Ethics Forum

Posted confidentially on the author’s behalf.

How can anthropologists successfully publish images without compromising individuals’ rights to privacy? I’ve wrestled with this question for over thirty years while conducting fieldwork and running ethnographic field schools. During these decades, I’ve seen that taking a camera out can create discomfort for some, ambivalence in others, and garner firm refusals from still others. Thus, my approach to taking and publishing photos has been two-pronged, and coincides with general ethical standards in the discipline. If individuals agree to have their images shown with their names visible, I get their written consent or verbal acknowledgement that I can publish, and explain where they will be published. If they don’t give permission, I don’t publish their photos. However, the ethics of publishing photos has become more complicated in this era when so much digital content has become accessible to a global audience via the Internet. Often neither the photographer nor the subject have knowledge of, nor control over, who is viewing and possibly downloading these photos. 

The potential consequences of publishing photos of recognizable individuals became acute for me when an open access anthropological journal published an article containing a photo of an extended family I have known for decades. This image included approximately a dozen family members, with some posing while others seemed oblivious to the camera as they went about daily activities.[i] It was surprising to see this included in an article that neither discussed their community nor anyone in the family. I emailed a link to the article to Robert (a pseudonym), the family member I know best, with a note explaining that it had recently been published. He responded with a number of questions I could not answer, including “What is this?” and “Why us?” He iterated that they were not involved in the research and did not know the author, nor who took the photo. 

Robert and his siblings were perplexed about why this photo – which appeared to be decades old – had been selected to illustrate an article discussing current conditions in a different village. Robert asked how the journal had gotten the photo of his family, and why they published it. He asked more than once, “Who gave them permission to publish this?” He described publication of this image as a violation of his family’s human rights and spoke of feeling they had been exploited. He replied to my offer to contact the editors with a request to take the photo down by saying, “Please. My mother is in it.” These last words underscored the poignancy of the situation, as family members were grieving the relatively recent loss of their beloved mother, who was featured prominently in the photo. 

Fortunately, the process of removing the photo went quickly. I contacted the author, who forwarded my message to the editor with a request to remove the photo. The editor explained that it had been chosen to add visual interest to the article, which had been submitted without images. The photo was intentionally selected from a site boasting a Creative Commons License, which assures copyright protection. The editors asked me to convey their apologies to the family. Robert accepted the apology and thanked all involved for removing the photo so quickly. He said he “Thanked God” that the photo was not in a book or printed journal, which would have been “more permanent.” Nonetheless, family members remain dissatisfied with answers about how and why their privacy was invaded. Although the photo is no longer visible in the article, Robert’s query, “What gives anthropologists the right to do this?” resonates.

Additional questions that arose from this situation include, How can anthropologists apply the same level of respect for confidentiality regarding the use of images that we do when publishing text?  What are our professional responsibilities to those whose images we publish? These issues are debated in multiple blogs and articles that examine our general responsibilities when publishing photos from the field, and more recent discussions of images published online. Eshe Lewis’ (2020) piece exploring “The Power of Images,” reifies this concern, as she recognizes that the process of selecting photos for the journal Sapiens “often raises sticky anthropological questions about ethics, representation, and storytelling.” Her discussion of the importance of adhering to ethical practices, including securing “confirmation that they received consent from the people pictured” (https://www.sapiens.org/culture/anthropology-image-representation/), harkens back to the 2012 Principles of Professional Responsibility (PPR) that guides our research. But are these guidelines comprehensive enough in an age when photographs can be posted on the internet without their subjects’ consent?

As we know, authors are required to get photographers’ permission to publish images and must credit them, with words such as “photo courtesy of…”. However, there is not always a corresponding requirement that subjects give consent to have their likenesses used. As the example of Robert’s family illustrates, this takes on added gravitas when images become more accessible to a global audience through the Internet and other types of mass media. Given the potential for these images to be downloaded or shared, it is all the more imperative that we ask ourselves how we can insure that the context for publication of a photo is fully explained and the subjects’ permission obtained. They should be informed that even those who consent to having their photo used for a specific purpose in a particular venue may later learn that these images appear in an open access or online journal that is widely accessible to Internet surfers beyond students and scholars.

This returns to the importance of maintaining privacy, an issue that is at the very core of the AAA ethics statement. We do this in myriad ways when writing, most commonly by using pseudonyms. And yet assuring confidentiality is significantly more complicated when publishing photos in which individuals are clearly identifiable. The section of the AAA publishing FAQs concerning photographs advises that although there are exceptions for images of a “highly personal or offensive nature,” in general, the “assumption that the use of photographs is publication in scholarly journals, and not, for instance, being used for advertising, greeting cards or other expressly commercial enterprises” means it is not always necessary to get the subject of photos’ permission to publish them. Indeed, we rely on our colleagues to responsibly present images from the field after obtaining consent, and to follow the PPR in using caution by not publishing identifiable images that might cause the subjects embarrassment or discomfort without the subjects’ consent. Nonetheless, these strategies are not foolproof. We cannot know what images – even if seemingly harmless – may cause pain or distress to those in them.

