerning a qualitative research on migration in Italian shrinking areas, the contribution underlines the importance of conceiving research as a process of negotiation. Moreover, it shows how positionality in qualitative migration research is not static but flexible, and is conditioned by different emotionalities emerging during the fieldwork. In this sense, the continuous negotiation that exists between researchers and participants can imply affectivities and kinship that valorises the relationships created during the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic practice in contentious and high-risk spaces raises important ethical and methodological questions. When working with grassroots activists who actively avoid forms of surveillance, the boundary between consensual observation and potentially harmful documentation becomes difficult to discern. This article aims not only to identify the gaps in qualitative research methodologies for scholars working with grassroots activists, but also to think of practical ways in which researchers should mitigate concerns both for participants and themselves. Based on fieldwork in Australia, the author explores the ethical, methodological, and emotional dilemmas of conducting research with activists as a militant ethnographer. The article argues that activist-centred project designs must consider the challenges between the researcher's mandate to collect data and their responsibility to uphold security culture both in and outside activist spaces. Reflexive research ethics, further, should be a part of ongoing research engagement to address the emotional tensions overlooked in standardized ethical protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the shift from face-to-face participatory action research (PAR) with groups in situations of vulnerability to digital methods during COVID-19, we reflect on how we can go beyond compensating for the physical absence of the researcher from the field. We argue that instead of simply aiming to replace face-to-face research with a digital equivalent for maintaining 'participatory' and 'inclusive' research practices, remote practices have the potential of being more-than compensatory. We suggest that when producing multi-method digital approaches, we need to go beyond a concern with participant access to remote practices. By rethinking remote PAR in the light of expressive rather than participatory research practices, we critically reflect on the (sometimes experimental) process of trying out different digital research method(s) with Brazilian youth in situations of digital marginalisation, including the initial 'failures' and lessons learned in encouraging diverse forms of participant expression, and ownership using WhatsApp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the author's experiences and reflections of researching vulnerable people for a housing research project, this article explores the ethical dilemmas, and the health and safety challenges, of conducting in-depth, qualitative interviews with 'vulnerable' research participants in their own homes. Vulnerability, in a housing research context, takes account of: living in poverty; insecure housing/employment situations; poor health and/or mental ill health; alcohol and /or drug dependency, etc. Diary notes are used to illustrate the challenging situations that can unfold when working alone in the field in disadvantaged areas, with vulnerable people, which can present physical and emotional risk. Concern with risk and the potential impact on individuals is two-fold: that on the participant; and that on the researcher. Through reflexivity and revisiting of experiences in the field, this paper explains the difficulties and negotiations, and it provides some suggestions for better research practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of relational, participatory, collaborative and emergent research approaches in recent years has brought new ethical challenges for research with children and youth. These approaches require greater consideration of the specific social and cultural contexts of the research, along with the greater emphasis on researcher–participant relationships that often occur over sustained periods of time. Very few tools are available to help researchers think through the everyday ethical dilemmas such research can raise. In this article, we review the theoretical underpinnings of feminist and indigenous research methodologies that have encouraged these emerging approaches. Through examining an 18-month Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project case study, we critically review ethical moments relating to negotiating consent over a sustained period of time, enhancing co-design and navigating power issues between adult and youth researchers. We conclude with a number of questions to 'think with' when reflecting on ethical research with children and youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative empirical enquiries into dynamics of security and insecurity often include a blind spot that bear theoretical ramifications because only those areas and respondents that allow for relatively safe fieldwork are studied. To transparently articulate the spheres of projection that creep into our knowledge production, we propose a distinction between inner and outer circles as highly fluid but separate geographical, socio-political and methodological spaces. Drawing on fieldwork in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, we discuss the risks posed by incomplete data and subsequently flawed inferences. We argue that the perceptions of fear projected onto the outer circle shape people's behaviour more than measurable insecurity incidents and that increased interaction between actors in both circles reduces the perceived threats coming from the outer circles. We