Accountability

Accountability is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “liability to account for and answer for one's conduct, performance of duties, etc. (in modern use often with regard to parliamentary, corporate, or financial liability to the public, shareholders, etc.); responsibility.” [1]

The public aspects of accountability, and their centrality in social life, including social organisations and institutions, are highlighted by many scholars.[2] Accountability has been described as “the adhesive that binds social systems together,”[3] maintaining social contracts regarding various forms of service delivery and impacting citizenship.[4] According to Phillip E. Tetlock’s social judgment and choice model:

Accountability is a critical rule and a norm enforcement mechanism … Expectations of accountability are an implicit or explicit constraint on virtually everything people do (“If I do this, how will others react?”). Failure to act in ways for which one can construct acceptable accounts leads to varying degrees of censure.[5]

Norms of accountability allow individuals to recognise the possibility, even if unrealised, of expected evaluations by an external audience, in which explanations will be required, leading to consequences. Dwight D. Frink and Richard J. Klimoski point out that “people are constantly influenced by the potential for scrutiny and evaluation, and indeed, they likely expect to be held accountable.” [6] This type of awareness of one’s own accountability is defined by Angela T. Hall, Dwight D. Frink, and M. Ronald Buckley as “felt accountability”,[7]  suggesting that “accountability may be the most pervasive (and perhaps even the most powerful) single influence on human social behavior.” [8]

Within research, accountability is related with the aspiration for creating a positive research environment, on one hand, and taking responsibility for misconduct, on the other. For example, Universities UK published the Concordat to Support Research Integrity, a framework signed by various higher education, research and funding bodies, that “seeks to provide a national framework for good research conduct and its governance.”[9] The Concordat lists accountability as one of the five core elements of research integrity:

accountability of funders, employers and researchers to collectively create a research environment in which individuals and organisations are empowered and enabled to own the research process. Those engaged with research must also ensure that individuals and organisations are held to account when behaviour falls short of the standards set by this concordat.

Accountability is not only performed in response to external evaluation. Amit Dhiman, Arindam Sen, and Priyank Bhardwaj point out that self-accountability is a self-regulatory behaviour that is performed regardless of the existence of external regulatory conditions of evaluation, reward or punishment. They suggest that self-accountability answers the individual’s need “to confirm or enhance a self-identity or image shaped by strongly held beliefs and values.”[10]

The relationship of accountability to ethics and to self-formation or “subjectification” is a core aspect of the work of feminist philosopher Judith Butler. In Giving an Account of Oneself Butler argues that “the ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation – or set of relations – to a set of norms.” She notes that: “If the ‘I’ is not at one with moral norms,” this means that “the subject must deliberate upon these norms,” and that part of such a deliberation will “entail a critical understanding” of the social genesis and meaning of those norms.[11] In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler stresses how intrinsically linked processes of self-formation and subjectivation are in the formation of the ethical subject. On the one hand, she writes, “There is […] no forming of the ethical subject without ‘modes of subjectivation’ and an ‘ascetics’ or ‘practices of the self’ that support them,”[12] and on the other, that: “There is no making of oneself (poiesis) outside of a mode of subjectivation (assujettisement).”[13]

Scholars have also pointed out that there is a “dark side” to accountability.[14] Hall et al. note that because of the potential implications of being evaluated or held accountable, “there are powerful motives to avoid, manipulate, or otherwise cope with our accountabilities.”[15] They criticise institutional and organisational cultures of evaluation that use problematic mechanisms such as over-monitoring, flawed or biased evaluation, and abusive supervision, that can cause stress and resentment and encourage individuals to apply or operate the most easily defensible options, or in retrospect, to use justifications and excuses.[16]

Making connections between accountability to both self and others is also central in the context of care ethics. Selma Sevenhuijsen argues that while a principle-based ethics approach “invites us to treat the other as we would want to be treated ourselves, and thus to see the other as similar to ourselves,” care ethics emphasises the acknowledgement of differences and otherness.[17] This  demands “active attention” as a central aspect of care, through the performance of interwoven relational “attentive activities.” Accountability is one of these activities, along with the notions of presence, seeing, active listening, thoughtful speaking, honouring our intuition, reliability, and recognition of plurality.[18] Sevenhuijsen further argues that since the search for the “correct way to care,” inevitably leads to making mistakes, accountability “implies that we are willing to check our perceptions against those of others … . It also implies the willingness to admit mistakes, and to apologize for misjudgements or harmful actions.”[19]

The performance of care-related “attentive activities” including accountability is central for citizenship practices in the political sphere, from the local to the global scale.[20] However, it is crucial to consider that the meaning of accountability and its implications varies across cultures. This may pose challenges to cross-cultural interactions, including research collaborations and knowledge co-production processes. Cultural dependency refers both to the norms and values to which people are held accountable in different cultural contexts,[21] as well as to perceptions of self-accountability related to questions of identity and reputation.[22] Michele J. Gelfand, Beng Chong Lim, and Jana L. Raver refer to the varied culturally-specific accountability systems as different “accountability webs.” Such webs relate to multiple cultural dimensions, including the relationship between the individual and the collective. Furthermore, within a given culture, several forms of accountability webs may exist along each other,[23]  demanding careful consideration and awareness.

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] “Accountability,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, last modified June 2018, accessed 14 January 2022, https://www-oed-com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/view/Entry/1197?redirectedFrom=Accountability#eid

[2] See for example Jeffrey D. Robinson, “Accountability in Social Interaction,” in Accountability in Social Interaction, ed. Jeffrey D. Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 376, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190210557.001.0001. See also Angela T. Hall, Dwight D. Frink, and M. Ronald Buckley, “An Accountability Account: A Review and Synthesis of the Theoretical and Empirical Research on Felt Accountability,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 38 (2017): 204–24, https://doi.org/10.1002/job; and Philip E. Tetlock, “The Impact of Accountability on Judgment and Choice: Toward a Social Contingency Model,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 25, no. C (1992): 331–76, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60287-7.

[3] Dwight D. Frink and Richard J. Klimoski, “Advancing Accountability Theory and Practice: Introduction to the Human Resource Management Review Special Edition,” Human Resource Management Review 14, no. 1 (2004): 2, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2004.02.001.

[4] D.Z. Niringiye, “Conclusion,” in Ngoma Series Vol. 1: Ugandan Churches and the Political Centre, ed. P. Musana, A. Crichton, and C. Howell (Cambridge: Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide, 2017), 254.

[5] Tetlock, “The Impact of Accountability on Judgment and Choice,” 337.

[6] Frink and Klimoski, “Advancing Accountability Theory and Practice: Introduction to the Human Resource Management Review Special Edition,” 3.

[7] Hall, Frink, and Buckley, “An Accountability Account: A Review and Synthesis of the Theoretical and Empirical Research on Felt Accountability,” 206.

[8] Hall, Frink, and Buckley, "An Accountability Account," 208.

[9] The Concordat to Support Research Integrity, Universities UK, Policies, last modified 2019,  accessed 9 September 2021, https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-08/Updated%20FINAL-the-concordat-to-support-research-integrity.pdf. Signatories to The Concordat include the Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland; Higher Education Funding Council for Wales; National Institute for Health Research; Scottish Funding Council; UK Research and Innovation; Universities UK; Wellcome Trust; The British Academy; Cancer Research UK; GuildHE Research.

[10] Amit Dhiman, Arindam Sen, and Priyank Bhardwaj, “Effect of Self-Accountability on Self-Regulatory Behaviour: A Quasi-Experiment,” Journal of Business Ethics 148, no. 1 (2018): 80, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2995-4.

[11] Judith Butler, Giving An Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 8.

[12] Butler, Giving An Account of Oneself, 21.

[13] Butler, Giving An Account of Oneself, 21

[14] Frink and Klimoski, “Advancing Accountability Theory and Practice,” 11; Hall, Frink, and Buckley, “An Accountability Account,” 205.

[15] Hall, Frink, and Buckley, “An Accountability Account,” 208.

[16] Hall, Frink, and Buckley, “An Accountability Account,” 208.

[17] S.L. Sevenhuijsen, “Care and Attention,” South African Journal of Higher Education 32, no. 6 (2018): 25, accessed 9 September 2021, https://doi.org/10.20853/32-6-2711.

[18] Sevenhuijsen, "Care and Attention,” 23.

[19] Sevenhuijsen, "Care and Attention,” 26.

[20] Tula Brannelly, “An Ethics of Care Research Manifesto,” International Journal of Care and Caring 2, no. 3 (2018): 373, https://doi.org/10.1332/239788218x15351944886756.

[21] Tetlock, “The Impact of Accountability on Judgment and Choice,” 337.

[22] Hall, Frink, and Buckley, “An Accountability Account,” 218.

[23] Michele J. Gelfand, Beng Chong Lim, and Jana L. Raver, “Culture and Accountability in Organizations: Variations in Forms of Social Control across Cultures,” Human Resource Management Review 14, no. 1 (2004): 135–60, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2004.02.007.

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Adjacency

The reparative work of transforming proximity into accountability; the labour of positioning oneself in relation to another in ways that revalue and redress complex histories of dispossession.[1]

When Luke Willis Thompson, a mixed race New Zealand artist of Fijian origin exhibited his Autoportrait (2017) of Diamond Reynolds it was both celebrated and criticised.[2] In 2016 Reynolds had filmed and broadcast live the shooting and murder of her partner Philando Castile by Minneapolis police. The “still-moving-image”[3] of Willis Thompson’s speech-less 35mm film portrait of Reynolds has been criticised as aestheticizing black trauma and as silencing a black woman who had refused to be silent. Whilst affirming that “a silent portrait of any black woman is categorically unbearable”[1] Tina Campt celebrates Willis Thompson’s autoportrait of Diamond Reynolds as an assertion of black visuality and of refusal.[4]  In Willis Thompson’s film Campt writes that Reynolds does not speak: 

she mouths silent words, blinking regularly. Ebbing side-to-side, adjusting in her seat, nodding occasionally, followed by an effortful, exhausted in- and exhale. A prayer, a meditation or an internal monologue made manifest?[2]

Campt asks, why should we demand that Diamond Reynolds witness again for us – and witness differently?[5]

Campt asks us to take seriously Willis Thompson’s self-description as a black artist not of the African diaspora, which for Campt places him in a position of adjacency:

It is the adjacency of indigneity and diasporic formation linked by a viscous history of imperialism and colonialization that tethers black subjects to pacific islanders.[6]

Adjacency is one of a number of terms which suggests a spatial positioning of one in relation to another.[7]For Campt, adjacency does not claim an “identity with” but an “adjacency to.” Adjacency is:

the reparative work of transforming proximity into accountability; the labour of positioning oneself in relation to another in ways that revalue and redress complex histories of dispossession.[8]

The accountability presented by proximity links the term adjacency to that of implication, also coined by Campt as a positioning that acknowledges complicity and at the same time demands action.

The work of adjacency, described by Campt as “affective labour,” is for her intrinsic to the black gaze and black visuality both of which operate through relationality and adjacency.[9] In her definition of “visuality” Campt quotes Nicholas Mirzeoff who writes that “the ability to assemble a visualisation manifests the authority of the visualiser.”[10] Campt moves this on to rework understandings of power and vision through critical race theory.[11] The black gaze re-centres the black subject as a viewing subject and “shifts the optics of “looking at” to a politics of looking with, through, and alongside another.”[12] Thus demanding from the viewer a position of adjacency: 

It reconfigures this gaze by exploiting white exclusion from and vulnerability to the opacity of blackness and in the process demands a different kind of labour in its viewer. It requires us to feel beyond the security of our own situation to cultivate instead an ability to confront the precarity of less valued or actively de-valued individuals and doing the ongoing work of sustaining a relationship to these imperilled and precarious bodies.[13]

Campt makes it clear that this black gaze should not be confused with empathy, nor does adjacency allow an assumed sharing of another’s situation.[14] Returning to the spatialised nature of the term, adjacency does not share the position of another but demands the affective labour of relating across difference. 

Written by Danielle Hewitt.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivatives 4.0 International Licence.

[1] Tina Campt,  “Political Concepts: Adjacency,” Lecture, Brown University, Providence, U.S.A., 24 April 2020, accessed 13 September 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uFtRdVsEJI

[2] Luke Willis Thompson, Autoportrait (2017) was awarded the 2018 Deutsche Börse prize for photography and was nominated for the 2018 Turner Prize. See Rene Matic, “Luke Willis Thompson’s Turner Prize nomination is a Blow to Artists of Colour”, gal-dem, 3 May 2018, accessed 13 September 2021, https://gal-dem.com/luke-willis-thompsons-turner-prize-nomination-is-a-blow-to-artists-of-colour/; Annie Armstrong, “Black Pain is Not for Profit: Collective Protests Luke Willis Thompson’s Turner Prize Nomination at Tate Britain”, Art News, 25 September 2018, accessed 13 September 2021,  https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/black-pain-not-profit-collective-protests-luke-willis-thompsons-turner-prize-nomination-tate-britain-11046/; and Anny Shaw, “Curators defend Turner Prize nominee Luke Willis Thompson”, The Art Newspaper, 4 October 2018, accessed 13 September 2021, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/curators-defend-turner-prize-nominee

[3] Tina Campt, “Black Visual Frequency: A Glossary/‘Still-moving-images,’” Fotomuseum Winterhur, 19 June 2018, accessed 13 September 2021,  https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/2018/06/19/still-moving-images/

[4] Tina Campt, “Adjacency: Luke Willis Thompson’s Poethics of Care,” Flash Art, 8 October 2019, accessed 13 September 2021, https://flash---art.com/article/adjacency-luke-willis-thompsons-poethics-of-care/; Campt,  “Political Concepts: Adjacency;” Tina Marie Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29, no. 1 (2019): 79–87, https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2019.1573625;  Campt, “Black Visual Frequency: A Glossary/‘Refusal.’” 