In an age when technology enables us to download photos in a matter of seconds, we cannot predict nor guarantee how images (nor text, but that’s a matter for a different discussion) will be used once published.  Nor can we have confidence that even when a photographer has given free access to use an image, the subject(s) also consent to have their image(s) displayed on the Internet. Thus, I consistently remind myself and my students that we must take care at all times to respect the privacy of individuals we photograph, and especially if they did not realize how widely their image may be visible. Critical ways to move forward include developing policies that explicitly convey  in permission forms the risks associated with publishing photographs, to allow participants and photographers to fully understand where the photos may eventually be posted – including on the Internet – and may subsequently be used for other purposes. Journal editors can add obtaining this permission to the checklist that authors complete when submitting an article. Finally, authors and editors should commit to a policy where, as in this case, all efforts will be made to remove a photo that has been published without the subjects’ permission. In this way we can further our commitment to protecting identities and confidentiality.

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[i] The family gave me permission to talk about their experience provided their identities are obscured. To further protect privacy, neither the journal, its’ editors nor any anthropologists involved are identified. 

Filed under: ethics statement, fieldwork, informed consent, publication, Visual anthropology | Comments Off on Ethical considerations when publishing fieldwork photos in online sources

Lise M. Dobrin, University of Virginia

Ethics education is not about transferring to novices the rules and principles of ethical behavior. Rather, it’s about socializing students into habits of reflection and cultivating their sensitivity to the competing, often mutually contradictory needs and interests of multiple stakeholders. So it’s a shame to approach ethics education as “training” like one gets from the widely adopted CITI system, which allows ethics instruction to be administered in the form of short, discrete, conveniently auditable online modules that are too often perfunctorily completed and then forgotten.

In the discipline of anthropology, ethics education has an additional problem. Anthropologists tend to focus disproportionately on the treatment of fieldwork participants, even though professional practice in anthropology, as in all disciplines, presents ethical challenges across all domains of work.

When NSF announced in 2009 that it was requiring applicant institutions to “provide appropriate training and oversight in the responsible and ethical conduct of research”, the University of Virginia Department of Anthropology took it as an opportunity to develop its own departmental Responsible Conduct of Research program: a workshop series on topics in “Fieldwork, Ethics, and Ethnographic Writing” (FEEW) that runs parallel to the department speaker series. This experimental program has been more successful than we ever could have imagined when we started it.

Building on the primary guidance then available in regard to format¹ (e.g. face to face discussion, faculty participation), subject matter (e.g., data management, authorship and publication, collaboration, human subjects protections), and duration/frequency (8 contact hours, early in a student’s career), we developed an 8-hour program that has by now been taken over by rotating pairs of enthusiastic and creative graduate student leaders. It is now primarily student-run, though with guidance and input from a faculty adviser.

Rather than aiming for coverage, which would in any case be incomplete, the workshop aims for relevance and interest. In addition to a 2-hour IRB tutorial, program organizers run three 2-hour group discussions annually on varying topics collaboratively planned by the students and the faculty adviser. Group size is generally 10-20 people. Here is a sample of the workshop topics covered in recent years:

The format consists of short experience-based presentations by a handful of panelists followed by full group discussion. Panelists typically include both faculty and post-field grad students. Discussions are facilitated by the program’s student leaders. Occasionally we have invited outside presenters, e.g., the intellectual property workshop featured an attorney from our university’s General Counsel office, and the journal publishing workshop featured Q&A with the editor of a journal. In the days before covid, snacks and drinks were always served.

In designing the program, our overarching goal was to prepare the next generation of anthropologists we trained to be ethically sensitive in every aspect of the work they do. In anthropology, knowledge frequently emerges in an open-ended way from situations that are not rigorously controlled by the researcher. Students work in diverse settings, from tribal college offices in the US Northern Plains, to rural villages in Papua New Guinea, to online chat rooms. Multiple subfields of the discipline are represented in the department, with methods that include archaeological excavation, analysis of video-recorded interaction, and participant observation. Given this great diversity and open-endedness, there would be no way to effectively target “the right” set of topics and issues that need to be covered for every student. Instead, we thought the most basic lesson all students should learn was that ethics is everywhere and calls for ongoing alertness and engagement. We wanted to create an environment in which ethical reflection was explicit (so conscious), relevant (so rewarding to discuss), and systematically integrated into the professional life of the community into which students were being socialized. After establishing a program that had these qualities, we then shifted the responsibility to the students to plan and implement it.

The success of UVA Anthropology’s FEEW RCR program is evident from its full integration into the life of the department and the enthusiasm with which graduate students have embraced it. The students are aware that the program fulfills an NSF requirement, but the “compliance” motivation is by now so backgrounded that students say they would continue to run it and attend even if the requirement were dropped. Students continue to attend workshops and agree to present in them long after their 8-hour obligation has been fulfilled. They proudly describe the FEEW program to prospective students during admission events and to fellow students from other institutions when they meet at conferences. There are several roles for student volunteers in the Anthropology department, and the FEEW student leader positions are among the most coveted. They enjoy hearing their professors and fellow students speak in an open-ended way about ethically challenging experiences they have had and how they have dealt with them. Faculty receive the FEEW workshop email announcements, and a handful typically show up to each workshop simply out of interest in the topic or to listen to particular presenters. But some faculty involvement is always ensured by the regular inclusion of faculty serving as panelists.

The FEEW requires a faculty member to agree to serve as the FEEW adviser and compliance coordinator, and it requires two rotating volunteer student leaders. These aren’t very big jobs. Most importantly, what it requires is a flexible administration: UVA’s VP for Research had to agree to let us experiment with this program and trust us to keep records for use in compliance reporting. We are fortunate that we were allowed to develop this important and meaningful program instead of being required to do CITI modules.

