Fieldwork Safety and IRB Detachment
Emily Channell
Doctoral Candidate at CUNY
In the fall of 2014, three months after returning from fieldwork in Ukraine, I was required to submit a “Continuing Review Form” for my university’s IRB. After spending several months the year before arguing with the IRB about what forms needed to include participants’ acceptance of being photographed and what an “official” translation would mean before they would approve my research, I was frustrated to read the questions on the Continuing Review.
“Have there been any unanticipated events, protocol violations, adverse events, subject complaints and/or DSMB reports since the last continuing review that have not already been reported to the IRB?” “Has any new information come to light that might affect the risk/benefit ratio of the study?”
These questions seemed absurd in the context of what I experienced during my fieldwork. About two months into my stay in Ukraine, mass mobilizations of hundreds of thousands of people began in Kyiv, the capital and my research base. The mobilizations and a protest camp continued until my research ended in June of the next year. In January 2014, people began to be killed and to disappear from hospital beds. In February, nearly 100 people were shot and killed by militarized police forces, whose provenance is still uncertain. Representatives from the US Embassy met with me and other state-funded grantees, attempting to convince us to leave the country (admitting only in March that they could not require us to evacuate under any circumstances). My fieldwork — and whether I would finish with enough legitimate “data” to write something at the end of it — was rife with uncertainties that mirrored the feelings of my local friends who participated in my research project. At home, those in my program watching from afar sent comments like, “How exciting!” and “I wish something like that would happen in my field site, it’s not that interesting here.”
My experience forced me to consider ethics in research in ways that I never anticipated. I spent months trying to figure out my relationship with the protests in Ukraine themselves and whether it was possible to engage with protesters in a critical way without endangering myself and others around me. This included attempts to obtain “research materials” in a way that did not put participants in and supporters of my research at risk. As an American citizen, I was forced to consider leaving the country under the guise of a relatively official evacuation, leaving my friends behind to face whatever came their way — and I was lucky to have the privilege to make the choice to stay despite my government’s recommendations. When I did return to the US at the end of my grant period, I was asked to sum up my experience to others who had peripherally observed what had happened. In this context, when I received the IRB’s request for a Continuing Review that was so detached from everything I had experienced, I was angry. If they cared so much about whether someone wanted to have their photo taken, couldn’t they at least bother to ask if all the people who helped me with my research were still alive?
The realities of ethnographic research — which, I suspect, most practitioners know — is that what happens on the ground often looks completely different than what was proposed in a grant or IRB application. Before I left the US, my advisor told me to keep my eyes open for everything, and that my final project would look nothing like what I thought (I don’t think even she knew how right she would be). Knowing this, it was extremely hard to take seriously the details expected in my IRB application, because “risk” and “benefit” are terms that are contextually fluid in ways that IRBs do not recognize. In my application, I presented my research in what I felt was an extremely detached and even falsified way, knowing that my field experience would not fit the stagnant outlines expected from the IRB.
When the protests in Kyiv began, I quickly dove into the mobilizations with my Ukrainian friends, who are largely leftist and feminist activists. From the beginning, these people were attacked and harassed during the protests, which were being touted by Western media either as the true representation of democracy in Ukraine or as a neo-fascist takeover. Of course, the reality was infinitely more complex. As days and weeks went by, it