[5] Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal.” 

[6] Campt. “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,” 85.

[7] On the ways that “knowing and being are articulated through spatial terms.” See Jane Rendell, “Pre-Positions,” in Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism, (London: I.B Taurus, 2010), 1–20.

[8] Campt,  “Political Concepts: Adjacency.” 

[9] Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,” 80.

[10] According to Nicholas Mirzeoff, visuality is a nineteenth-century term meaning the visualisation of history. See Nicholas Mirzeoff, The Right to Look (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) quoted in Campt, “Black Visual Frequency.”

[11] See for example, Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Screen, issue 3, (Autumn 1975), 6–18.

[12] Tina Campt, “How Black Artists Are Shaping a Distinctly Black Gaze,” Hyperallergic, 2 August 2021, accessed 14 September 2021, https://hyperallergic.com/671547/how-black-artists-are-shaping-a-distinctly-black-gaze-tina-m-campt/ This quote is extracted from Tina Campt, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021).

[13] Campt,  “Political Concepts: Adjacency.” 

[14] Campt,  “Political Concepts: Adjacency.” 

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Affect

“Affect” derives from the Latin noun affectus (something having been affected, or influenced) and its verb afficere (to affect, or to be affected by). Affect is an autonomous potential or capacity carried by an event or an encounter. Affect is not inert. Leaving its marks or “refrains” on human and non-human bodies which in turn intersect with landscapes and institutions, affect is found in the residues of lived encounters. It accrues in atmospheres which are co-compositional and co-constitutive as these are made by competing subjects whose presences overlap across different temporalities.[1] Affect is critical ­to recover “the minor, inconsequential, secret, atomic,” and it is “not given in advance, not apprehendable except through the thickets of formalist analysis.”[2]

This view of affect being linked to form and representation is however contentious given that the late twentieth-century’s “turn to affect” has rejected such tangible conceptions in favour of more fluid notions of sensation, materiality, and embodiment. It is in considering this polemic that the film theorist Eugenie Brinkema disputes affect’s repeatedly negative definitions, for example, “what undoes, what unsettles, that thing I cannot name, what remains resistant, far away…, indefinable,” arguing that this empties out affect into a generic category delineated by the vagueness of “pressures, forces, intensities.”[3]

In fact, to dismantle “the ideological, aesthetic and theoretical problems it claimed to confront,”[4] it pays to attend to the specific forms and materialities taken by affect, as well as to detect where these appear in representation, and through experience, both conscious and unconscious. The challenge here is to acknowledge affect as a capacity that is both felt and thought. The philosophy of affect, the philosopher Brian Massumi explains, is about the “movement in thought” or “the force of thought, embodied.”[5] For psychoanalysis, affect is irreducible to language. It is only glimpsed in the spaces of non-correspondence or what the literary theorist Isobel Armstrong calls “the broken middle,” a space held between representation/language (writing, drawing, film, sculpture) and affect.[6] Affect is not simply about the irrational or the unthinking, nor is it about the expression of personal emotion.[7] An attention to affect invests forensic scrutiny to process, or thought-in-movement. Affected by an encounter, we are compelled to make sense of, contextualize, and connect with a situation – to examine what we know, and to concede what we may not.

Affect itself is an ambiguous, alternating force. It moves between the destruction of representation, opening up an abyss in consciousness by violently breaking the barrier of repression, and appropriating, thieving, representation. It belongs to a chain of discourse and breaks it: it alternates between being bound and unbound, attached to signification and rupturing it. … The concealing and revealing, exposing and masking process which belongs to affect is structurally tied to the possibility of meaning. [8]

In other words, affect might be critically grasped “as a problematic of structure, form, and aesthetics”[9] where reciprocally, reading for form and representation are key to understanding how affect is enabled or blocked. Others including Lauren Berlant, Kathleen Stewart, Michael Taussig, Roland Barthes, and Raymond Williams have discussed affect ­­(without necessarily naming it as such) through questions of encounter and forms of representation, including writing, drawing, and filmmaking. They examine how affect travels across modes of representation, and how discourse itself (also a form of representation) can allow the capture of affective residues. In these writings, intersecting affect is the problematic but intransigent category of experience. Rather than producing an authoritative knower, the affective experience is recast as energetic occurrences or event-based encounters which set up opportunities for potential relations.[10] Barthes (via the “punctum”) and Williams (via “structures of feeling”) divergently explore such possibilities for a taking apart of “experience,” understanding it as both historicized and pre-ideological; and as such, laying the groundwork for theorizing the affective encounter as the intersection of the untaught and the intuitive as much as the culturally informed.

In addition, the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant argues that intuition is embodied and learnt through memory and life experiences, “Intuition is where affect meets history.”[11] Berlant advances that a focus on the affective gives insights to historical situations, insights that go beyond an understanding of orthodox institutions and practices. Affective evidence squares up what is sensed against what is known or recognizable. It traces how a lived situation is negotiated between status quo and individual desire. Responding to affect’s emphasis on immediacy and its relationship to historical framing, Massumi, with Erin Manning, argue that “immediation” prioritizes the event “as the primary unit of the real.”[12] Massumi proposes that one learns to sense from the residue of past events so as to decipher the historical and contextual connections intuitively when a present event is encountered. This is the act of thinking-feeling:

The feeling of the transitional encounter is not “raw” feeling. It is imbued with an immediate understanding of what is under way, what might be coming – and what we are becoming.  This is enactive understanding: it is one with action. It is what I call a thinking-feeling. …[I]t is clear that the affective thinking-feeling is not the thinking or feeling or a particular object – or a particular subject. It pertains more directly to the event, what passes in-between objects and subjects… [13]

In the thinking-feeling of an affective event, the relation to the past is “direct, unmediated,” “Immediation is actually more intensively inclusive of the past that a reflective or critical thinking about it, because it includes the force of the past – where it is potentially heading beyond itself… Immediation is the past bumping against the future in the present.”[14] An attention to affect thus allows the slowing down and precise tracking of a “situation,” a “happening,” “getting the drift of things” which may become an event.[15] It allows the researcher to trace the happening’s resonance to the historical. This attunement to the affective situation creates the possibility of inhabiting the past in an embodied historical present. Hence, a historicism attentive to affect, will behave, relate, and read differently.

In admitting the primacy of these affective encounters and their concomitant evidence into a discursive framework, we can shift an academic disposition from one of habitual critical distance, which is itself non-exempt from a power to ascribe meaning from afar, in favour of one with access to critical proximity. The latter knowingly implicates the knower. It is obliged to question relationships that enable or prevent knowledge. The affective encounter demands reflexivity therefore. It is concerned not just about the subject but equally how this subject is constructed in relation to itself, and to others, so bringing in the ethical. The discourse weaves through ways of seeing and thinking and considers how these discriminate. An attention to affect thus delineates a map of disciplinary motives, blindness, and biases, showing how we are always implicated in the knowledges we produce, and therefore why affect is ethical.

Written by Lilian Chee.

[1] See Shanti Sumartojo and Sarah Pink, Atmospheres and the Experiential World: Theory and Methods (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2019), 3. Sumartojo and Pink, while writing on the identification and cultivation of atmosphere, concede that to define atmosphere as “coherent, contained, staged” is to miss its changeable and charged qualities. Atmosphere is emergent. Sumartojo and Pink’s book examines where strong atmospheres are located, what they convey, what they can do, or what they make possible.

[2] Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2014), xv.

[3] Brinkema, xii-xiii.

[4] Brinkema, xiv.

[5] Brian Massumi et al., "Affect and Immediation: An Interview with Brian Massumi," Disclosure: A Journal of Social Theory 28, (2019): 113, https://doi.org/10.13023/disclosure.28.09.

[6]  Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 115. Armstrong reads Freud and Kristeva’s definitions of affect through structures of repression and melancholia respectively.

[7] Massumi et al., "Affect and Immediation," 113.

[8] Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic, 123.

[9] Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects, xvi.

[10] Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts, Technologies of Lived Abstraction (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2011), 1.

[11]  Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2011), 52.

[12] Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 147.

[13] Massumi, Politics of Affect, 94.

[14] Massumi, 148–49.

[15] Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 82.

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Agency

Agency, the capacity to exert influence over something, is an obscure topic in everyday conversation but is perhaps one of the most influential social sciences concepts. My aim in this lexicon entry is not to explain the concept of agency. Agency is such a broad concept and used so widely that a full review of the concept of agency is beyond the scope of this entry. Instead, what I wish to do here is to explain how the concept of agency can be mobilized in research that seeks to deliver urban equality. I will focus on three aspects: 1) the mobilization of notions of agency to challenge hegemonic configurations of power; 2) the recognition of differential agencies and capacities to act in research, in the context of multiple intersecting drivers of discrimination; and 3) the need to rethink agency alongside new social material relations. I intend to expose the range of meanings that agency generates, to show that it is a generative concept that helps thinking new ideas, rather than a precisely delineated concept that generates policy-relevant solutions.

Agency emphasizes people's capacity to interact with and shape their worlds

The question of agency is intrinsically linked to the question of power. The debate between structure and agency is one of the defining conundrums in social theory. Colin Campbell summarises the debate as concerning “the degree of autonomy that should be attributed to individual actors as opposed to the constraining (if not determining) power of social structure.”[1] For example, in developing my own thought, the notion of agency was central to understanding how people organize themselves and resist impositions from above. Sometimes people are complicit in reproducing externally imposed forms of symbolic violence.[2] Other times, people exploit the inherent contradictions of existing systems to challenge and transform existing states of affairs.[3] Political ecology has been instrumental in foregrounding the notion of agency to understand the simultaneous oppression of people and nature. Studies of agency have provided an alternative to neo-Marxist analysis of environmental conflicts that conceptualized the people suffering from their impacts as passive victims.[4]  In the 1990s, actor-oriented perspectives that linked personal agency to power, particularly in development sociology, became prominent.[5] They questioned the absolute primacy of social and economic structures. Long and other members of his group in Wageningen taught me during my MSc, leaving an indelible concern with recognizing how people activate processes of change, moving beyond the dualism between structure and agency and revealing how these two are intrinsically linked.

Agency remains a “black box” whose actual relation with power is fraught. Campbell explains a certain confusion in classic definitions of agency, whether it is as the volitional or purposeful character of human action or its independence from social structure. In any case, these kinds of definitions link agency to the distinction of individuals as social actors. Power emerges when purposeful action can be linked to the capacity to transform the world. This agency links three different aspects of human life: the possibility to deploy action with purpose, directed towards something; the possibility to deploy action independently from the deterministic influence of social structure; and the possibility to create meaningful change in social life. According to Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, another way of looking at agency is with reference to its temporal elements, including an iterative element, a projective element, and a practical-evaluative element.[6] These elements resonate with each other in concordant or discordant zones, raising individuals' perception of their power to influence a situation.

In summary, people interact with their world in different ways, which manifest their agency in the enactment of iterative patterns of practice, in the development of future imaginaries that inform projective actions, and in the active practical evaluation of ongoing action, in order to justify decisions and practices. Thus, agency relates to both the influence of people on the world (achieving their goals, gaining independence, and transforming structure) and how they achieve this (through practices, strategy action, and normative reflection.

Differential agencies invite the possibility of rethinking the role of research

Challenging urban inequalities and injustices is one important reason to engage with ideas of agency. In contemporary societies there are different drivers of discrimination and oppression that interact to create a unique experience of marginalization, what is often referred to as intersectionality.[7] However, the way such drivers interact is not always visible. Traditions in the social sciences, especially sociology, have long focused on using research to understand social inequalities and address injustice.[8] From this perspective, agency emerges at different levels. At a personal level, how individuals engage with their social conditions will influence their life trajectories. However, when thinking about transformative capacity – because urban equality calls for transformations of the current conditions of urban living – the focus needs to be on the social movements that can activate such transformations, and the individuals or organizations that can catalyze such changes.

Two important observations follow. First, there are differential levels of agency, and there are those people who may be more effective in bringing up a particular kind of change because of their position in society. For example, as Erik Swyngedouw has shown, the literature on political ecology has shown how certain alliances of technological-oriented elites (governments, experts, and large companies) can direct development programs over long periods to maintain and reproduce the existing forms of hegemonic power.[9] Second, there are moments in which specific actors can shift the balance of power. Think, for example, of the role of social movements claiming the climate emergency and how they have structured themselves around a few individuals.