Please feel free to reach out to me at dobrin@virginia.edu if you are interested in learning more about the program or would like to consult about how you might implement a similar program on your campus.

¹https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/not-od-10-019.html

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Filed under: Graduate education | Comments Off on A Model for “Training” Anthropology Students in Responsible Conduct of Research

by Catharina Laporte

I am a cultural anthropologist. For the last two years, I have been immersed in developing and facilitating a class that specifically fulfills the ethics and professionalism component of the ABET (Accreditation Board of Engineering & Technology education) criterion.  Towards this end, I introduced the concept of role-playing in the class room — and it has taken off like wildfire!  I have never felt so invigorated about the application of anthropological thinking in the real world.  Why? … and what can an anthropologist teach an engineer?   

On the surface, anthropology and many of the STEM disciplines share professional and ethical values: do no harm (public welfare); follow the Code of Ethics of the discipline; respect fellow professionals; avoid conflicts of interest; avoid bribery and corruption etc. — but I feel the lessons and connection between the two lie deeper than that.  Ultimately, ethical and critical thinking require many of the basic tenants of all anthropology:  thinking holistically, the importance of building rapport and communication, recognizing ethnocentrism (it its many guises), and focusing on the influence that cultural diversity has in problem solving.

At the onset of this project, I started with a pilot group of 25 students. We’ve added more students every semester and experimented with different activities and case studies. Now we have a highly interactive, writing intensive, innovative, interdisciplinary class, ANTH370: Cultural Diversity and Ethics, that reaches 750+ STEM and anthropology students each year.   Students clamor to get in to the class and sections fill within minutes of being opened.  Every week I leave the class invigorated and inspired to do more.

Our primary objective was to provide an alternative to existing lecture-based engineering ethics curriculum and incorporate modern pedagogical theory: active, inclusive learning.  We also wanted to create an enduring interdisciplinary learning community that gave students a safe place to experiment, reflect, make mistakes, bring their own perspectives and research, and voice their concerns, experiences and opinions.  My TAs and I  quickly realized that just focusing on normative ethical stances and epic engineering failure case studies (e.g. Columbia Shuttle disaster or Gulf of Mexico Macondo blowout) was not the way forward.  Students felt little affinity with these tales.  We needed to move beyond traditional philosophical teaching to encompass fundamental anthropology concepts overlaid by the influence of culture and cultural construction of normalcy.  This task was twofold.  Firstly, we needed to synthesize real world ethical problems with the Code of Ethics of corporations and professional associations, together with individual worldviews, to view (and teach) ethics holistically. And secondly, we also needed to identify and holistically analyze opportunities to ‘do good’ — these opportunities are often embedded in the minutia of everyday life.

Role playing is an innovative activity that we introduced into the class to encompass these objectives. A caveat: don’t try this alone!  Without the 110% support of my Administration this huge interdisciplinary endeavor would not have been possible. 

This is no easy task.  Active learning? Role playing?  What is that? …and how do you manage 25/50/100 students in the classroom all having conversations at once?  From faculty detractors, we heard: “Where’s the lecture?”; “…and where are the readings on your syllabus?”; and “What?!? No textbook or exams?!?”  Engineering students, in particular, came to class with rigid conceptions of normalcy. Most are preconditioned to expect ‘lecturing’ and exams; after 3-4 years of being lectured and quizzed on black/white and right/wrong answers, they assume their engineering culture, their way of thinking, and their way of knowing, is the ‘right’ or ‘only’ way to think.  Anthropologists often turn to an old but good article to illustrate the concept of an etic perspective and alternate viewpoints — Body Ritual among the Nacirema (Horace Miner, 1956). However, in my experience, reading and discussing this article does not make much of an impact beyond superficial understanding.  Student do not creatively synthesize, utilize, analyze or evaluate the concept (hitting the upper levels of Bloom’s taxonomy) until they experience something themselves and get to ‘walk a few miles in another’s shoes.’

Role playing is an impactful classroom activity that enables students to ‘walk in another’s shoes’. Through the role play, debrief and subsequent reflections, students actively solve problems, work collaboratively in a community of peers, experience real-world application of knowledge, and reflect on their learning processes. Scholars from many disciplines assert that role playing is particularly good in many dimensions of skill acquisition: personal, interpersonal, cultural, cognitive and professional.

In our class, we initially introduced a role-playing exercise (called the ‘water boiling exercise’) in the second week of the semester.  We identified a real world case study of failed innovation((Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of innovations. 5th ed. Everett M. Rogers. n.p.: New York : Free Press, 2003., 2003. Texas A&M University General Libraries, EBSCOhost (accessed September 7, 2017).)) that had ethical consequence, required critical thinking, was multi-dimensional and had multiple disparate perspectives.  Our primary objectives were to illustrate the fundamental concept of ethnocentrism and introduce STEM students to alternate epistemologies (ways of knowing), axiologies (what is valued) and methodologies.  We were sure that most of the STEM students, given the opportunity, would cling fiercely to a positivist, quantitatively driven, predict and control paradigm.  It took a lot of preparation and we were extremely nervous going in to the exercise. To our delight, the majority (~90%) of students embraced the idea and really got into it – it was clear they more than simply understood the objectives and concepts – they lived them!  We expected that this would be an impactful class, but what we did not expect was that it would evolve into a semester long discussion revisiting and expounding upon the lessons learned in the water boiling exercise in nearly every subsequent class of the semester.