demonstrate how studying insecurity from inner circles risks securitizing outer circles while further centralizing the inner ones. We thus urge transparency in data collection and the related inferences that underpin our knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article scrutinizes and reconceptualizes covert research in social science. Surveying recent literature about this research method, we reflect on the ethical and safety implications stemming from the widespread, even if well-intended, lack of transparency characterizing many research projects, especially ones conducted in difficult research contexts. While the standard definition of covert research holds that researchers deliberately do not declare to research subjects that academic research is taking place, we argue that the remoteness of Western academia from most researched contexts often a priori renders field research at least partially covert, irrespective of the researcher's intentions. This is because its aims, utility, and expected outputs are hard to understand for research participants unrelated to academia. We illustrate this argument by analyzing our own fieldwork experiences in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. In conclusion, we emphasize the need to critically reflect on the de facto use of covert techniques by social researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on research into Indigenous people and sport, this article discusses the opportunities and challenges for a non-Indigenous researcher to study Indigenous issues. The author shares personal experiences from research into Sámi sport (Sámi are the Indigenous people of the North Calotte) and compares these with the literature relating to post-colonial methodologies. It concludes with some overarching elements to take into consideration when researching Indigenous peoples: reflection including critical self-reflection (as in any qualitative research); reciprocity, including respect, dialogue and that the research must benefit the Indigenous people under study and in general; and awareness about the heterogeneity within Indigenous groups and consciousness about the interface between researcher and Indigenous peoples. Given the heterogeneity, the interfaces vary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When conducting interviews about sensitive subject matter such as family life, powerful emotions may arise. The kinds of unexpected distress that can surface in interviews concerning topics laden with personal significance are different to the readily anticipated trauma that accompanies interviews in post-crisis or post-conflict situation. This article analyses the ethical considerations that accompany such research, drawing upon literature from oral history and qualitative sociology. The article traces ethical issues during the temporal phases of qualitative research – before, during and after an interview – before proposing three strategies that interviewers can adopt to help protect narrators from ongoing harm or distress after an interview. Such ethical safeguards include the self-interview, the post-interview follow-up with the narrator, and adopting an ethics of reciprocity that allows the narrator to feel that they are contributing to a larger purpose through involvement in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant amount of research has highlighted the different ontological and epistemological dimensions of insider and outsider research positions. In the field of education, this topic could benefit from more research. In this study, three researchers and former early childhood centre directors discussed their own research positions in a completed research project. Based on field notes from following the daily work of the centre leaders – positions the researchers formally held themselves – it is illustrated that the research affects continued to flow after the project had ended, raising new questions about how specific situations and the data had been handled. This study, a folding, unfolding and re-folding of data, highlights the ethical considerations actualised in the movements between research positions. The movements between research positions are understood as a source of tension that can produce affects, becomings and data with the ability to question given positions and established knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I take on the problem of the face in images and visual research on children. This is a problem that is engendered through the visual representations of children and the act of deploying the visualizing techniques associated with visual methods (pictures, video, etc.). It nevertheless is a problem, I argue, that has been couched singularly within a question of ethics in child studies, criminology, and sociology, among other disciplines. Here, I utilize the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to challenge the unquestioned ethical commitment to the pixilation of children's faces in publications. To trouble and reconceptualize the problem of visual representations of children, I assert that this problem is intimately connected to the cultural politics of childhood. For illustrative purposes, I analyze how children are represented in Today's Child advertisements and Roman Vishniac's Children of a Vanished World. This article concludes with a broader discussion of the (child's) face, digital images, and (micro)politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars from wide-ranging disciplines are turning to social media platforms as research sites, and as platforms expand their communicative possibilities, they create more spaces for users to enact a multitude of identities. Most platforms allow users to have 'pseudonymous' identities; that is, they can engage in practices intended to facilitate