The notion of differential agency is crucial because it endows some people with responsibility for addressing existing forms of inequity in cities. Such responsibilities raise ethical questions for researchers who may have access to agency conditions that differ from those accessible to the people with whom they interact in their research. The researcher-researched relationship has been a contested topic of debate because of the realization that inherent power dynamics shape it. While traditional strictures in social research and demands for objectivity have constituted the researcher as a repository of superior knowledge whose social status legitimizes their role, more recent debates, for example, the work of Målfrid Råheim and colleagues map the researcher's vulnerability and dependence on the researcher-researched relationship.[10] Researchers find themselves with the responsibility of preventing harm from the research, which requires specific work of anticipation, but also, with the responsibility of delivering good from their research, for example, ensuring that the research has a positive impact. Claiming impact almost always entails overestimating the possibilities of research and limiting the researcher's autonomy.

Many researchers find a dilemma between estimating the impacts of their research and ensuring that they maximize the value of the encounter for research participants, because they may perceive that their agency to create positive change is limited. Working in partnership could help distribute these responsibilities and acknowledging a wide range of agencies that can shape the research. However, partnerships are invariably shaped by the affordances that shape the researcher-researched encounter and the imaginaries that come into play in that encounter. While the aspiration to build partnerships is laudable, there needs to be explicit recognition of how different roles are being played and the differential agencies that they entail. In summary, the differential agencies that shape our social life also shape research practices.

Agency invites us to rethink our relationship with the material world

We live in complex urban landscapes, surrounded by arrangements of objects and institutions that open different affordances in terms of interpretations of the past and imaginations of the future. As Sara Ahmed explains, our lives and engagements are shaped by the multiple orientations individuals and groups engage with and develop through repeated performance.[11] Agency emerges in the possibility of choosing and changing, if desired, those orientations. However, limits are set to the extent to which we can choose those orientations – by our desires, perceptions, interpretations, and reactions. Agency is thus not a capacity that can quickly be located by an easy activation through our conscious engagement with the world.

Geography’s concern with spaces and spatial relations and concepts challenges our understanding of how we engage and react to the world. Along with Henri Levebvre and others, geographer Doreen Massey has described space as produced through social relations, as well as producing of social relations.[12] This notion is liberating: if space is constituted through interactions, space constitutes a sphere of possibilities in which multiple historical trajectories – affordances – can be deployed simultaneously. If space is continually being made, it is therefore always unfinished and heterogeneous. There is something beautiful in the idea that the spatial and material world is not given to us but constituted through our social interactions with it – such thinking foregrounds our actions, no matter how mundane, as central to the production of space.[13]

Because of this complex distribution of agency through spatial and material realms and social interactions with them, several academic debates have sought to identify agency as located beyond the human and suggested, as Jane Bennett does, the possibility that vibrant materialities can bring about change.[14] These debates are profound and philosophical, but from where I stand as a social scientist, three distinct perspectives can be drawn from this work that explain agency in a more-than-human world. The first emphasizes different actors’ possibilities for advancing strategic projects; the second examines agency as distributed in specific arrangements but conditioned by perceived limits; and the third accepts the absolute contingency of agency as emerging in particular sets of relations which are now stable but subject to change. Each perspective is explained in turn below.

In the first, some approaches distribute agency among different human and non-human actors in collective processes of making the world, but also attribute agency to specific actors, granting certain actors the capacity to lay a claim over a given totality.[15] For example, Yvonne Rydin and Laura Tate highlight the function of certain actors in shaping the planning process, for example, through mundane routines of expertise and decision-making.[16] This power in planning, they argue, is reinforced by producing specific material artifacts, such as regulations and plans, that are endowed with agency. This work builds on Actor Network Theory (ANT) and the principle of generalized symmetry offered by Bruno Latour, which refuses to recognize the primacy of the human in any social analysis.[17]

However, agency can also be approached from an understanding of the world in particular arrangements, which are sustained through social interaction, in the sense specified by Massey. For example, proponents of assemblage theory, such as Manuel deLanda propose investigating the constitution of arrangements in relation to fundamental internal and external relationships, diagrams, that solidify and maintain those arrangements.[18] Agency is thus distributed through those arrangements but conditioned to the specific diagrams. Agency may be distributed, but it is directional.

Finally, the third perspective goes further by accepting the radical contingency of agency as dependent on existing but changing relations. Such perspective is particularly prominent in feminist neo-materialism in which agency is located in-between different active elements –  humans and non-humans. Agency, therefore, is not something that anybody possesses, but it requires an enactment in between different nodes in a relation, in othe words, as Karen Barad has argued, agency requires “intra-action.”[19]

Accepting the contingent nature of agency is scary because it implies renouncing many already delimitated strategic projects that shape society. Yet, such an understanding enables alternative engagements with the real world that do not seek to explain its functioning a priori but instead engage with multiple possibilities or affordances as they open within specific arrangements of the world's equipment. This means that agency is not only manifest in objective, well-calculated plans but also in affective relations that emerge at the interstices between people, ecologies, and material artifacts. This approach opens up a more hopeful perspective for the possibility of changing socio-material and socio-ecological worlds in ways that recognise how affective engagements with those worlds do not anticipate a complete utopia but rather take the shape of a work-in-progress struggle towards urban equality.

This approach redefines the debate between structure and agency because it transcends the idea that individuals (or at best groups) exert their agency against a structure that either shapes that agency or is transformed by it. Thinking of intra-action challenges this dichotomy because both the perception of structure and agency emerge within broad landscapes in which many elements co-evolve (memories, imaginaries, technologies, ecologies) in ways that surpass the individual but enable the constitution of independent objects. This approach shifts our perspective away from nodes that hold agencies and instead situates agencies in the ways that all objects – including human bodies – are in the world, in given orientations.

Written by Vanesa Castán Broto.

[1] C. Campbell, “Distinguishing the power of agency from agentic power: A note on Weber and the ‘black box’ of personal agency,” Sociological Theory 27 no. 4 (2009): 407–18, 408.

[2] V. Castán Broto, “Symbolic violence and the politics of environmental pollution science: the case of coal ash pollution in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Antipode 45, no. 3 (2013): 621–40.

[3] V. Castán Broto, “Contradiction, intervention, and urban low carbon transitions,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 3 (2015): 460–76.

[4] H. Svarstad, T. A. Benjaminsen, and R. Overå, “Power Theories in Political Ecology,” Journal of Political Ecology 25, no. 1 (2018): pp. 350–63.

[5] N. Long, Development Sociology: Actor Perspectives, (Routledge, 2003).

[6] M. Emirbayer and A. Mische, “What is Agency?” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 4 (1998): 962–1023.

[7] For a comprehensive treatment of the subject, see for example, P. H. Collins and S. Bilge, Intersectionality, 2nd edition, (John Wiley & Sons, 2020).

[8] See S. K. White, J. M. White and K. O. Korgen (eds.), Sociologists in Action on Inequalities (Sage, 2014) especially the introduction and discussion of sociologists in action.

[9] E. Swyngedouw, Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain, (MIT Press, 2015).

[10] M. Råheim, L. H. Magnussen, R. J. T. Sekse, Å. Lunde, T. Jacobsen, and A. Blystad, “Researcher–Researched Relationship in Qualitative Research: Shifts in Positions and Researcher Vulnerability,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being 11, no. 1 (2016): 30996.

[11] S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Duke University Press, 2006).

[12] D. Massey, For Space (Sage, 2005).

[13] For a famously influential discussion of social relations and space see also: H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by D. Nicholson-Smith, (Wiley-Blackwell, 1991).

[14] J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Duke University Press, 2010).

[15] See an excellent, up-to-date summary in M. Michael, Actor-Network Theory: Trials, Trails and Translations, (Sage, 2016).

[16] Y. Rydin and L. Tate (eds.), Actor Networks of Planning: Exploring the Influence of Actor Network Theory (Routledge, 2016).

[17] B. Latour, We have never been Modern, (Harvard University Press, 1993).

[18] M. DeLanda, Assemblage Theory, (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

[19] K. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007).

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Anonymization

One of the key ethical principles in institutional ethics along with beneficence and (free, prior, and informed) consent is confidentiality. Respecting the privacy rights of participants is a core aspect of ethical research. This may involve ensuring that the identities of participants are kept confidential and that they cannot be identified in research produced with the information that they have provided. In some kinds of scientific and social scientific research information can easily be presented as anonymous – i.e. with no name –  in large data sets for quantitative research, for example. But in other types of research, particularly in the arts and humanities, this may not be possible due to the kind of research practice undertaken, for example, visual work, or even desirable, especially if issues of subjectivity are important and narrative styles are integral to the practice. Certain kinds of research are based on self-identification and require situated and positioned self-reflection, for example autoethnography, and so maintaining confidentiality through anonymity runs counter to the conceptual framework adopted. However, it can be possible to adopt fictional writing practices that use characters for disguise identities, or if not, to find other ways for the information to be shared which are not harmful to the participant.

When working with small groups and communities, or with well-known individuals or institutions, that are “famous” or clearly recognisable, it may not be possible to ensure that particular pieces of information are dis-connected from certain specific identifying features. In these instances, it is vital that researcher make clear to participations the risks of being exposed, especially if the research is in anyway sensitive.

Lee Ann Fujii’s work on “dilemmas of proximity” allows us to consider how questions of anonymity are made more complex when researchers enter the communities they are researching, and how issues of consent are figured through relations of power and distance:

Just as power hierarchies give rise to dilemmas around consent, the researcher’s social proximity to participants and interlocutors can give rise to dilemmas about how to maintain people’s privacy and confidentiality.[1]

Fujii notes that even when the researcher has “left the field,” dilemmas around consent persist through publication, with “professional incentives and ethical obligations … pull[ing] in different directions.” [2] She discusses how in order to advance their careers, researchers must publish, but that this may mean not protecting confidentiality and privacy to the extent required, ethically. She writes about the approaches she uses for hiding identities in her own work through the use of pseudonyms and deletions of identifying references to place and landscape, hinting at the craft and care required to do this in a way that draws out the relevant interpretations while also protecting identities.[3]

Participatory research and practices of co-production also pose interesting cases for anonymity and ethics. Given that they aim to respect intersubjective positions and develop relations as part of processes of collaborative engagement, these kinds of research practice may actively work against institutional demands for anonymity by requiring that participants are recognised and acknowledged – potentially named and linked to the information they contribute to the research as well as their roles in the process.[4] A collaborative or co-productive approach might then require that participants are not only named in the research, but become named researchers.

As visual methods in research have become more common due to the rise in digital and social media and the development of practice-led and artistic research, this has posed challenges for conventional ethical procedures, especially around informed consent and anonymity.[5] Informed consent is “particularly challenging with photographs because it is difficult to ensure that every subject has given their consent to the photo being taken and used for research purposes.”[6] This means that researchers might have limited options for sharing visual materials publicly, to only use photographs taken in public spaces where this is allowed – and internationally the law on this differs – or to decide not to include photographs of people who haven’t given explicit consent. Anonymity is also difficult to maintain when using images of people in the public places that they frequent, and visual tactics for obscuring people in images by either inserting black boxes or pixilating faces can appear as censorship. In addition, with the rise in digital and visual research, it may not always be possible to guarantee how research outputs are circulated or used, and there is an increased potential for research to interpreted and re-contextualised by third parties in unexpected ways.

A number of social research organisations have developed new ethical guidelines the focus on issues related to visual research and anonymity, for example, the International Visual Sociology Association and the British Sociological Association, and their Ethics Guidelines for Digital Research, and the Social Data Science Lab’s guidance on Social Media Research Ethics. ‘Visual Ethics: Ethical Issues in Visual Research’ an ESRC National Centre for Research Methods Review Paper, provides a coherent and comprehensive discussion of the ethical, moral and legal issues around visual ethics, with a section devoted to anonymity and confidentiality.[7] Here the tension is discussed between, on the one hand, the demand for anonymity from regulatory bodies, and the importance for the researcher to present unedited visual images because of the richness of the information contained, and on the other, for the participant to remain actively associated with images of themselves, or to be named as the author of images they may have produced. Issues of internal confidentiality are explored, as well as methods for obscuring details and removing identity which are understood as particularly problematic and requiring further exploration.[8] The recommendation is that visual information is presented in full with consent, and there is no attempt to anonymise individuals, noting that the use of pseudonyms is not generally possible in this kind of research. [9]

Researchers have a duty to talk to participants about the possibilities, implications, and restrictions for maintaining anonymity or being identified at the outset of the research. This needs to include discussions concerning the implications of being identified, and early and clear explanations of the methods and plans for publishing research. It is important to find ways of sharing the research, primary data, drafts, and completed articles and artefacts that participants are happy with, and to allow plenty of time for responses to materials to be given, suggestions offered, and decisions made on whether and how participants wish to be identified in the research. For these reasons the drafting and sharing of information sheets and consent forms needs to become part of the practice of the research, and where possible, ethics procedures and paper-work remodelled to respect different cultural, visual and linguistic codes. Making decisions on confidentiality and anonymity together, between researching and researched subjects, has been described as “pre-ethics,” and this can be especially important when working with sensitive material and vulnerable people.[10]

Anonymity can also be linked to issues of disclosure. A researcher may decide that they need to disclose an illegal or immoral activity shared with them confidentially, which may lead into the area of whistle-blowing, where balances have to be made between private and public interests. Issues around covert research may also be encountered, where researchers are under obligation to operate under cover themselves, and/or to protect their participants as vulnerable sources, given the dangers of exposing certain forms of knowledge. In specific cases where the participants are bound by obligations to the institutions or corporations that they work for, researchers may find requests to sign non-disclosure agreements, and to ensure that the information gained is not shared, or only made public in particular ways, with requests for names not be included.