In the role-play, students were grouped into characters or perspectives.  Each group was given their character attributes, their objectives and clues that they had to ‘divulge’ during the course of the role play — much like a murder mystery dinner.  The students worked through the role play, with very little guidance from myself or the TAs, exactly as anticipated: some demonstrating ethnocentric assumptions and asserting that their way of ‘doing things’ was the best and only way of thinking.  Some failed to acknowledge that there could possibly be other ways of thinking while others got angry and/or frustrated, or felt belittled or marginalized. They were actively engaged — just like the real world of problem solving and ethical decision making.  Weeks into the semester and they were still talking about and referencing the role play.  As the class progressed and their exposure to ethical considerations broadened, they often commented that if they were to do it again, they would tackle the role play entirely differently.  Not only did this exercise and its subsequent dialogue meet our university core curriculum objectives (critical thinking, communication and social responsibility), it also met many of the ABET criterion, and course learning objectives.

Over time we have developed multiple role-play scenarios based on real world, sometimes failed, engineering activities to illustrate other concepts such as the impact of culture on human decision making, fractious problems, differing ethical stances, bribery and corruption, and the importance of communication and rapport building.  We have found that the key to success of a role-playing scenario comes from ensuring there is opportunities for diverse opinions, worldviews and expertise to be brought to the table and debated.  With diversity comes insight into other worldviews and ultimately better solutions.

What I have personally learned from this exercise is that if we look beyond the superficial there are many parallels between what outwardly appear to be incongruent disciplines, their theoretical perspectives and what they value.  I learned that active learning can transcend disciplinary boundaries, and that ultimately, we all want to ‘do good’.  By teaching the fundamental anthropological concepts in a STEM classroom, we can not only help teach critical thinking and ethical decision making, but we can also improve the overall quality and longevity of STEM projects in the real world.

 

About the Author: 

Catharina Laporte is an Instructional Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University. As a cultural anthropologist with a passion for quality education and a pragmatic theoretical perspective, she is specifically interested in how applied anthropology, and an appreciation for cultural diversity, can provide different perspectives on real-world phenomenon, projects and problems. Having extensive international experience in multinational corporations, her current work focuses on improving the education experience by emphasizing the importance on incorporating diverse perspectives into the STEM ethics and professionalism curriculum.   Email:  claporte@tamu.edi  Personal website: www.idiglife.com  or Faculty website: https://anthropology.tamu.edu/catharina-laporte

Filed under: collaboration, doing good, teaching | Comments Off on Interdisciplinary Ethical Role-Playing

by Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein

This post originally appeared on Everyday Linguistic Anthropology

Filed under: media ethics | Comments Off on The bonuses of singular ‘they’: anonymity and bias avoidance

By Rafael Estrada Mejía (São Paulo State University)

Last year, Brazil was in the world’s spotlight due to political turmoil and to its appeal as a tourism destination giant.  The global media followed with ferocity both former President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment with its accompanying massive protests for and against it, and the 2016 Olympic Games, when for the first time in history, ten refugee athletes from four countries competed together as the Refugee Olympic Team.  The great irony is that, in the same time period, almost sixty thousand people were displaced because of sports mega-events such as the World Cup and the Rio Olympic Games.  This occurred to make space for sports venues, tourism projects and transport, and to improve the international image of the host cities by eliminating slums from areas exposed to visitors and television audiences.

Two main concerns motivated me to write this piece.  The first one is the unrest I felt because, for the most part, the Brazilian elite and middle classes (many of whom are white, intellectuals and university professors) paid no attention to the forced displacements, and later enthusiastically supported the coup d’état against Rousseff.  Although outraged, I was not surprised. This scene is repeated in Brazil’s history. Disdain for democracy is the common denominator of both the coups of 1964 and of 2016.  The difference is that this most recent coup follows the rules of financial capitalism, thus requiring the neoliberalization of the state and making both dictatorial and social welfare regimes anachronistic.   

The second concern has to do with questioning the ethical implications of my own practice as an anthropologist and the role of social scientists at large in today’s political conjuncture. This reflection was fueled by my experiences as a postdoctoral researcher conducting studies of the elite.  I am the only anthropologist in a research team formed by a group of renowned geographers who study the production of urban space in mid-size cities in the states of São Paulo and Paraná.

One of the research lines of the project is the real estate sector and the role of closed condominiums (the Brazilian version of US gated communities) in the context of public space

production. My contribution to the the study of the processes of subjectivation of the emergent Brazilian elites who live in these spaces. I also study how closed condominiums have become one of the most desired living arrangements for all Brazilians. The project aims to overcome the dominant macropolitical framework used to understand closed condominiums to move the focus to a micropolitical approach.  My understanding of these frameworks is based on the French thinkers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, for whom both macropolitics and micropolitics are inherently political, public and private, and operate simultaneously from small to large levels so the distinction is based on the scale of the components interacting in a network, and not the scale of the network itself.