nonidentifiable content. But pseudonymity presents a series of unique challenges to the principles of anonymisation in qualitative research. This article explores the slippery nature of dealing with pseudonymous social media users' personally identifiable data during research, framed around my responses to four questions I was asked when I applied for ethical approval to conduct research with pseudonymous fan communities on social media. The four questions concern: (Q1) changing notions of 'public' and 'private' forms of data; (Q2) identifying underage and therefore vulnerable participants online; (Q3) changes to the processes of obtaining informed consent from social media users; and (Q4) the risks social media research might bring to those conducting it. This article concludes by calling for qualitative researchers and Ethics Review Boards (ERBs) to engage with institutional ethics review across the duration of a project, or at the very least to advocate for ongoing consent as research progresses, especially for (but certainly not limited to) research involving pseudonymous social media users. The article aims to be useful to other researchers facing similar dilemmas. Indeed, given the popularity of pseudonymity on social media and the growing penetration of platforms across global demographics, a need for ethical discussions of this kind is surely set to increase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the use of fiction as a mode of representing data in social research. I show that three of the key drivers for fictionalising research accounts relate to the ambitions of aesthetic engagement, verisimilitude and user engagement. I look at the different ways that authors have attempted to achieve these ambitions and the methodological tensions that arise from them. I show that contemporary evaluative criteria in qualitative inquiry helps us to understand that fictional reporting is an important tool for researchers in creating more affective writing. However, there are divergences in how researchers conceive of and use fictional accounts, which highlight the importance of continued debate about the methodological practices of its use. In order to contribute to these debates I point to three areas that need particular consideration for researchers working in this area: (1) the structures of academic publishing and their embodiment in university audit regimes; (2) the absence of engagement with alternative forms of writing in academic professional development and training; and (3) the substantial ethical dilemmas in the use of fictional accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-conceptualizes the highly ambivalent relationships between researchers and research participants in conflict zones, with a focus on recognizing respondents' multiple and fluid positionalities. Standardized and dominant approaches to qualitative research are largely based on essentialist and infantilized portrayals of research participants and neo-colonial assumptions regarding the research relationship: informants are presumed to be inevitably vulnerable and in need of external protection, while the researcher is positioned as the omnipresent expert in control of the research process. In reality, however, research participants rarely exclusively occupy the 'oppressed victimhood' axis of identity and frequently take on active roles in the research and data collection process in a myriad of ways. I elucidate how especially in (post-)conflict zones, research participants frequently re-shape power dynamics by exercising agency over the researcher and the research process. While previous studies have considered how informants' agency can shape processes of knowledge production, in this article I expand this focus by examining how key-informants can, and frequently do, facilitate the researchers' safety and security. I specifically draw on personal experiences of empirical research in Northern Uganda. I demonstrate how in a particular moment of post-conflict insecurity – while being trapped in-between the exchange of gunfire between the Ugandan police and an armed group – one of my key-informants ensured my physical protection and safety, thereby exercising power over me and the research relationship. The key-informants in this context thus occupied multiple positionalities – ranging from informant to protector, evidencing that research relationships are never static but rather contextual, shift and fluctuate. Such ambivalent and fluid power dynamics are more reflective of the lived realities of qualitative research and can influence the research process by positioning researchers and research participants on more equal terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on the notions of thick and thin description elaborated by Geertz and looks at what descriptive methods have been used in the field of papyrology, a sub-discipline of classics that studies ancient manuscripts on papyrus fragments recovered through legal and illegal excavations in Egypt from the 19th century. Past generations of papyrologists have described papyri merely as resources to retrieve ancient 'texts'. In the article I argue these descriptions have had negative effects in the way this ancient material has been studied, preserved, and also exchanged through the antiquities market. Through a series of case studies, I offer an alternative description of papyrus fragments as things, which have a power that can be activated under specific circumstances or entanglements. In demonstrating papyrus manuscripts' unstable nature and shifting meanings, which are contingent on such entanglements, the article calls for a new politics and ethics concerning their preservation and exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the strengths and limitations of doing ethnographic research with young people in