Researchers must comply with particular legal requirements in relation to the storage and use of personal data, as stipulated in the UK by the Data Protection Act (1998) and any subsequent similar acts, including, from May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Researchers must have participants’ explicit permission to disclose personal information to third parties, and are required to ensure that such parties are permitted to have access to that information. 

The UK Data Protection Act (1998) and the GDPR that supersedes it also confer the right to private citizens to have access to any personal data that is stored, and which relates to them. Researchers seeking to exploit legal exclusions to these rights must have a clear justification. The Freedom of Information Act (2000) is applicable to requests for access to data held by public authorities, including state schools, but research data in these settings would be exempt from such requests where explicit confidentiality arrangements are in place. The release of such information would be a breach of personal confidence.[11]

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] Lee Ann Fujii, “Research Ethics 101: Dilemmas and Responsibilities,” PS: Political Science & Politics 45, n. 4 , (2012): 717–23.

[2] Fujii, “Research Ethics 101.”

[3] Fujii, “Research Ethics 101.”

[4] Caitlin Cahill, Farhana Sultana and Rachel Pain, “Participatory Ethics: Politics, Practices, Institutions,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies – Special Issue on Participatory Ethics 6, n. 3 (2007): 304–18, 301, accessed 7 December 2021, https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/779.

[5] Jen Tarr, “Ethics and Visual Research,” (2015), accessed 7 December 2021, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/thinkingmethods/2015/07/01/ethics-and-visual-research/

[6] Tarr, “Ethics and Visual Research,”

[7] Rose Wiles, Jon Prosser, Anna  Bagnoli, Andrew Clark, Katherine  Davies, Sally Holland, and Emma Renold, “Visual Ethics: Ethical Issues in Visual Research,” (2008), an ESRC National Centre for Research Methods Review Paper, accessed 7 December 2021, https://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/id/eprint/421/.

[8] Wiles et al, “Visual Ethics.”

[9] Wiles et al, “Visual Ethics.”

[10] See E. Barrett, B. Martin, J. Koolmatrie, D. Dank, D. Swan. C. Creed. M. Stephens, A. Matthews, B. Webb, L. Solomon, D. Gilson, and D. Toby, “Guidelines and Principles for Pre-ethical Approaches to Indigenous Australian Research,’ in 2016: Proceedings of the Art Ethics and Indigeneity Symposium, (Melbourne, Vic.: University of Melbourne, 2016), 1–3. See also the “pre-ethics” entry in the practisingethics.org lexicon.

[11] British Educational Research Association, “Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research,” (4th Edition) (2018), paras. 40–51, accessed 7 December 2021, https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-2018.

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Anxiety

Their children were also affected, not only by the lack of domestic space, but also by the family’s recurrent displacement: “they get stressed, they never settle.”[1]

Through processes of researching the built environment, both researcher and researched subject may encounter situations in which they feel vulnerable. Feelings of vulnerability can lead to anxiety, commonly understood as“uneasiness or trouble of mind about some uncertain event,” “solitude,” “concern” or a “strained or solicitous desire” for or to effect some purpose.[2] Anxiety is a concept in both philosophy and psychology; the former is concerned with anxiety as a means to encounter the meaning and purpose of human existence, while the latter is understood as a form of mental condition that might exacerbate into illness. Anxiety encountered through researching the built environment occurs in culturally varied modalities, throughout the different processes and stages of research. Embracing anxiety as part of the research process is vital to an ethical practice as it fundamentally informs the relationship between researcher and researched subject and consequently the research outcome.

Relationships between people concern ethics, as they are situated in contexts of power and control. For example, in writing about oral history and research ethics in the visual arts, Matthew Partington quotes Ruthellen Josselson in the following:

that we explore other peoples’ lives to make them into an example of some principle or concept or to support or refute a theory will always be intrusive and narcissistically unsettling for the person who contributes his or her life story to this enterprise.[3]

Partington advises how discussing and settling issues such as the taking up the interviewee’s time without payment while seeking informed consent can ease the discomfort of both interviewer and interviewee.

However, interpersonal relationships created when researching the built environment can be formulated not just as part of a pre-planned project that maintains formal relationship between researcher and researched subject positions. Rather, people may relate to each other in subtle and informal ways where the boundaries between personal and professional become elusive, so that the offering of payment, for example, may be perceived as arrogant or even insulting. Premeditating whether such an offer might be acceptable can itself become a cause of anxiety for the researcher. Cultural differences can further complicate the recognition of what may be a cause for anxiety for the other.

Anxiety in research in the built environment is important in social, global and political contexts. For example, research has shown that residents of social housing may experience clinical anxiety as a result of the scheduled demolition of their homes.[4] Paul Watt has termed this occurrence “displacement anxiety,” referring to:

the subjective response to the threat of immanent direct displacement — the feeling that potential displacees have once they have either been told their home will be demolished, or when they are given notice to quit. Such displacement anxiety generates a profound sense of ontological insecurity as people literally do not “know their place.”[5]

Following Watt, Loretta Lees and Phil Hubbard have highlighted the emotional and psychic impacts of council estate renewal in contemporary London, raising concerns that: 

Displacement is something that needs to be considered as potentially causing individual stress and anxiety, and exacerbating existing health conditions or long-term illnesses.[6]

Anne Power has summed up how refurbishment and the reuse of the existing building stock is socially, environmentally and economically more sustainable than the demolition of such stock followed by new construction.[7]The global environmental costs of the building industry, Power claims, contribute to half of the world’s carbon emission. Therefore the building industry needs to be understood as partly responsible for natural disasters associated with climate change, that in turn, as research has shown, cause anxiety to those who suffer the consequences locally.[8] Research has also evidenced how community-based architectural heritage conservation has an influence on well-being and reduces participants’ anxiety.[9] Old buildings as opposed to newly built ones, participants of the research claimed, gave them a sense of security, stability, comfort, and increased connection to an area “in the current modern climate of instability and anxiety about the present.”’[10]

Anxiety can also emerge in the decision-making processes of professional and governmental bodies. For example, when ruling over the heritage listing of buildings, anxiety concerning the political approval of the decision may disrupt or paralyze professional approaches. Disregarding the wider environmental and social impacts of listing decisions as they fall outside of the professional field of conservation also aggravates the anxieties resulting from these impacts.Anxiety always discloses an acute ethical problem that has to be faced and analysed rather than repressed or evaded in order to approach opposed views and interests, thus facilitating the solution of complex predicaments.

Written by Judit Ferencz.

[1] Paul Watt, “ ‘This Pain of Moving, Moving, Moving:’ Evictions, Displacement and the Logics of Expulsion in London,” L’Annee Sociologique 68, no. 1 (May 2018): 59, https://doi.org/10.3917/anso.181.0067.

[2] John Simpson, ed., Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009), CD-ROM.

[3] Matthew Partington, “Conclusion:  Oral history and Research Ethics in the Visual Arts: Current and Future Challenges,” in Oral history in the Visual Arts. eds Lisa Sandino and Matthew Partington (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 189.

[4] Agnès Deboulet and Simone Abram, “Are Social Mix and Participation Compatible? Conflicts and Claims in Urban Renewal in France and England,” in Social Housing and Urban Renewal: A Cross-National Perspective, eds Peer Smets and Paul Watt (Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2017), 157.

[5] Paul Watt, “’This Pain of Moving, Moving, Moving,’” L’Annee Sociologique 68, no. 1 (May 2018): 1-67, https://doi.org/10.3917/anso.181.0067.

[6] Loretta Lees and Phil Hubbard, “The Emotional and Psychic Impacts of London’s ‘New’ Urban Renewal,” Journal of urban Regeneration and Renewal 13, no. 3 (January 2020), 241–50. 

[7] Anne Power, “Does Demolition or Refurbishment of Old and Inefficient Homes Help to Increase our Environmental, Social and Economic Viability?” Energy Policy 36, no. 12 (December 2008): 4487-501, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2008.09.022.

[8] Shuquan Chen, Rohini Bagrodia, Charlotte C. Pfeffer, Laura Meli, and George A. Bonanno, “Anxiety and Resilience in the Face of Natural Disasters Associated with Climate Change: A Review and Methodological Critique,” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 76 (August 2020): 102297, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2020.102297.

[9] Vanessa Thorpe, “Heritage Healing: Why Historic houses Improve Wellbeing,” The Guardian, 21 September 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/sep/21/historic-houses-improve-wellbeing, accessed 7 September 2021.

[10] Sarah Reilly, Claire Nolan, and Linda Monckton, Wellbeing and the Historic Environment (Historic England, 2018), 34, https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/wellbeing-and-the-historic-environment/wellbeing-and-historic-environment/ accessed 7 September 2021.

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Benefit

Benefit is one of the central principles of contemporary institutional research ethics. It is often used along with its synonym “minimising harm,” to form the principle of “benefit not harm.”[1] For example, the Economic and Social Research Council’s guidelines for ethics state that “research should aim to maximise benefit for individuals and society and minimise risk and harm.”[2]  The idea of ‘no harm’ in research ethics is rooted in nineteenth-century utilitarian liberalism, for example in English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s writing. Mill argued that individuals should have the liberty to act as they wish, except if their actions cause harm to others.[3] This stance has influenced some of the central twentieth-century thinking about research ethics.  Thus, avoiding harm was one of the basic ethical principles of the Nuremberg Code, which was written in 1947 following the Nuremberg trials of World War Two war criminals, including medical doctors who had conducted experiments on human subjects. The Nuremberg Code set forth ten ethics principles for research involving human experimentation.[4] The principle of “no harm” was supplemented with an understanding of benefit as an obligation in the 1979 Belmont Report, which was published by the USA’s National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioural Research.[5] The Belmont Commission’s task was to identify the ethical principles that should underlie the conduct of research involving human subjects, and to develop guidelines. The Belmont Report defined benefit as “something of positive value related to health or welfare,”[6] and clarified that benefit is not an act of kindness, but rather an obligation. Researchers, and particularly medical researchers, are required “to decide when it is justifiable to seek certain benefits despite the risks involved, and when the benefits should be foregone because of the risks.”[7]

The definition of benefit as potentially justifying certain risks or harm, such as in the case of medical experimentation in which research subjects may suffer harm in the name of the “greater good” of the public, has been widely criticised. Many researchers and research participants have argued that since researchers derive a range of benefits from conducting research, benefits should also be ensured for their research participants.[8]  The meaning of benefit and the complex relationships and ethical problems that could result from expectations for benefits have also been questioned. For example, researchers have noted that research participants may expect tangible benefits other than monetary payments, such as assistance in legal matters, in dealing with authorities or in finding work.[9] In this context, defining “benefit” should be part of planning specific research projects, including questions such as who will benefit from this particular research, in what way, and how to ensure that the research will be beneficial to all stakeholders.[10]

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] See for instance the webpage of University College London’s Research Ethics Committee: Accepted Ethical Standards “which all researchers and ethical committees are expected to comply with.” The standards are: “Informed Consent, Confidentiality, and Benefit not Harm.” The principle of “Benefit not Harm” means: “Research involving human participants must have a benefit to society and the risks involved to participants must be balanced against the potential benefit to the overall community,” accessed 5 August 2020,  https://ethics.grad.ucl.ac.uk/accepted-ethical-standards.php.

[2] This is the first of the core principles for ethical research on the Economic and Social Research Council’s website. https://esrc.ukri.org/funding/guidance-for-applicants/research-ethics/our-core-principles/ accessed 4 August 2020.

[3] Clifford G Christians, "Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research," in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Nrman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, Second edi (Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications, 2000), 142.

[4] Evelyne Shuster, "Fifty Years Later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code," New England Journal of Medicine 337, no. 20 (November 13, 1997): 1436–40, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199711133372006.

[5] Kenneth John Ryan et al., "The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research," Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, USA, 1979, https://doi.org/10.1021/bi00780a005.

[6] Ryan et al., “The Belmont Report.”

[7] Ryan et al., “The Belmont Report.”

[8] See for example A. B. Zwi et al., "Placing Ethics in the Centre: Negotiating New Spaces for Ethical Research in Conflict Situations," Global Public Health 1, no. 3 (2006): 268, https://doi.org/10.1080/17441690600673866.

[9] Lee Ann Fujii, "Research Ethics 101: Dilemmas and Responsibilities," PS - Political Science and Politics 45, no. 4 (2012): 719, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096512000819.