The Brazilian version of the 1% is not composed of millionaires, but by those who earn more than 30 times the monthly base salary (currently at R/.880 or approximately 244 dollars). The 1% in Brazil are people we see walking down the streets every day. It includes university professors, many of whom chose to live in closed condominiums.  For the record, I am not part of that elite and do not live in in a closed condominium.  But many of the professors I have interviewed for my research are part of this elite; some of them are social scientists and shared with me the belief that our role as researchers should be strictly confined to the analytical space.  These remarks have made me wonder about the role of academics and intellectuals in Brazil.  What are the implications of being progressive, analytic, and critical only within the confines of academic walls, and once the daily labor ends, comfortably returning to an individual paradise inside the walls of the closed condominium?  What are the mechanisms that allow us to ignore the criminalized alterity that the media and institutional powers have constituted and reconstituted? What are the ethical and political challenges of anthropologists and social scientists in the Brazilian context? 

The discipline of anthropology in Brazil tends to look at applied anthropology with disdain. This contrasts with other Latin American countries where there is a seamless flow between anthropological reflection, university life and applied projects.  Except for the committed work of anthropologists with indigenous peoples and peoples of African descent, Brazilian anthropology has tended to be restricted to university life.   

Studying Brazilian elites as an anthropologist and from a micropolitical perspective suggests a framework applicable beyond academia, as a map to navigate this complex world. By looking at the mode of existence of privileged groups who choose to isolate themselves from public life, we see that we cannot be committed and engaged at the macropolitical level, while remaining complacent at the micropolitical level.  We need to find a way to eliminate microfascism from our discourse, our acts, our heart and our pleasures. By microfascism, I mean the desire that individuals have that others follow their own personal rules, which ultimate enable fascism at the state level. This kind of totalitarian view operates in both the public and private spheres.

It is important to suspend common sense or what Brazilian scholar Renato Ortiz calls the “a-critic consensus.”  It is important to stop using the concepts of ethics and morality interchangeably.  Morality deals with a series of external coercive norms, assumed to be universal and based on punishment.  Ethics, on the contrary, deals with a series of facultative rules through which individuals constitute themselves as subjects, problematize their own actions, and create new modes of existence. Brazil is in dire need of ethically committed and engaged scholars.

Studying the elites is indeed a way to combat inequality in a country considered among the most unequal in the world.  However, this is certainly not enough.  It is essential to overcome the paralysis that sometimes accompanies the social sciences, to go beyond the academic sphere and reach a truly ethical dimension. It is essential to demonstrate acts of resistance in our lives, and to oppose all the established forms of fascism to impede that more be erected. As Brazilian scholar Suely Rolnik once said, “It is time for micropolitics to guide us!”

Filed under: activism, doing good, practicing/applied, the state | Comments Off on Ethical Questions in Post-impeachment Brazil

By Marnie Thomson

I share this Facebook post with the permission of Berhanu Gurach, an Ethiopian refugee who lives in Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania. He posted this six days after Trump signed his first executive order banning citizens of specific Muslim countries and all refugees entry to the U.S.

Berhanu’s post represents the despair of refugees who endure in UN camps, clinging to the hopes of resettlement in the U.S. It expresses the dismay of those for whom promises of resettlement have now been reneged. His picture captures his raw emotion in the immediate wake of the first ban. Berhanu posted this before the first stay, and the ban had taken effect immediately, even in remote refugee camps like Nyarugusu.

During this time, refugees from Nyarugusu camp began asking me questions. “Why does Trump hate us?” “Why did Obama like us?” “What about the 30,000 that the U.S. promised to take from Tanzania?” “What is going to happen to us now?” Refugees who had already been resettled in the U.S. also had questions. “How does this order affect those of us who are already here?” “Will Trump issue an order about us?” The one question that refugees in the camp and those already in the US both asked me was: “What can we do?”

This is the ethical question I have been asking myself too. It stems from a place of dismay and distress. As Bianca Williams contends, emotion shapes not only how we embrace and understand social theory but also how we anthropologists position ourselves as allies and take action.

After the first Muslim/immigration ban, many anthropologists also took to social media.

Some joined the airport protests or started contributing to the ACLU and other organizations. The AAA called for the immediate reversal of the executive order. AES endorsed the AAA stance and contributed additional points in their own statement against the order. APLA/PoLAR issued a three-part response to the ban called Speaking Justice to Power. Six of us spoke out as anthropologists. In our classrooms, we spoke with our students about the implications of the ban. 

Do anthropological ethics need to change in this new Trump era? In many ways, no. As Ruth Benedict said, anthropology’s purpose is to make the world safe for human differences. Yet as we work against racism, xenophobia, nationalism, white supremacy, and many other social injustices, we also need to take seriously anthropology’s complicity in creating today’s political landscape. In the special issue of American Ethnologist on the 2016 Brexit referendum and Trump election, Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa urge anthropologists to unsettle our field, including recognizing the ways in which this political moment is not exceptional, but rather is consistent with both domestic and global political currents.

As part of unsettling anthropology, we need to ask: how should our ethical engagements change? How should they stay the same?

In a time where public anthropology may no longer suffice, Carole McGranahan suggests we take cues from the National Park Service and other governmental institutions and consider what going rogue would mean for anthropology. In her words, “Public anthropology is to be engaged. It is to communicate anthropological knowledge in a way that will be useful. Rogue anthropology is to be enraged. It is to communicate anthropological knowledge in a way that will disrupt, stop, resist, refuse.”

