Dr Rebecca Tapscott
Research Ethics in the Arts and Humanities: Understanding Global Trends and Their Implications
Research with people—especially that on socially and politically contentious topics—is rife with ethical issues. Social sciences as well as arts and humanities scholars are increasingly reflecting on how to best address these. Many of these debates have focused largely on ethics in practice, leaving questions of procedural ethics to the side. However, procedural ethics are important—they are increasingly required across all areas of research, they are the bedrock of institutional approaches to regulating ethics, and they shape ideas about what constitutes ethical research practice. This keynote presents new findings from the Research Ethics Governance dataset (REG), the first globally comprehensive dataset of national level ethics regulations. It shows that while almost all countries have research ethics requirements, they are almost exclusively concerned with biomedical and clinical studies—though the trend in changing to extend regulation to the social sciences and arts and humanities. It then presents a country case study to give shape and depth to the quantitative findings, illustrating how research ethics regulation can produce unanticipated and counterintuitive outcomes when transferred to contexts with different political economies of knowledge production.
Rebecca Tapscott is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of York. She runs two major research projects, one on the history of Resistance Councils in Uganda (funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation’s Special Programme on State, Society and Security), and another on the politics of research ethics in the social sciences (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Ambizione program). She is the convenor of the Ethics Governance Network, and serves as reviews editor for Civil Wars and an editorial board member for International Studies Review. Her work has appeared in leading journals across comparative politics, international relations, African studies, and development studies, and she is the author of Arbitrary States: Social control and modern authoritarianism in Museveni’s Uganda (OUP 2021), which was a finalist for the African Studies Associations’ Bethwell A. Ogot book prize.
professor kimberly theidon
In many human rights documents and much academic literature, silence is presented in the singular and represented as an adversary to the researcher in their quest for ethnographic insight (AKA a juicy bit of news). In contrast to Geertzian optimism regarding “thick description,” I have encountered more opacity than transparency in conducting my research. In contrast to the premise that the anthropologist may peer over the shoulders of the Balinese and read their cultural scripts as the Balinese themselves recite them, fieldwork amidst conflict raises numerous impasses, which may be information of another sort. The webs of significance that people have spun depend as much upon a turn of phrase or a colloquial expression, as they do points of refusal, practices of dissimulation, and silences in the plural. Drawing upon research in Peru and Colombia, I will discuss various secrets that were shared with me, and what those secrets were meant to do.
Kimberly Theidon is the Henry J. Leir Professor in International Humanitarian Studies at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. She received a master’s degree in Public Health and a PhD in Medical Anthropology both from the University of California at Berkeley. She is a medical anthropologist focusing on Latin America and her research interests include political violence, transitional justice, gender and queer studies, critical security studies, and the environmental humanities.
She is the author of many articles, commissioned reports, four books and an edited volume. Entre Prójimos: El conflicto armado interno y la política de la reconciliación en el Perú was awarded the Latin American Studies Association 2006 Premio Iberoamericano Book Award Honorable Mention for outstanding book in the social sciences published in Spanish or Portuguese. Her second book, Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru, was awarded the 2013 Honorable Mention from the Washington Office on Latin America-Duke University Libraries Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, and the 2013 Honorable Mention for the Eileen Basker Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology for research on gender and health. Her third book Legacies: Violence, Ecologies and Kin (2022) draws on her research in Peru and Colombia to analyze the multiple environments in which conception, pregnancy and childbirth unfold, environments that may lie far beyond the control of any one woman. From toxic chemicals to land mines, from rivers tinged with blood to angry mountain gods, her goal was to capture the multiple environments and actors that play a role in “distributed reproduction,” and to consider the human and more-than-human wages of war.