[10] Emmanuel Osuteye et al.,"'Knowledge Co-Production for Urban Equality," KNOW Working Paper Series 1, no. 1 (2019): 9.

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Buen Vivir

Its elementary principles would be reciprocity as opposed to liberalism which has no positive effect, complementarity instead of competition, the reproduction of life and not the reproduction of capital.[1]

There are multiple definitions of buen vivir. I have developed the following definition out of my understanding of the community-based use of the term by some indigenous and campesino groups in Colombia, and the Bolivian thinker Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, which emerged from researching the work of the Universidad Intercultural de los Pueblos (Peoples Intercultural University) based in Colombia and their conference titled: Rights of the Peoples, Social Struggles and Buen Vivir: Perspectives before, during and after Covid 19. In particular I focus on the contributions to the conference by Chara Mina from Procesos de las Comunidades Negras (Black Communities Process), [2] Leonora Yonda from the Coordinador Nacional Agrario (Agrarian National Coordinator),[3] and Nelson Lemus from Asociación de Cabildos Indígenas del Norte del Cauca – ACIN (Association of Indigenous Councils from the North of Cauca).[4] I have also referred to the work of Universidad Autónoma Indígena Intercultural del Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (Intercultural Autonomus Indigenous University of Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca) in Colombia, and the article “Wēt wēt fxizenxi: Buen vivir Comunitario Nasa (Nasa Collective Buen Vivir),” written by Manuel Augusto Sisco and published in the journal of the university, Feelings and Thoughts, Weaving Memories.[5] In addition, I have consulted the alternative journal Periferias (Periferies) and in particular the article “Challenging Buen Vivir,”[6] by Vilma Almendra, Emmanuel Rozental, Edwin Pipicano, Ángela Gutiérrez, and Jorge Sarria. Looking for Latin American indigenous thinkers I turned to an interview with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui by Boaventura de Sousa Santos about buen vivir,[7] and another one with Cusicanqui by Rolando Carvajal, “Silvia Rivera: ‘El vivir bien se transformó en palabra hueca,’” published on the web page Rebelión.[8]

Buen vivir is a way of living that connects living things, including humans, and non-living things, with a specific territory. This territory is understood to be an integral part of this way of living and is brought to life through the weaving of relations, cultures, exchanges, interactions, and rituals.

Buen vivir allows for those with diverse perspectives to speak and co-exist, while searching for connections between them and respecting their differences. By drawing on collective wisdom and respect, buen vivir allows a recognition of the other. Buen vivir relates to autonomous ways of living, including food sovereignity and autonomous approaches to health, education, spirituality, and economy, for example. As a collective project in constant construction, buen vivir searches for the self-determination of peoples. Buen vivir respects life above all, and this could be seen as its principle ethical stand.

Buen vivir is a term that is part of numerous indigenous Latin American cultures and as such it does not have a specific and unique meaning. In Ecuador, for example, buen vivir refers to the Quechua concept: “Sumak Kawsay;” in Bolivia, buen vivir connects to the Aymara concept: “Suma Qamaña;” and in Colombia, for the Nasa people, buen vivir refers to WĒT WĒT FXIZENXI:

Buen Vivir Comunitario Nasa: WĒT, is what is tasty, what is delicious. FXIZENXI is life. What is it? It is to taste life, but it places us in a social, cultural, spiritual, political and economic context. It is the bet where we, social groups, move.[9] (My translation).

Buen vivir reached political recognition in Latin America in 1990’s and more broadly around 2005 when it was adopted by left wing political parties in power in Ecuador and Bolivia. In both countries buen vivir was incorporated into their new constitutions, and in an unprecedented move, this included the rights of nature or “Pachamama.”[10]

The use of the term buen vivir is understood then as an alternative to the western discourse of development. The adoption of the term buen vivir by governments in Latin America is an important political move that brings about the recognition of indigenous cultures and speaks – from a state-based position – of other possible ways of living and relating to each other and to nature. Nonetheless, the use of the term by governments that are at the same time embedded in the global extractive economy, represents a challenge. As most rural populations oppose extractivism – a practice core to western development that both implies and actually produces the breakdown of indigenous territories and traditional ways of living of – how then can buen vivir be fully implemented?

In the context of western development, the meaning of buen vivir is reduced and its full significance is hidden when placed in relation to the dominant economic and cultural system. Buen vivir has been compared with the western discourse of degrowth,[11] but this comparison limits the deeper concept of buen vivir by connecting it to the problem of overconsumption, and does not acknowledge that buen vivir also relates to the need to build connections, create collective autonomies in territories, and to search for the spiritual roots that connect us to this world. In addition, degrowth means to focus on “less,” while buen vivir refers to a life with an abundance of connections and to life itself. In English, for example, buen vivir has been translated as “the plentiful life”.[12] A connection of buen vivir with reduction risks emptying the term of its potentiality.

The term buen vivir points to an important discussion around the relevance of life and the need to protect life globally in response to violent means of extraction, accumulation, and enrichment. This is an important lesson for the western world and western thinking, and focuses on the ethics of respecting life above all. The lesson continues because buen vivir refers to a process – it is not a static defined concept, but embodied. Therefore, if we are to learn from buen vivir, it is necessary to see how social movements are currently and constantly keeping the concept alive by embodying it, and so giving continued vigour to its practice, meaning and political strength.  

Written by Diana Salazar.

[1] Rolando Carvajal, “Silvia Rivera: «El vivir bien se transformó en palabra hueca»” Rebelión, 10 June 2015, https://rebelion.org/silvia-rivera-el-vivir-bien-se-transformo-en-palabra-hueca/. My translation.

[2] Charo Mina in “Derechos de los Pueblos, Luchas Sociales y Buen Vivir: Perspectivas Antes, Durante y Despues del COVID-19,”, accessed 16 September 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MtmKkWEhJg

[3] Leonor Yonda in “Derechos de los Pueblos, Luchas Sociales y Buen Vivir: Perspectivas Antes, Durante y Despues del COVID-19”, accessed 16 September 2021,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FHaXsFOV1A

[4] Nelson Lemus in “Derechos de los Pueblos, Luchas Sociales y Buen Vivir: Perspectivas Antes, Durante y Despues del COVID-19”, accessed 16 September 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU2c_TaUcTw

[5] Manuel Augusto Sisco, Pueblo Nasa, “Wēt wēt fxizenxi: Buen vivir Comunitario Nasa,” Universidad Autónoma Indígena Intercultural del Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca, Sentires y Pensares: Tejiendo Memorias, Revista 0, 85, accessed 15 September 2021, https://uaiinpebi-cric.edu.co/de-interes/sentires-y-pensares-tejiendo-memorias/

[6] Vilma Almendra, Emmanuel Rozental, Edwin Pipicano, Ángela Gutiérrez, and Jorge Sarria, “Challenging ‘buen vivir:’ Photographic Essay: A Sketch of the Forms of Buen Viver of Pioyá, Cauca,” accessed 6 October 2021, https://revistaperiferias.org/en/materia/challenging-buenvivir-or-whatever-its-called-to-get-back-on-track/

[7] “Cusicanqui y el buen vivir – conversa com Boaventura,” accessed 6 October 2021, http://vidaboa.redelivre.org.br/2017/08/16/cusicanqui-y-el-buen-vivir-conversa-com-boaventura/

[8] Roland Carvajal, “Silvia Rivera: «El vivir bien se transformó en palabra hueca,»” (6 October 2015), accessed 6 October 2021, https://rebelion.org/silvia-rivera-el-vivir-bien-se-transformo-en-palabra-hueca/

[9] Sisco, “Wēt wēt fxizenxi.”

[10] Eduardo Gudynas, “Buen Vivir: Today's Tomorrow,” Development 54, no. 4 ((2011): 441–7. doi:10.1057/dev.2011.86.  

[11] Gudynas, “Buen Vivir.”

[12] Pablo Solón, Compilador, Alternativas Sistémicas, 1era edición (La Paz, Bolivia: Ediciones Fundación Solón/Attac France/Focus on the Global South, 2017), accessed 6 October 2021, https://systemicalternatives.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/sa-final-ingles-pdf2.pdf.

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Care #1

The term “care” relates to dependencies and relationships between human beings. The ethics of care have been generally defined by Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher as:

a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.[1]

Tronto identifies four types of care:

caring about, i.e. recognizing a need for care; caring for, i.e. taking responsibility to meet that need; care giving, i.e. the actual physical work of providing care; and, finally, care receiving, i.e. the evaluation of how well the care provided had met the caring need.[2]

Care ethics offer potential alternative ways of looking at liberal human rights theory, which is based on universal principles such as egalitarianism, justice and autonomy. Virginia Held argues that the ethics of care is a distinct moral theory, which is both a practice and a value. She points out that care is characterized by its focus on relationships, but these are often situated within contexts of power and control. Held therefore stresses the significance of care ethics in social, political and global contexts.[3] Relationships and responsibilities which extend beyond national borders to the global scale, involve power inequalities, colonial legacies and global politics.[4] Care ethics is useful in understanding and recognising harm, often caused unintentionally by individuals through their participation in various institutions such as the global policies of states or the economic interests of commercial corporations. Global “relationships of responsibility” allow for understanding various levels of accountability as relationships of care and commitments.[5] Such an understanding differs from an altruistic approach, because it is based on a sense of solidarity,[6] that can be understood relationally rather than as a commitment which grows out of legal obligations or universal abstract moral principles.

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] Joan B. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. (New York, London: Routledge, 1993), 103.

[2] Joan C. Tronto, "Creating Caring Institutions: Politics, Plurality, and Purpose," Ethics and Social Welfare 4, no. 2 (2010): 160, https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2010.484259.

[3] Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford University Press, 2006), 5.

[4] See for example Fiona Robinson, "The Ethics of Care," The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195325911.003.0020; Carol C. Gould, “Transnational Solidarities," Journal of Social Philosophy 38, no. 1 (2007): 148–64, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00371.x; Iris Marion Young, "Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model," Justice and Global Politics 4, no. 4 (2006): 102–30, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511550744.005; Joan C. Tronto, "Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics," Ethics and Social Welfare 6, no. 3 (2012): 303–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2012.704058.

[5] Tronto, "Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics."

[6] Anjali Dutt and Danielle Kohfeldt, "Towards a Liberatory Ethics of Care Framework for Organizing Social Change," Journal of Social and Political Psychology 6, no. 2 (2018): 584, https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v6i2.909.

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Care #2

We must diminish vulnerability, reduce the drivers of disaster and open room for wellbeing, restoring ecosystems and human relationships.[1]

Following the work of Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher, to focus on care is to continuously emphasise the importance of the contexts and environments within which we create care relationships.[2] This focus suggests that care is vital in social and environmental movements and so calls on us to assess our current relationships accordingly – Are we in a reciprocal exchange of care? Are we being exploited? Are we evading responsibility? Are we causing harm? Are we taking care of ourselves? Are we taking care of our environment?

Nel Noddings describes two stages of caring: “caring-for,” which describes the act of caring, and “caring-about,” which describes the act of cultivating ideas and actions of caring.[3] Even though Noddings explains that it is difficult to care for all, especially when great physical distances might prevent us from fulfilling the characteristics of a mutual caring relationship, “caring-about” acts as a motivation to fight for local justice, which in turn can inspire global justice.[4]

When centering care within the context of the environment, we can move towards intersectionality and the creation of an inclusive movement, one which many organizations, like Wretched of the Earth, have been fighting for.[5]

The term “Intersectionality” was first introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw as a theory which states that social categories like gender, race, sexual orientation, and class, act as systems of oppression which can overlap, causing multiple injustices to occur to people that sit at their intersections.[6]  Crenshaw focuses on the importance of lived experiences as a core aspect of intersectionality, and as she points out, lived experiences have been undervalued in widespread theoretical work in philosophy, ethics, and politics.[7]

Similarly, in care ethics, Virginia Held argues that by championing social connections, we can promote healthy and reciprocal relationships of care, disrupting what she calls a traditional self-interested journey of morality:

The small societies of family and friendship embedded in larger societies are formed by caring relations … A globalization of caring relations would help enable people of different states and cultures to live in peace, to respect each other’s rights, to care together for their environments, and to improve the lives of their children.[8]

Within this context, care and intersectionality can inform environmental movements that focus on liberation by highlighting existing systems of oppression and the creation of care networks. These theories of care and intersectionality have informed the practice of intersectional environmentalism, defined by the founder of Intersectional Environmentalist, Leah Thomas, as an inclusive movement which recognises the interconnected nature of people, communities, and the protection of the Earth,[9] therefore recognising environmental injustices as overlapping layers of social inequalities and environmental catastrophes.

Written by Montserrat Gutierrez Mesegue.

[1] Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik, The Memory We Could Be (Oxford: New Internationalist, 2018), 174.

[2] Joan B. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York, London: Routledge, 1993), 103.

[3] Joan B. Tronto, “Creating Caring Institutions: Politics, Plurality, and Purpose,” Ethics and Social Welfare 4, no. 2 (2010): 160.

[4] Nel Noddings, “Part Three. Towards a Caring Society,” in Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (Berkeley, CA: University of CA Press, 2002), 227–83.