confinement. The article draws on two studies from Scotland and Denmark, and reflects on critical issues such as getting access, obtaining informed and voluntary consent, emotional challenges, safety, positionality and situated ethics. While a substantial body of literature addresses the methodological challenges of doing ethnographic research in prisons, the literature on doing qualitative research with young people confined in locked residential institutions and youth remand centres is very limited. The article demonstrates the continued importance of doing ethnographic research in penal institutions, by showing how sensory data and lived experience of penal practice and materiality, contributes to our understanding of how young people experience confinement. By drawing on fieldnotes and interviews, this article aims to inspire and lay the grounds for new researchers in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amidst a winter snow storm we drove slowly and carefully to our research site. Leaving much earlier than usual we wanted to be there to greet the indigenous youth who we had come to know in the process of inquiring into their ongoing identity making. We came to know them over several months in a junior high school arts club and had developed relationships with them that were marked by care. In attending to care, Noddings (1984) offered us a way to think about ethics. Yet Noddings did not explicitly turn her attention to an ethics for research, rather her focus was on an ethics of care in moral education. Drawing on our work alongside indigenous youth we show how these four components of an ethics of care shaped our narrative inquiry and show how a relational ethics builds on, and extends, an ethics of care in narrative inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we argue that research ethics in the doing of oral history research are inadequately addressed in the existing body of research. Although oral history researchers have paid considerable attention to procedural ethical issues, there is currently a lack of attention on situational research ethics in the doing of oral history. We address particular ethical challenges that we experienced while reconstructing the history of three remaining orphanages after the Second World War in the city of Ghent (a city in Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium) by drawing on oral history research from former orphans and ex-staff members. Their rather surprising, yet pertinent, questions enabled us to discover the political nature of research ethics, and prompted us to engage in 'going public'. We discuss the complexities of our attempt to provide a 'questionable' historical interpretation for the ambiguous history of these childhood institutions in the recent past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses a significant ethical oversight I am responsible for in my doctoral research program: the failure to account for and comprehensively prevent the threat of spiritual harm for my research assistants in Ghana and Cameroon. In this work, I discuss spiritual care as a major lacunae of research methodology considerations and ethics procedures in relation to my own work in the field of political science. Through an analysis of my methods and ethics preparations and subsequent fieldwork, I hope to demonstrate how epistemological and structural biases I enacted are also embedded in academic processes and how these helped facilitate this oversight. I argue that a modernist approach to research and ethics can lead researchers, such as myself, to overlook important considerations regarding spiritual care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity and decision-making are interrelated concepts, but the relationship between them is complex particularly when an unwell person's ability to make decisions is compromised. In this article we discuss how moral self-definition (Nelson, 2001;Walker, 1987) can be used within a Listening Guide (LG) analysis to extend analysis of the temporal relationship between identity and decisions. In this project, the LG was used to analyze interviews exploring older people's understanding of medical decision-making when the unwell person's capacity is diminished. The second step of the LG drew attention to the participants' expression of decision-making voices and health-related identities, but the iterative and temporal relationship between identity and decisions was less well illuminated. Therefore, we applied the theoretical framework of moral self-definition within the third listening. The focus of this article is on how moral self-definition can be integrated as a theoretical framework within the contrapuntal listening to extend the LG analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We critically reflect on insights from our experiences as female researchers on a creative writing project in a men's prison, including the emotional impact on the men involved and the ways in which our role as participant researchers impacted deeply on us. Juxtaposed starkly with the physical constraints of the prison, a sense of journeys emerged as significant throughout the study, particularly the symbolic crossing of boundaries. We draw on theories of performativity from both Feminist and Symbolic Interactionist perspectives to frame our understanding of the experience of being participant researchers in prison creative writing workshops, and also consider associated ethical issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a paradigm shift amongst Indigenous peoples and researchers about how research with Indigenous peoples is conceived, implemented, and articulated. The result has been referred to as the Indigenous research paradigm (Wilson, 2003) and has taken the shape of Indigenous research methodologies and processes. The purpose of