Rage, as Glen Couthard shows in Red Skins, White Masks, fuels the communal fire of resistance. By refusing and resisting Trump’s first immigration ban and seeking to disrupt and stop it, the anthropological responses mentioned above are the makings of a rogue or an enraged anthropology. What else might collective outrage mean for anthropology? Anthropologists should continue along the lines of producing swifter responses to more urgent matters. Anthropologists are well-positioned to respond quickly and incisively thanks to our longitudinal research, or what can at times seem like the field’s “unbearable slowness.” Our sustained commitments to specific communities also means that we can maintain the momentum of going rogue.

The federal court has overturned both of Trump’s executive orders. In some ways, however, the bans are still working. For example, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has not been back to Tanzania since Trump signed the first order on January 27. This means that no new cases can be approved for resettlement in the U.S. Moreover, refugee resettlement quotas have historically been determined by executive order so there is no telling what that means for the future of refugee entry to the U.S.

Furthermore, where does this leave refugee hosting states and aid organizations? In Tanzania, for example, an entire aid apparatus has been built around resettlement in Nyarugusu camp during the past three years. The Tanzanian government, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and its partnering organizations are now trying to figure out what to do with the infrastructure, funds, and staff they had designated for U.S. resettlement purposes.

Even overturned, the Muslim ban/immigration ban reverberates. Certainly, there are other communities of refugees, immigrants, and Muslims, as well as humanitarian organizations and state governments feeling its effects. This is not to mention the other executive orders and policy changes of the new administration. Anthropologists take their cues from the reactions of affected communities. Ethics, emotions, anthropology, and action are all entangled.

Just yesterday, another Nyarugusu resident messaged me to ask about the status of Trump’s order on refugees. He wanted all the details. I explained that a few days earlier I had corresponded with a UNHCR representative in Tanzania, who said that they were still waiting to hear if interviews for resettlement in the U.S. will resume. He was disillusioned to learn that there had been no new developments. As Renato Rosaldo has taught us, rage seethes with devastation and loss. This occurs even as emotional subjugation accompanies political subjugation, as Frantz Fanon has illustrated. Refugees’ disappointment, the UNHCR representative’s dismay, Berhanu’s despair: this is how we stay engaged and enraged. We stay tuned in—emotionally, ethically, anthropologically, and actively.

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Posted confidentially on the author’s behalf by the ethics blog editors

This is the story of how my collaboration with a coauthor collapsed over ethical concerns. Neither of us violated any formal ethical protocols. And yet, our ethical sensibilities were divergent, premised upon different agreements and conversations with members of the community we both work with. The story shows that while taking an open-ended “conversational” rather than “regulatory adherence” approach to ethics might help researchers attend to the contextual specificity of particular ethnographic projects, conversations between co-authors about their respective ethical agreements need to happen early on in a collaboration, and even then might not solve every problem. Which conversations are had, by whom and with whom? How do these conversations change over time? What is left unsaid, and how do such things come to matter when researchers work together?

Early in my research, community leaders explained to me their worries about how my work could lead to harm. Their concerns mostly involved keeping out of the public eye: on at least one occasion, the publication of a news story about their small community had subjected them to a visit by ethno-nationalist vandals. I was urged not to do things that could potentially attract this kind of harassment.

As my research continued, I learned that individuals could differ greatly in their attitudes toward privacy. While preparing to publish my first academic paper, I included information about someone that she objected to. Fortunately, we discovered this before I submitted the final version, so I was able to take it out. Since then, I have asked community members to review my manuscripts before I submit them for publication. Interestingly, the community leader I am closest to objects to this practice. He thinks that some people have unreasonable privacy concerns and that I give them too much say over my work. Through my experience with these different perspectives over a period of years, I have become highly sensitive to the political nature of privacy concerns and the importance of handling them with care.

I brought this heightened sensitivity to the collaborative writing project that eventually broke down. I noticed that my colleague had included photographs of people in the community in some of his prior work. When I mentioned this to the people featured, they seemed unpleasantly surprised to learn that their photos had been used in this way. I knew my colleague had positive relationships in the community, so after bringing the matter to his attention I let it drop.

But in the context of our co-authorship, my concerns resurfaced when he wanted to cite his prior work with the photographs. I worried that readers could follow the citation trail to identifying information of a sort that I had promised to keep private. My colleague resisted removing the citation on the grounds that to do so was improper scholarship. He suggested that we go back to one of the leaders for advice, but for me this was not a solution, given the differences of opinion that I knew existed in the community. Later, my colleague assured me he had signed consent forms to publish the images in question. This surprised me, since it flew in the face of my own agreement with community leaders to keep such information private. I understood later that my colleague and I had begun our work at different times and that the stakes might have been described differently to each of us. Even individual persons’ concerns seemed to have changed over time. But by the point I understood this, my relationship with my collaborator had become too strained to be readily repaired.

What this case of collaboration-gone-awry shows is that the conversations in “conversational ethics” are subject to matters of power, temporality, and happenstance. My colleague and I had divergent ethical dispositions, senses of responsibility, and understandings of risk. In part these emerged out of the different conversations we had had at different times with different community members—and in some cases, even with the same individuals. We had different understandings of who speaks with authority, and even which moments of conversation we should hold ourselves accountable to. Because we simply took for granted that our perspectives would align, we had no consensus on the ethical issues at stake and no clear way to move forward. We were both blindsided and hurt when we found ourselves in a collaboration that could not be sustained.