[5] Wretched of The Earth. “An Open Letter to Extinction Rebellion.” Red Pepper, 3 May 2019, https://www.redpepper.org.uk/an-open-letter-to-extinction-rebellion.

[6] Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, no. 8 (1989).

[7] Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color." Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99.

[8] Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 168.

[9] “About Us,” Intersectional Environmentalist, accessed 25 June 2021, https://www.intersectionalenvironmentalist.com/about-ie.

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Co-production

Co-production in relation to research refers to a method of collaborating with partners to jointly define research questions and generate new knowledge, projects or products. The process of co-production involves collaborating with different stakeholders in order to deliver an outcome or process that is grounded in a relevant social, cultural, and political context. Co-production incorporates various ways that different stakeholders use in order to approach, understand and deal with the research questions. Co-produced knowledge or products are not only integrated but can also be transformational and become agents of change which can affect different stakeholders.[1] In this way, knowledge enables social learning that can challenge existing assumptions which prevent transformative change.[2]The societal effects of knowledge co-production therefore include not only gaining new knowledge, but also other possible impacts such as encouraging network building, increasing public involvement, developing a wider understanding of different perspectives, and enhancing decision making capacities.[3]

Since co-produced research is performed by multiple stakeholders, interactions and communication between partners stand at the core of this method. This highlights the centrality of recognition and respect for the knowledge and value systems of the various stakeholders,[4] and the need to carefully define common goals and purposes, agree about the details of working together, and make sure that all partners gain something out of the project.[5]

Differences can lead to tensions, for example around issues of power relations between partners, balancing different expectations and interests, allocation of time and resources, and ways of working through disagreements, misunderstandings or conflicts. Problematic attitudes may surface, such as competition, ethnocentrism or paternalism.[6] In such contexts, even attempts to discuss ethical issues could run the risk of re-embedding colonial ideas about relationship, respect, and responsibility.[7] While institutional ethics principles and procedures are important starting points for thinking about research ethics, they offer no tools for dealing with such issues. There is a need for partners involved in co-producing research to reflect on their relational responsibilities, in order to open up possibilities for positive interaction and transformation. Such a process can contribute to the development of understandings of research ethics, not only personally but also from an institutional perspective.  

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] H. Z. Schuttenberg and Heidi K. Guth, 'Seeking Our Shared Wisdom: A Framework for Understanding Knowledge Coproduction and Coproductive Capacities,' Ecology and Society 20, no. 1 (2015): 14; Susanne C. Moser, 'Can Science on Transformation Transform Science? Lessons from Co-Design,' Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 20 (2016): 107.

[2] Emmanuel Osuteye et al., “Knowledge Co-Production for Urban Equality,” KNOW Working Paper Series 1, no. 1 (2019): 11.

[3] Alexander Walter et al., 'Measuring Societal Effects of Transdisciplinary Research Projects: Design and Application of an Evaluation Method,' Evaluation and Program Planning 30, no. 4 (2007): 332–33.

[4] Emma Visman et al., 'Learning to Support Co-Production Learning between at-Risk Groups , Humanitarian and Development Practitioners, Policymakers, Scientists and Academics,' BRACED Learning Papers, no. 3 (2016): 2, http://www.braced.org/resources/i/?id=f69880ae-f10f-4a51-adb5-fb2a9696b44d.

[5] Osuteye et al., 'Knowledge Co-Production for Urban Equality,' 9.

[6] Richie Howitt and Stan Stevens, 'Cross-Cultural Research: Ethics, Methods, and Relationships,' in Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography, ed. Iain Hay, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2008), 35; Schuttenberg and Guth, 'Seeking Our Shared Wisdom: A Framework for Understanding Knowledge Coproduction and Coproductive Capacities.' 

[7] Sarah Wakefield and Madeline Whetung, 'Colonial Conventions,' in Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education, ed. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang (New York: Routledge, 2015), 149.

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Commons

The commons is neither market nor state, capitalism nor communism, but it consists of three main elements: a particular resource; a particular community that manages that resource; and the rules and negotiations the community develops to manage it ... A common can't be sold, it can't be given away, and its benefits are shared equally among the members of the community.[1]

The term “commons” originated in medieval Europe to describe shared land and the socially agreed-upon rules for governing and managing this natural resource by communities. Overtime, the term has expanded beyond the management of natural resources to include knowledge, virtual reality and other communal resources. “The Tragedy of the Commons,” published in 1968 by Garrett Hardin,[2] questioned people’s capacity to organise and properly manage a resource, claiming that there is an innate tendency to overexploit it. The only way to avoid this tragedy, according to Hardin, was through private property rights and governmental regulation.

Since then, an entire school of thought has emerged to study and showcase ways in which communities are in fact able to manage and govern common resources to ensure their long-term viability. Guided by the theoretical framework developed by Elinor Ostrom,[3] the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC),[4] explores alternative structures to govern common resources, seeking to continuously improve these systems which are neither market nor state, arguing that privatisation and regulation do not guarantee that resources are not overexploited.

George Monbiot further explores the claim that state regulation is not sufficient to properly manage resources, depicting the ways in which neoliberalism, as a predominant political current, tends to promote individualism and competition between people.[5] He calls instead for a more participatory “politics of belonging” which strives for the revival of community life which is, in turn, better able to manage resources at the local level. This is of particular relevance in times characterised by disengaged government policies and programmes detached from everyday realities, capacities, and needs.

Alternative communal governance has benefits beyond greater efficiency in offering improved accessibility to, and long-term availability of, shared resources. The commons are linked to the forging and strengthening of agency in processes that promote equality in gathering for decision-making. There is thus an emancipating and affective aspect of more horizontal and communal governance structures, along with a shared principle of collective responsibility and renewed citizenship. The social and environmental connections originated through commoning promote what in Latin America is known as buenvivir. These dimensions and benefits are not new. For instance, the guiding question for the 17th Architectural Biennale celebrated in Venice, Italy in 2021, was “how will we live together?”

The Philippines Pavilion,[6] curated by Framework Collaborative, responded by showcasing how mutual support and collective solidarity are intrinsic values around the world – we are already living together and supporting each other. More than managing common resources, commoning involves co-producing resources, materially and socially, that promote collective wellbeing and a sense of belonging.

The horizontal management of collective resources presents challenges and limitations. David Harvey questions the capacity of Ostrom’s framework in managing complex commons that extend beyond the local level:

What looks like a good way to resolve problems at one scale does not hold at another scale. Even worse, patently good solutions at one scale (the “local,” say) do not necessarily aggregate up (or cascade down) to make for good solutions at another scale (the global, for example).[7]

Harvey therefore argues that hierarchical forms of organization “are needed to address large-scale problems such as global warming.” [8] On-going work on the commons, as stated by the IASC, seeks to envision and design alternative governance structures capable of effectively managing resources shared at larger scales. Communal governance cannot occur without political action and people not only participating in decision-making processes but actively appropriating them, what Monbiot refers to as “a thriving civic life.”[9]  

 Current governance structures and ways of managing resources are unsustainable in that they do not guarantee that those resources will be available in the long-term and are currently not accessible to everyone in an equal manner. The need for different ways of governing and co-existing is undeniable. The question remains as to how to learn and adapt successful models of governing common resources in ways that transcend the local and are able to respond to the complex challenges of the anthropocene and increasing inequalities.

Written by Belen Desmaison.

 [1] George Monbiot, “ The New Political Story that could change Everything,” (2019), accessed 6 October 2021, https://www.ted.com/talks/george_monbiot_the_new_political_story_that_could_change_everything

[2] Garrett Hardin,“The Tragedy of the Commons,”  Science 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1243–8, doi:10.1126/science.162.3859.1243.

[3] Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446200964.n32.

[4] International Association for the Study of the Commons, accessed 6 October 2021, https://iasc-commons.org/.

[5] George Monbiot, Out of Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (London: Verso. 2017)

[6] Dima Stouhi, “The Philippines Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Biennale Explores Bayanihan in the Times of COVID-19,” (24 May 2021), accessed 6 October 2021, https://www.archdaily.com/962202/the-philippines-pavilion-at-the-2021-venice-biennale-explore-bayanihan-in-the-times-of-covid-19.

[7] David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Right to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso, 2012), 69–70, https://doi.org/10.4067/S0250-71612014000100013.

[8] Harvey, Rebel Cities, 69.

[9] Monbiot, Out of Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis, 43.

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Confidentiality #1

Confidentiality in research ethics is often equated with privacy protection, as a measure taken to ensure that the identities of research subjects are protected from the potential harm that could result from their naming. Confidentiality and privacy protection are central principles of contemporary institutional research ethics. Privacy protection refers to the collecting and handling of personal data, defined in the UK Data Protection Act 1998  as information which relates to a living individual who can be identified. Under this Act, personal data consists of information as to:

(a) the racial or ethnic origin of the data subject, (b) his/her political opinions, (c) his/her religious beliefs or other beliefs of a similar nature, (d) whether he/she is a member of a trade union […] (e) his/her physical or mental health or condition, (f) his/her sexual life, (g) the commission or alleged commission by him/her of any offence, or (h) any proceedings for any offence committed or alleged to have been committed by him/her, the disposal of such proceedings or the sentence of any court in such proceedings.[1]

In 2019, the European Union issued the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), that builds on the current Data Protection Act to address modern forms of communication.[2]

The concepts of privacy and confidentiality have been criticised as resulting from a western perception of autonomy, which is rooted in a utilitarian moral approach to individuals as ‘autonomous human beings,’ and in deontological ethics which are based on a universal moral code. This approach has dictated the current understanding of confidentiality, which as noted by Clifford Christians, views the invasion of people’s ‘fragile but distinctive privacy’ as intolerable.[3]

However, the precedence granted by this approach to the individual over the communal has also been widely criticised as a western-centric approach. For example, some African scholars refer to a different and far more complex view of the role of the community in relation to the individual.[4] The debates around notions of personhood and relations of individual and communal highlight the questionable relevance of western individually-based ethics principles, such as confidentiality and privacy protection, in different cultural contexts. 

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] “ESRC Framework for Research Ethics,” Economics and Social Research Council, 2015, 43, http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/about-esrc/information/framework-for-research-ethics/index.aspx.

[2] Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO): Guide to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/, accessed 5 Oct. 2020

[3] Clifford G Christians, “Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Nrman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, Second edi (Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications, 2000), 139. See also David Spataro, “Reframing Structure and Agency in Participatory Action Research PAR as a Politics of Scale,” International Review of Qualitative Research 3, no. 4 (2011): 469, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/irqr.2011.3.4.455.

[4] See for example K. Wiredu, “An Oral Philosophy of Personhood: Comments on Philosophy and Orality,” Research in African Literatures 40(1) (2009): 8–18; I. Menkiti, “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought,” in African Philosophy: An Introduction, ed. R.A. Wright (Washington D.C.: University Press of America, 1984), 171–181; John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969); Leonard Tumaini Chuwa, “African Indigenous Ethics in Global Bioethics,” vol. 1, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8625-6; Kwame Gyekye, “Person and Community: In Defense of Moderate Communitarianism,” in Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (Oxford Scholarship Online, 1997), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof; Yusef Waghid, “Knowledge(s), Culture and African Philosophy,” Knowledge Cultures 4, no. 4 (2016): 11–17.; Joseph Jinja Divala, “Re-Imaging a Conception of Ubuntu that Can Recreate Relevant Knowledge Cultures in Africa and African Universities.,” Knowledge Cultures 4, no. 4 (2016): 90–103, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=117150804&site=ehost-live.

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Confidentiality #2

The identifiability of an individual can also extend into the sound and recognisability of their voice. As Brandon LaBelle writes: “ … the voice is also a full body, always already a voice subject, rich with intentions and meanings; sexed and gendered, classed and raced, accented, situated, and inflected by the intensities of numerous markings and their performance … ”[i]  The combination of the sound of a voice, what that voice is saying, and any contextual information, such as that provided by a specific creative work or research project, means that it might be possible for listeners to work out who is speaking, even if the individual speaking is not named. The sound of a voice can also, as LaBelle suggests, indicate characteristics about the participant, such as their gender and ethnic origin, which under GDPR is regarded as personal data.[ii] This has ethical implications for the use and presentation of audio recordings of participants, irrespective of the content of what is being said, and puts into doubt the ability to maintain participant confidentiality when presenting or disseminating any audio recordings/clips of research interviews and conversations. For this reason, the risks of potential identification should be discussed with participants and consent sought prior to any audio being shared.

Written by Naomi Gibson.

[i] Brandon LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 5.

[ii] Information Commissioner's Office, “Special Category Data,” Information Commissioner's Office, accessed 10 October 2021, https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/lawful-basis-for-processing/special-category-data/

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Conflicts of interest

A conflict can be actual, potential or perceived. A perceived conflict of interest is one which a reasonable person would consider likely to compromise objectivity. A potential conflict of interest is a situation which could develop into an actual or perceived conflict of interest.[1]

A conflict of interest occurs when two competing interests conflict with each other! This might be when two relationships compete with each other for a person's loyalty. So a person might have loyalty to an employer and to a personal business, in which case, each entity expects the person to put its best interest first.