this article is to discuss the tenets of the Indigenous research paradigm in relation to its practical application within two research projects conducted in higher education settings in British Columbia, Canada. In sharing how these principles are lived during the research process, it discusses how each project embodied Indigenous research processes by being respectful, relevant, responsible, and reciprocal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is on the everyday world of bouncers in the night-time economy of Manchester, England. The structure of the article is to contextualise my covert passing in this demonized subculture followed by explorations of the everyday world of bouncers through the related concepts of door order and the bouncer self. A part of the article is an examination of the management of situated 'ethical moments' during the fieldwork and, more generally, critical reflections on emotionality, embodiment and risk-taking in ethnography. I also reflect on the retrospective and longitudinal nature of my fieldwork immersion, and both the data management challenges and possibilities this brings. Covert ethnography can be a creative part of the ethnographer's tool kit and can provide an alternative perspective on subcultures, settings and organisations. By overly frowning upon the apparent ethical transgressions of covert research, we can stifle and censor the sociological imagination rather than enhance it. My call is for a rehabilitation of covert research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the growth of social media and other forms of digital communication make it impossible for ethnographers to offer anonymity to research sites or to those significant people involved in the research sites. Indeed, it was never actually fully possible to offer anonymity in ethnography. Ethical Guidelines need to recognise these facts and researchers need to modify their research procedures such that the advantages of more openness in research are exploited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research ethics processes, based on the mantra of privacy and institutional protection, take a paternalistic approach to research participants that leaves them open to harm. Reflecting on our own research/consultancy as a case study to illustrate the current flaws, we explore our and our subjects’ experiences within the wider political context of institutional ethical rules and the Australian NHMRC guidelines. In doing so we argue for fundamental changes to the modern research ethics processes – a system that treats participants more as research collaborators rather than victims in waiting. A complete review of ethics processes is needed to empower participants and researchers to recognize the reality of the process as co-created and negotiated. This includes changes at the top level of research administration – a shift in ethics policies and procedures as well as greater education in ethics with commensurate trust for active researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to conduct ethnographic research in a context where inequalities are pervasive? Drawing on experiences conducting research with poor migrant Qur’anic students (almajirai) in Kano, northern Nigeria, this article explores the challenges of establishing productive and ethical research relationships with informants whose social and socioeconomic status is significantly lower than that of the researcher. The article argues that large socioeconomic and educational inequalities demand a rethinking of the subject positions available to researchers in such contexts. In the article, I consider in turn my roles as an ‘accomplice’ of exclusionary elite behaviour, as a ‘patron’ for my informants, and as a ‘go-between’ facilitating access for them to otherwise inaccessible ‘social microworlds’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informed consent is critical in research with children. Although much has been written about the need to see consent as an ongoing process, less has considered how to do it in practice. This article reflects on the authors’ experiences of conducting a piece of research focusing on children’s experiences of safety from abuse within institutional contexts. It draws on feedback provided by participants and the guidance of three Children’s Reference Groups. The importance of presenting information in accessible and appropriate ways, of providing opportunities for participants to negotiate their participation and for in-the-moment challenges be dealt with collaboratively and reflexively are stressed. To illustrate our approach, we provide a number of consent tools and describe how they were utilised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2011, the illicit online marketplace ‘Silk Road’ opened for business. Located on the darknet, accessed via the Tor browser, Silk Road was the first of a new breed of darknet marketplaces (DNMs) and smartphone app-based drug markets. Participants on these transact under closely guarded aliases using sophisticated encryption. This article examines how ethnographers might study DNMs and the app-based drug trade. I spent over four years observing and interacting on these marketplaces and associated chat forums, following offline participant observation in a variety of criminal markets which provide useful methodological comparison to the DNM and smartphone app fieldwork sites. This article discusses my methods, highlights differences in online versus offline ethical concerns and risks, and I make suggestions to further the development of a formal methodology for digital ethnography of criminal and hidden online populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital data is constitutive of many forms of popular culture and user engagement. How data feeds back and is integrated into