Speaking with my colleague about our respective ethical assumptions early on in the collaboration might have helped us avoid this outcome. However, before such dialogues can even begin, researchers need to be able to imagine that there are a range of ethical issues, positions, and agreements at stake, even when working within the same community. I hope that sharing this story helps show how this can be so, and motivates others to recognize this difficult but potentially important aspect of professional collaboration.

Filed under: accountability, collaboration, dissenting viewpoints, professional relationships, publication | Comments Off on Contingency in Conversational Consent and Turbulent Collaborations

By Scott Maher

Researchers are often asked to investigate sensitive topics — things that are very private, personal, embarrassing, or even incriminating to research participants. This is an ethical minefield.

I’d like to share a story about something that happened at UX Australia’s Design Research 2017 conference this afternoon, as a way in to talking about the ethical challenges of doing research on sensitive topics. (Side note: the conference was fantastic. You missed out if you weren’t there, but you can catch up when they post audio and slide decks of all the presentations soon!)

A funny (and not “ha-ha”) thing happened at the conference

In the second last talk of the day, Mary Landrak* from ThinkPlace presented some examples and reflections from research in and outside of Australia. One of the questions she raised was about methods and truth, captured here in a tweet:

Mary Landrak: Can we get intimate truths in an exploratory interview? #uxaustralia #designresearch

— Mimi Turner (@pocketv) March 9, 2017

To demonstrate this challenge, Mary then showed us two slides. The first contained the title “Ice (un)breaker.” And she gave us instructions for the activity: stand up, find someone next to you, ideally a stranger, and then, follow the instructions on the next slide. The instructions were:

Discuss with the stranger next to you:

When was the last time you engaged in risky sexual behaviour.

Here’s how that went for me.

When we were asked to stand, one of a group of three young women sitting in the row in front of me volunteered to be my icebreaker partner. Very kind. The only other person in my row was four or five seats away.

When the icebreaker prompt was shown on screen, a lot of chatter broke out in the room. We looked at each other and both began to blush.

Me: Well, this is awkward…

Her: [silence, looks at the screen, then at me, then at the screen]

Me (and this is my first big mistake): Uh, [nervous laughter] you go first.

Her: [silence, looks toward the other women in her row, looks at feet, looks back at me]

Me: No, you don’t have to…

Her: Well, last…[quickly tells me an answer to the prompt, then looks away, then looks back at me with what appears to be a fair bit of anxiety on her face]

Me: Oh, wow… uh, um [thinks ‘oh crap, what do I do now?!?’]. Oh, time’s up. [nervous laughter, sits down, feels shame for several minutes]

It was a visceral experience of just how uncomfortable it can be to talk about something very intimate with a stranger.

The prompt is loaded with layers of meaning: it asks participants to not just discuss a sexual experience, but specifically to talk about “risky sexual behaviour.” That’s even more loaded with moral baggage. Framing sexual behaviour as “risky” already positions it as morally wrong and irresponsible. And risky sexual behaviour may or may not be consensual: being a victim of sexual assault could easily be construed as “engaging in risky sexual behaviour.” In terms of ‘intimate truths,’ this is heavy stuff.

Let me pause here to do what I should have done in the moment:

I apologize to the anonymous stranger who volunteered to join me in an icebreaker activity and who may feel embarrassed, intimidated, or worse as a result of the interaction. I wish I had been more aware in the moment of just how bad it was for me to say: “you go first.” I regretted it almost instantly, and am sorry.

In our society, an older male telling (not asking) a younger female stranger to “go first” in divulging private, intimate information is not cool. I don’t think I need to explain here how it reflects male privilege and patriarchy.

The ethics of the ice (un)breaker

I can see both sides of an argument about whether this activity was appropriate for a conference.**

On one hand, I appreciate the chance to experience first-hand the discomfort and stress that research participants might feel. I’m a big fan of experiential learning, and given that researchers are often more privileged in general than participants (and as I’ll discuss below are almost always so in the context of research), intellectually discussing the discomfort a participant might feel is not likely to be as effective. I hope all of those present will remember this experience and use it to have more empathy for the research participants we depend on for our livelihoods.

On the other hand, we were given no advance warning that we might face a difficult situation during the talk. None of us could have consented to the activity, because none of us had any prior information it was coming, and the context and manner in which it was presented gave little opportunity to opt-out.

Further, what active teaching might have accompanied this moment was lost in the din of a crowd of researchers chattering awkwardly (and for some, with mild outrage). This could have been executed much better than it was — and even with prior information and a reminder that we could opt-out, it may have been an effective active learning experience.

I do appreciate that this experience gives me an opportunity to reflect on the ethical challenges raised in researching sensitive issues, and to write something that may be useful to other researchers.

Making this meaningful

Taking today’s experience and applying it to research on sensitive topics in general, I think there are three key things to cover: informed consent, privilege and power, and the risk of harm to participants.

Informed consent

As far as I’m aware at the moment, it’s virtually universal that research involving humans requires participants to give informed consent before the research begins. People must never be compelled to participate in research activities (so, research with prisoners and other marginalised people is particularly high risk in ethical terms).