Conflicts of interest occur at the interface then between competing entities: these may be public and private, public and personal, private and personal, and the conflict of interest may be actual, potential, or perceived. A conflict of interest is a situation which occurs when the commitments and obligations owed to one entity appear to be comprised by gains, commitments, and obligations connected to another set of relations. Conflicts of interest often arise when money is involved and profit can be gained, but they do not have to be financial, indeed conflicts of interest can be financial, non-financial or both.

Conflicts of interest will typically be faced at some point in a researcher’s career. They may occur in terms of the need to balance different ethical obligations due to relations with collaborators and other affected parties, as set out by the American Anthropological Association.[2] Some conflicts of interest are present at the outset of a research project, and so the issues they produce can be predicted, and so noted at the start, and/or logged as they emerge. As long as definitions are in place to determine what constitutes a conflict of interest, and procedures exist that set out what to do, and how to disclose a conflict of interest, it can be possible manage a conflict of interest as part of an agreed and declared plan. However in certain cases, when conflicts of interest are actual rather than potential, disclosure and/or a management plan may not be sufficient, and a researcher may not be able to start or to continue to carry out their work.

In the UK, Universities and Research Councils, as entities in receipt of public and other funds, are expected to fulfil the highest standards of governance which include the “Seven Principles of Public Life,” as drawn up by the Nola Committee and endorsed by the UK Parliament – “selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership.” [3]

The UK’s Economic and Social Science Research Council, for example, identifies the conflicts of interest that might occur depending on the research activity being undertaken, for example, peer review or sitting on a panel reviewing a funding application. In the case of peer review, a conflict of interest can include personal relationships, so, for example, a close family relationship, the sharing of a household, an existing business or professional relationship, a supervisory relationship, a research collaboration or co-publishing relation with an individual. When assessing funding applications, the kind of relationships that may potentially pose a conflict of interest extend from the family to the university where the funding application is based and to the funding council itself.[4]

Conflicts of Interest Policies are often related to other codes of conducts. At University College London (UCL), for example, these include the Anti-Corruption and Bribery Policy, the Close Personal Relationships Policy, the Fraud Policy, the Intellectual Property Policy, the Prevention of Bullying, Harassment and Sexual Misconduct Policy and the Public Interest Disclosure.[5] UCL notes how conflicts of interest can occur when research interfaces with activities beyond the university, through collaborations with the commercial world, for example, through the licensing of intellectual property and ‘spin out’ companies, or when academics engage with public bodies, by serving on government panels, providing expert advice, and media commentary.[6]

Conflicts of interest may not be foreseen and can arise out of unexpected circumstances. Yet recognising a conflict of interest when it occurs and acting to disclose it – to manage risks to reputational damage and to protect individuals and institutions from harm – is part of developing an ethical research practice and maintaining research integrity.

Actual, potential or perceived conflicts which are not managed effectively risk harming the integrity and reputation of [an institution] and [of] the individuals concerned.[7]

Professional codes for practitioners also include definitions and guidance concerning conflicts of interest. The Architects Registration Board (ARB), is no exception, for example:

Standard 1.3 of The Architects Code: Standards of Professional Conduct and Practice (the Code) provides guidance for architects on disclosing conflicts of interest to affected parties. Under the Code, architects are required to ensure that where conflicts arise they are disclosed in writing and are managed to the satisfaction of all affected parties.[8]

The ARB highlights how professionals are expected to act with “independence, integrity, in the best interests of the client above all others,” and that when giving advice “impartial and independent professional judgement” is to be used. Criticisms have been made of the problems with valuing a client’s interest – which may, for example, involve the making of private profit and producing large carbon emissions – above both the public good, and – importantly in times of climate and ecological crisis – above planetary survival.

In professional terms, a conflict of interest is understood to take place when a “personal” interest stands in the way or impacts professional duty, especially when a personal or professional benefit can arise as the result of a relationship. The ARB also notes that a conflict of interest may not be actual, but can also be potential – or­ perceived by others – for example:

A familiarity or long-standing relationship with a contractor, receiving gifts or hospitality from a business, handling confidential information, or having a close association with an individual who has an interest in a supplier (e.g. a spouse/partner or close relative) could all be seen as conflicts.[9]

The advice given is to declare interests, and to act with honesty and integrity.

Ideally in both research and professional organisations principles, codes, and protocols are put in place to limit the potential for conflicts of interest to occur, and to provide mechanisms for disclosing and managing them should they arise. Depending on the kind of entity involved, and its source of funding, a mechanism for the disclosure of a conflict of interest might be confidential or a conflict of interest might be required to be made a matter of public record. If conflicts of interest are not recorded or acted upon appropriately, then this can put an institution’s reputation at risk.

In order to protect the public interest, when a conflict of interest occurs if it is not declared, then there is also the risk that whistleblowing may occur. Whistleblowers are seen to be “vital for maintaining an open and transparent society,” and for “exposing misconduct of hidden threats.”[10]  So in 2019, for example, The EU Whistleblowing Directive was instigated to protect whistleblowers.

 Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] The UCL Disclosure of Conflict and Declaration of Interest Policy. See https://www.ucl.ac.uk/enterprise/about/governance-and-policies/ucl-disclosure-conflict-and-declaration-interest-policy

[2] “Ethics and Methods,” accessed 6 December 2021, https://www.americananthro.org/ethics-and-methods

[3] “ESRC: Conflicts of Interest Guidance,” accessed 6 December 2021, https://esrc.ukri.org/files/funding/guidance-for-peer-reviewers/conflicts-of-interest-guidance/

[4] “ESRC: Conflicts of Interest Guidance,” accessed 6 December 2021, https://esrc.ukri.org/files/funding/guidance-for-peer-reviewers/conflicts-of-interest-guidance/

[5] “UCL Disclosure of Conflict and Declaration of Interest Policy,” accessed 6 December 2021, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/enterprise/about/governance-and-policies/ucl-disclosure-conflict-and-declaration-interest-policy

[6] UCL Disclosure of Conflict and Declaration of Interest Policy,” accessed 6 December 2021, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/enterprise/about/governance-and-policies/ucl-disclosure-conflict-and-declaration-interest-policy

[7] UCL Disclosure of Conflict and Declaration of Interest Policy,” accessed 6 December 2021, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/enterprise/about/governance-and-policies/ucl-disclosure-conflict-and-declaration-interest-policy

[8] “Managing Conflicts,” accessed 6 December 2021, https://arb.org.uk/architect-information/guidance-notes/managing-conflicts/

[9] “Managing Conflicts,” accessed 6 December 2021, https://arb.org.uk/architect-information/guidance-notes/managing-conflicts/

[10] “EU Whistleblowing Directive,” accessed 6 December 2021, https://www.integrityline.com/en-gb/expertise/eu-whistleblowing-directive/?gclid=CjwKCAiAnO2MBhApEiwA8q0HYZg7XmwG1fVdSNkSo0nX5p0kDW4qrFRiGNP7tr9pR_OCiw5HSgAG6xoC_98QAvD_BwE. See also A. J. Brown, D. Lewis, and R. Moberly (eds), International Handbook on Whistleblowing Research, (Edward Elgar Publishing: 2014).

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Consent

Consent is one of the central principles of contemporary institutional research ethics. It is one of the basic principles listed in the Nuremberg Code, which was written following World War Two and put forth a set of ten ethics principles for research involving human experimentation. One of them was the obligation to gain the voluntary consent of the human subject (other principles include avoidance of all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury, the right of the human subject to withdraw from the research, and the protection of privacy).[1] The principle of informed consent means that

the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension [...] to make an understanding and enlightened decision.[2]

Informed consent, like privacy protection, is rooted in deontological ethics, which follow a universal moral code. This perception of informed consent has been criticised as problematic because it assumes that participants are in relatively equal positions of power with researchers.[3] Furthermore, like other institutional research principles it also reflects a culture of individual rights of an ‘autonomous individual’.  However, as argued by Wynn and Israel, the signing of written consent forms is a ‘ritual,’ based on the western legalistic view of the contract and authenticity of the signature as culturally and politically neutral.[4] Other researchers have pointed out that such procedures could cause suspicion and work against building trust relations with research participants.[5] In order to achieve genuine agreement to participation, researchers have suggested instead that consent should not be limited to a point in time at which a form is signed. Rather, an interpersonal process should take place in which interactions and negotiations will lead to a meaningful informed consent.[6]

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] Evelyne Shuster, “Fifty Years Later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code,” New England Journal of Medicine 337, no. 20 (November 13, 1997): 1436–40, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199711133372006.

[2] Shuster, 1436.

[3] Catriona Mackenzie, Christopher McDowell, and Eileen Pittaway, 'Beyond "Do No Harm": The Challenge of Constructing Ethical Relationships in Refugee Research,' Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 2 (2007): 302, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fem008.

[4] L. L. Wynn and Mark Israel, 'The Fetishes of Consent: Signatures, Paper, and Writing in Research Ethics Review,' American Anthropologist 120, no. 4 (2018): 797, https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13148.

[5] Mackenzie, McDowell, and Pittaway, “Beyond ‘Do No Harm’: The Challenge of Constructing Ethical Relationships in Refugee Research,” 306.

[6] Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, 'Ethics, Reflexivity, and "Ethically Important Moments" in Research,' Qualitative Inquiry 10, no. 2 (2004): 272, https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800403262360.

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Emancipatory Pedagogies

I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions - a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom.[1]

According to the Oxford English Dictionary pedagogy refers to “the art, science, or profession of teaching,” while emancipatory is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “giving people social and political freedom and rights.”[2][3] The aim of emancipatory processes could be understood as liberation and autonomy from some form of restraint, oppression or influence, setting people free from legal, social, or political restrictions, while activating their rights.

Putting together the elements of pedagogy and emancipatory, however, is more than a process of addition in which teaching leads to liberation. Rather, emancipatory pedagogies are multi-directional: they create and curate possibilities to counteract the biases that uphold and maintain the supremacy of colonial, imperialist, Western, patriarchal, racist, occupied and de-humanising systems of knowledge and practice. Moreover, emancipatory pedagogies are future-oriented and inherently political in that they seek emancipation for impactful action, and for eliciting alternative imaginaries of more just, equal, and sustainable societies. They are simultaneously personal and social, as they develop collective agency, common passions and affects.[4] Emancipatory pedagogies work across the material and immaterial, as they rely on all our senses; they generate not just different ways of understanding in the world but of seeing, listening and being in it.

This approach to education as the practice of freedom,[5] a multi-directionality that emancipates from, and emancipates for, requires a pedagogy which works through resistance, contestation, and indignation, as well as possibilities, sensibilities, and hope: through creating caring relations, through facilitating iterative learning and unlearning, and un-rooting and re-rooting learners with their own agency and dignity.[6] In urban practice, this resonates strongly with the everyday pedagogies practiced by and through social movements, grassroots organisations, and activists. In higher education institutions, emancipatory pedagogies are claimed by marginalised learners and are at the core of movements such as “de-colonising the university” or “black lives matter” – rather than being simply inscribed into formal teaching strategies or institutional ethics norms.

The relations between emancipatory pedagogies and ethics of practice in the built environment are manifold. On the one hand, emancipatory pedagogies are essential to activate and build the agency of urban practitioners (including built environment professionals) to engage ethically in their practice[7]. In the language of this lexicon, this includes learning how to navigate ethical hotspots, unravelling blindspots and the reasons they exist, and acquiring the practical experience of using principles as touchstones. On the other hand, urban practitioners are themselves learners as well as pedagogues who frequently engage in pedagogic processes with emancipatory potential. For example, participatory and community-led planning inherently require a range of urban actors (citizens, civil society organisations, government officials, consultants, and others) to learn about, and engage with, each other’s often conflicting aspirations and visions while working towards a collective aim.

The ethical “test” for urban pedagogies to be emancipatory, lies in how these emancipatory pedagogies are practiced as well as on the effects they have on all engaged:[8] on the extent to which they generate capacities to disrupt power asymmetries, to contest multiple forms of othering, to activate our agency and rights to change ourselves and the world.

The practice of emancipatory pedagogies invites us to conceive our bodies and experiences as the “classroom,” to articulate new meanings to what education is and does; to approach education as the practice of freedom and as a form of political activism – paraphrasing bell hooks, as a journey that connects the “will to know with the will to become.”[9]

 Written by Julia Wesely and Adriana Allen.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

[1] bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 20.

[2] “Pedagogy,” OED, Oxford English Dictionary, last modified December 2020, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/139520?

[3] “Emancipatory,” Cambridge Online Dictionary, last accessed October 2021, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/emancipatory

[4] Laurence Tan, “The 5 E’s of Emancipatory Pedagogy: The Rehumanizing Approach to Teaching and Learning with Inner-City Youth,” in Handbook of Social Justice in Education, eds. William Ayers, Therese Quinn, and David Stovall (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 485–96.

[5] hooks, Teaching to Transgress. See also Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970).

[6] Sara C. Motte, “Emancipation in Latin America: On the Pedagogical Turn,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 36, no. 1 (July 2016): 5–20.