practice is of critical importance when it comes to analysing the place of the ‘self’ in contemporary culture. This article provides an account of video-blogging on YouTube. It takes as its case study three UK ‘YouTube Celebrities’ – Charlie McDonnell, Chris Kendall and Benjamin Cook – and focuses upon three vlogs which all express disquiet with their celebrity. This unease is articulated in relation to the digital consummation of self YouTube provides its users. Through a textual and performance analysis the article explores the cultural heritage of the vlog in what Charles Taylor calls western culture’s ‘expressive turn’. It argues that what a digitised popular culture gives us is a novel space to rework longstanding cultural ideals around the self, individuality and self-expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on a series of collaborative studies led by the author where co-investigation with peer-researchers has played a central role. The first concerns work with young people, trained to enable them to participate as peer-researchers in a child mobility study in Ghana, Malawi and South Africa; the second a research project on youth and mobile phones, in which some of those young peer-researchers have a continued involvement; the third a study of older people’s mobility in Tanzania, conducted in collaboration with an international NGO. Experience in these projects illustrates the complexities of co-investigation, not least the ethical concerns which have to be addressed when working with commonly marginalized people, whatever their age, but it also highlights the potential rewards which such collaborations can bring to individual peer-researchers, to academic research quality and, in the longer term, towards better policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the questioning of the neutral objective researcher, reflexivity has jumped to the forefront of qualitative research, thus positioning the embodied researcher within the research process. In its power to reveal tacit embodied social structures, reflexivity is touted as the hallmark of methodological validation while also being described as a messy process, particularly in participatory research. In this article, we use illustrative examples from our participatory research exploring the healing practices of racialized minority youth in Canada to highlight the limits of reflexivity and participation. We examine the messy processes in the preliminary phase of our research project and the invaluable insights we took into developing a creative methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "On the ethics of interviewing for discourse analysis" by Martyn Hammersley.

The focus is an ethical dilemma that arises, in an acute form, in interviews for studies using constructionist forms of discourse analysis. Informants typically assume that researchers are aiming to document their experiences, feelings, perspectives, etc., as features of a collectively shared world; an assumption that is probably reinforced by the rationales researchers provide, and by their behaviour. Yet, in such studies, the purpose of interviews is actually to generate displays of discursive practices, rather than to elicit information about the world or about people’s individual subjectivities. This discrepancy amounts to deception, but attempts to remedy it are likely to be counterproductive because of the gap between the natural attitude and a constructionist analytic orientation. From the perspective of some currently influential views about ethics, relating to informed consent and doing research ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ people, this would disqualify such research. However, these views are by no means beyond challenge. In these terms, discourse analysis poses important questions about currently accepted views of research ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Ethics Application Repository is an open access, online repository of exemplary Institutional Review Board (ethics committee) application forms donated by scholars who want to gift some of their expertise and wisdom to novice researchers in the spirit of a public good. This article describes the background for the genesis of the project, the building of The Ethics Application Repository as a proof of concept and the initial supportive and critical feedback from graduate students, graduate advisors and Institutional Review Board members. The article also serves as a call for donations from qualitative researchers to enlarge and develop stage 2 of the project, the development of special collections featuring children, information research, innovative methodologies and community-based participatory research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an exploration of the tensions inherent in the interaction between ethics and methodological innovation. The authors focus on three cases of innovation in qualitative research methods in the social sciences: netnography, child-led research and creative research methods. Using thematic analysis of data collected through semi-structured interviews with the innovators and commentators on the innovations, they discuss issues of ethical responsibility, democratisation of research, empowerment and the relationship between research and the academy. This article highlights the ways in which innovation is about reflexivity as well as new techniques. It shows how innovation may be about managing risk rather than taking risks: the innovators are cautious as much as creative, operating within a culture in which procedural ethical regulation acts to limit methodological development and in which they (and other users of their method/approach) communicate the safe qualities alongside the innovative qualities of their approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]