They must have sufficient capacity and information to freely agree to participate in the research (so research with children requires more careful scrutiny, and deception about the purpose, process, or topic should be avoided unless it is absolutely necessary and the benefits outweigh the risks).

Researchers must also always recognise and respect the right of research participants to not answer a question, to not participate in part of the research, or to end the interaction altogether. No means no, and stop means stop. And we must not penalise participants for exercising this right.

Privilege and power

As researchers in businesses, governments, non-profits, or academic institutions, we often feel less-than-powerful. We’re typically small (underfunded, underappreciated) fish in a big pond.

In interactions with research participants, things are different. Where participants are promised incentives, we may appear to hold the power over whether they receive the incentive — thus making people feel compelled to continue through discomfort or distress, even if we don’t intend it.

As representatives of corporations, governments, universities, or other institutions, we may also carry the air of authority and power by association. In those instances, we are the institution, and the participant is often much smaller and less powerful — they are patients, customers, citizens, employees; Davids to our (implied) Goliath.

We must always remember — as I obviously forgot in today’s icebreaker — the role of gender, age, race, status, education, position, ethnicity, etc, etc, in shaping the relationships, even (especially?) fleeting ones between researcher and participant. Are there social and/or cultural forces in play that disempower participants and empower researchers when it comes to the information produced in our interactions? Yes, always! And be careful you don’t exploit those.

We must remember that as researchers, we are not extracting confessions like the CIA or the Spanish Inquisition. We must behave in ways that realise the inherent human dignity of research participants. We have to hold ourselves to a higher standard in the context of research than we do even in our day to day lives.

Do no harm

The Do No Harm principle is huge and complex in itself. It’s the first of the seven Principles of Professional Responsibility of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) for good reason. It’s also an area of significant ambiguity, which allows for debate and should guide deep consideration for any human research project. I would argue it should also be a guiding principle of business and innovation, but that’s a bit out of scope for today.

For the AAA, researchers must carefully consider what harm might come of a project before starting any research, and they must continually assess whether the risk of harm changes during the course of a project. They also recommend that “anthropologists should not only avoid causing direct and immediate harm but also should weigh carefully the potential consequences and inadvertent impacts of their work.” This holds whether the research is a purely academic endeavour, or intended to bring about some sort of positive change in the world. Unintended consequences can be just as — if not more — harmful as intended outcomes.

Harm can be understood and measured in many different ways — physical harm like inflicting temporary pain or doing longer term physical damage are the easy ones. Much more difficult are cases where social, emotional, or psychological harm may be involved. Are you discussing things that a participant would be embarrassed if other people found out about them? Then you need to be extra careful with confidentiality, at the very least. Are you asking people to tell you about traumatic experiences from the recent or more distant past? Red flags here!

Even when research is intended to support outcomes that improve participants’ and other people’s well-being, researchers and our sponsors/clients must weigh the potential benefits of a research project against the risk of harm to participants. Academic research ethics boards often do this very conservatively, and in that setting research is most likely intended to produce social good. In business settings, we should be weighing the risk of potential harm to research participants and customers (heavily) against the potential benefits to society and the business.

So what do we do about ‘intimate truths’?

Getting back to the methodological and ethical question at hand — we know that there are many reasons to conduct research about topics or experiences that might be sensitive, uncomfortable, or inherently risky to discuss. So how do we go about it, ethically?

Can we get intimate truths in an exploratory interview? Maybe. Can we do it without imposing our privilege and exploiting participants, however subtle that may be? Hmmm.

We must respect the dignity of participants, and their right to informed consent and to withdraw from research at any time. We must also be prepared to mitigate harm done by the research we undertake — and not just in terms of liability to ourselves, our clients, or our institutions.

Where researchers need to uncover intimate truths about people’s behaviours, attitudes, and experiences, we must be prepared to invest time and energy in developing trust. Trust is what makes it possible for people to share accurate information with us about their intimate lives, their secrets, their insecurities. Trust — not power — helps us get at truth.

To develop trust, we almost always need to develop relationships and engage in reciprocity, with patience, sensitivity, humility, and most of all respect for the people whose lives we enter.

Fortunately, several of the talks at today’s conference highlighted these points. It’s a good start.

Updates:

*When I first published this essay, I also wrote to Mary directly to thank her for her presentation and tell her about my mixed feelings with the activity she used. I also wanted to send her a link so she could read what I had written.

Mary’s reply was thoughtful and professional, and she both clarified her intention and owned her misjudgement of the audience’s response. She acknowledged that the exercise had gone very differently for some of us than she had expected when planning it, and that she regrets the offence it caused.

She also explained that her intention was to highlight the complex challenges we face as researchers when we need to elicit and explore deeply personal experiences and behaviours. This activity was meant to be an engaging moment for the audience at the conference and a means to open up discussion.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can all say that this situation could have been constructed differently to achieve those goals.

**UX Australia, in their event wrap-up email, apologised to attendees for any discomfort caused by the activity. They noted in the email that they have processes in place to prevent this sort of thing, including asking “all speakers to discuss with us anything that might be sensitive or cause discomfort for attendees.”

They also wrote that “We have spoken to the speaker about it and she is not welcome to speak at one of our events again.”

This post originally appeared on Medium.com.

Filed under: accountability, informed consent | Comments Off on Crossing the line with ‘intimate truths’: Can we do ethical research on sensitive topics?