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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]

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Witchcraft-related violence in Ghana has been the subject of international media attention for decades. In the past few years, increasing interest in the sensational stories of Ghana’s northern witch camps have enthralled readers and elicited furore. While much of this outcry is motivated by concern, it is also greatly misinformed regarding local realities, witchcraft phenomena, and the impact of international interventionism in general, and in Ghana specifically. This paper aims to stress the importance of informed and reflexive engagement with the subject of witchcraft in Ghana and elsewhere. Based in part on my own doctoral research on the subject of witchcraft and witchcraft-related violence in Ghana, this paper stresses the power of language of international actors, looking specifically at the discursive interventions of one non-governmental organization, ActionAid International, that have led the charge against the witch camps in Northern Ghana. This paper concludes that a critical discourse analysis of Action Aid International’s ‘anti-witch camp campaign’ reveals numerous layers of neo-colonial intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]