[7] Nouri, Ali and Seyed Mahdi Sajjadi. “Emancipatory Education in Practice: Aims, Principles and Curriculum Orientation.” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 5, no. 2 (2014): 76–87.

[8] Devika Chawla and Amardo Rodriguez, “Emancipatory Pedagogy as Insurgence,” Radical Pedagogy (2001), accessed 12 Octbober 2021, https://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue3_2/chawla.html

[9] hooks, Teaching to Transgress.

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Equality

The term “equality” has been widely considered, defined and debated over the years from diverse disciplinary angles. In relation to urban equality, it is useful to adopt a view of equality as “justice or fair treatment” rather than “sameness or homogeneity.” [1] This view allows for a focus on distributional aspects of inequality, as well as institutional recognition and participation.[2] The KNOW Research Programme, for example, has used four broad and inter-related dimensions of urban equality: equitable distribution and access to income and basic services; reciprocal recognition of different social identities; mutual care and solidarity; and parity political participation.[3]

When considering research ethics it is also possible to consider how equality and inequality operate in the practice of research itself. As noted by Joan Tronto, unequal relations “are, ultimately, probably a majority of the relations in which people find themselves,” [4] making this aspect central to research ethics.

The idea of equality as “sameness” is relevant for maintaining research partnerships without the assumption of homogeneity. For example, while acknowledging differences, Keguro Macharia calls on researchers from the global north to consider their African partners as equals:

Don’t turn us into native informants. Respect us as intellectual equals. Ask us the same kinds of questions you’d ask people you consider intellectual equals. Be rigorous. We can take it. Expect the same.[5]

This piece of advice highlights the point that as well as material elements of distribution and access to resources in research, other aspects such as recognition, respect, attentiveness and sensitivity are necessary for establishing and maintaining partnerships of equivalence.

Many researchers co-producing knowledge, for example, do so with awareness and reflexivity, but even so difficulties remain. Grace Musila talks about “the labour of speaking up again, and again, and again, about unequal power relations, to people who build entire careers off writing about inequality.” [6] Why are scholars who write about inequality still prone to treat their partners or research participants unequally? This question is articulated by Iris Marion Young, who looks at ingrained ways of interacting that are often not part of the discussion about ethics:

Much moral theorizing is devoted to discussion of dilemmas and hard cases, where alternatives are explicit, and the question is which one to choose. Within this paradigm it is often regarded as inappropriate to submit habits, feelings or unconscious reactions to normative judgement. [7] 

In considering this question, it is useful to think about the differences and contradictions between “formal equality” and interpersonal equality. Formal equality characterises many western capitalist societies, providing structural recognition of various groups, that is both rights-based and duties-based. It is expressed verbally in public law and other institutionalised policies and frameworks that acknowledge multiculturalism and the need for sharing power. The critique of formal equality highlights that within contemporary highly diverse societies, aspects of relations between people of different backgrounds are taken for granted. For example, researchers in the field of migration studies have engaged in a debate about multiculturalism, as a formal approach to equality, and interculturalism, that emphasises contact, relations, and interactions as the basis for creating policy interventions. [8] Interculturalism builds on Allport’s contact hypothesis, which states that “contact and sharing promote mutual acceptance under conditions of equality, and initiate a process of prejudice reduction and knowledge formation.”[9] 

The contradiction between formal equality and the actual prevalence of relations of privilege and oppression, is highly relevant for research ethics, because institutional equality and multiculturalism do not guarantee that daily interactions will be conducted on an equal basis. [10] Young considers manifestations of oppression that are denied and silenced, using Anthony Giddens’ theory of subjectivity for understanding social relations. [11] Giddens terms verbalised utterances as discursive consciousness, and differentiates them from a second level of reactions, termed practical consciousness. Unlike discursive consciousness, practical consciousness relates to “all the things which actors know tacitly about how to ‘go on’ in the contexts of social life without being able to give them direct discursive expression.” [12] Young suggests that actions and reactions on the level of practical consciousness involve:

often complex reflexive monitoring of the relation of the subject’s body to those of other subjects and the surrounding environment, but which are on the fringe of consciousness … Practical consciousness is the habitual, routinized background awareness.[13]

This level of background awareness, involving tacit knowledge and emotions, also has political dimensions, as suggested by Klaartje Klaver, Eric van Elst, and Andries J. Baar, who point to its close connections to existing hierarchic epistemological structures.[14] In this context François Levrau emphasises the need for formulating an “interpersonal ethos” based on empathy and concern.[15] This approach resonates with care ethics, that examines care not only as a moral but also a political concept that relates to existing structures of power and inequality.[16] However, despite its awareness of vulnerability and its emphasis on sensitivity, attentiveness, and responsiveness, the notion of care nevertheless exposes not only connections but also disconnections,[17] which can stand in the way of achieving relations of equality within research practice. 

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] C. D. Lummis, "Equality," in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, ed. by W. Sachs (Witwatersrand University Press: Johannesburg and Zed Books Ltd: London and New Jersey, 1993), 38–52, 38.

[2] Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) and N. Fraser, "A Rejoinder to Iris Young," in Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate, ed. by C. Willett (Maldon and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 68–72.

[3] Four broad and inter-related dimensions provide a working definition of urban equality in the KNOW programme. See Caren Levy, “Forward,” In the KNOW, Issue 3, (March 2020), 5, accessed 14 January 2022, https://indd.adobe.com/view/f98557e6-c9df-47ec-8a8d-6100127293cd.

[4] Joan C. Tronto, "Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics," Ethics and Social Welfare, 6.3 (2012)" 303–16, 310, https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2012.704058>.

[5] Keguro Macharia, "Visiting Africa: A Short Guide for Researchers," Pambazooka News, (2015).

[6] Grace A. Musila, "Against Collaboration – or the Native Who Wanders Off," Journal of African Cultural Studies 31, no. 3 (2019): 286–93, 287, https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2019.1633283>.

[7] Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 150.

[8] Ricard Zapata-Barrero, "Interculturalism in the Post-Multicultural Debate: A Defence,",Comparative Migration Studies 5, no. 1 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-017-0057-z>; W. Kymlicka, "The Essentialist Critique of Multiculturalism: Theories, Policies, Ethos," in Multiculturalism Rethought: Interpretations, Dilemmas and New Directions, ed. by V. Uberoi and T. Modood (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 209–49; Tariq Modood, "Multiculturalism, Interculturalisms and the Majority," in Multiculturalism and Interculturalism: Debating the Dividing Lines, ed. by N. Meer, T. Modood, and T. Zapata-Barrero (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 246–65.

[9] Allport, 1954, quoted in Zapata-Barrero, "Interculturalism."

[10] François Levrau, "Towards a New Way of Interacting? Pondering the Role of an Interpersonal Ethos," Comparative Migration Studies 6, no. 1 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-018-0081-7>.

[11] Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1984).

[12] Giddens, The Constitution of Society, xxiii.

[13] Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 131.

[14] Klaartje Klaver, Eric van Elst, and Andries J. Baart, "Demarcation of the Ethics of Care as a Discipline: Discussion Article," Nursing Ethics 21, no. 7 (2014): 755–65, 762, https://doi.org/10.1177/0969733013500162>.

[15] Levrau, "Towards a New Way of Interacting?"

[16] Joan B. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, (New York, London: Routledge, 1993), 21.

[17] Parvati Raghuram, "Locating Care Ethics beyond the Global North," Acme 15, no. 3 (2016): 511–13, 526.

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Ethics

Ethics is often regarded as a matter of the rules of conduct in professional life. While it is certainly the case that such rules form a part of the field of ethics, it is important to recognize that ethics is much more than this. Although concerns with specific statements about conduct follow from ethical discussion, the main purpose of ethics is to have such a discussion in the first place. In this sense, ethics can be seen as “the conscious reflection on our moral beliefs.”[1]

Ethics can be understood as a branch of knowledge or field of study with morality as its subject matter. Since ethics deals with moral principles, social, or personal values, it can be thought of as “equivalent to moral philosophy,”[2] and more broadly speaking as “the way that we think through how best to live our lives.”[3] In his research into the etymology of key terms for cultural studies, cultural theorist Raymond Williams discusses how the earliest meaning of ethics is “a study of, or treatise on, moral principles,” reflecting the Greek and Latin title of Aristotle’s Ethica. This use of ethics, in his view, gives rise to an important core meaning of ethics: “the academic study of morality,” or “morality as a topic for systematic analysis” or a “conception of morality as something that can be studied and defined.” For Williams, the meaning of ethics is reflected in some of the most frequent “collocations” of the term ethical in contemporary English – ethical systems, ethical principles, ethical standards, ethical codes. Although all of these, as he notes, have been in existence for centuries, their usage has increased markedly, whether as moral principles or systems associated with a school of thought, a particular individual, or profession or sphere of activity.[4]

One way of categorizing the field of ethics (as a study of morality) is by distinguishing between its three branches: metaethics, normative ethics and applied ethics.[5] Metaethics deals with the existence of morality, the nature of right or wrong, and the justification of ethical claims. Normative ethics, sometimes referred to as ethical theory, is concerned with principles of morality, and the standards used to determine whether something is right or wrong. It can be divided into various sub-branches: consequentialist theories, deontological theories, and virtue-based theories.

Consequentialist normative principles require balancing the good and bad consequences of an action, and if the good consequences exceed the bad, then the action is considered to be morally proper. Consequentialist theories are sometimes called teleological theories, from the Greek word telos, or end, since the end result of the action is what determines its morality.[6]

Deontological theories or duty theories from the Greek word deon or duty, place rights, duties, and obligations as fundamental to morality. These principles are also sometimes called nonconsequentialist since they are based on obligations or duties rather than on the consequences of actions. Some of these duties are:

Fidelity: the duty to keep promises

Reparation: the duty to compensate others when we harm them

Gratitude: the duty to thank those who help us

Justice: the duty to recognize merit

Beneficence: the duty to improve the conditions of others

Self-improvement: the duty to improve our virtue and intelligence

Nonmaleficence: the duty to not injure others[7]

Virtue-based, sometimes called agent-centred theories, are less concerned with identifying the morality of particular actions and more concerned with the overall ethical status of individuals or agents who perform the actions.[8] Virtue ethics focus on the whole of a person’s life, rather than the specific actions a person may perform in any given situation, and thus take into account processes of education for training individuals to engage in ethical deliberation, as well as the importance of role models for understanding how to act ethically. Feminist thinkers have recently revised virtue ethics to foreground the principle of care as a legitimate and primary ethical concern, often in opposition to the more impersonal approach of justice. 

If applied ethics deals with the actual application of ethical principles to a particular situation, and analyses specific issues and actions, then for an issue to be considered an “applied ethics issue” it needs to concern a moral issue, and be subject to debate and differences of opinion.[9] The following principles are considered ones most often used in discussions of applied ethics:

Personal benefit:  acknowledge the extent to which an action produces beneficial consequences for the individual in question.

Social benefit:  acknowledge the extent to which an action produces beneficial consequences for society.

Principle of benevolence:  help those in need.

Principle of paternalism:  assist others in pursuing their best interests when they cannot do so themselves.

Principle of harm:  do not harm others.

Principle of honesty:  do not deceive others.

Principle of lawfulness:  do not violate the law.

Principle of autonomy:  acknowledge a person’s freedom over his/her actions or physical body.

Principle of justice:  acknowledge a person’s right to due process, fair compensation for harm done, and fair distribution of benefits.

Rights:  acknowledge a person’s rights to life, information, privacy, free expression, and safety.[10]

The Markula Centre for Applied Ethics,[11] is an interesting example of an institution which explores the ethical aspects of current issues and provides a good resource for making ethical decisions.[12] It follows five approaches to ethics – utilitarian, rights, fairness, common good, and virtue and sets out a process to ethical decision-making which involves a number of stages: recognising an ethical issue, gathering facts, evaluating alternative actions, making a decision and testing it, and acting and reflecting on the outcomes.[13] While “The Framework for Making Ethical Decisions,” based in Science and Technology Studies at Brown University, suggests that ethical dilemmas can be evaluated against the three kinds of normative applied ethical theories – consequentialist, duty and virtue – noted above, and through the following four categories of analysis – deliberative process, focus, definition of ethical conduct, and motivation.[14]

Feminist ethics is concerned with how life experience influences the ways in which we make ethical decisions, and Hilde Lindemann argues against the positioning of feminist ethics in any of the overarching categories – metaethics, normative ethics, or applied, or in the categories of applied ethics – consequentialist, deontological or virtue-based. Instead she argues that feminist ethics needs to be understood as an approach which crosses all three categories because it is a “way of doing ethics.” She gives examples of how a feminist ethics can be positioned in any of these branches. Since her definition of feminism is neither focused on equality or difference, but rather on power, for Lindemann the focus of feminist ethics is to understand, criticize, and correct how gender operates within moral and ethical systems, to produce theories about relations of unequal power, and to look at the forms of power required for morality to operate in the first place.[15]

Approaching ethics as a set of processes, rather than, or perhaps as well as, a set of principles, allows us to consider ethics not only as a way of doing as Lindemann suggests, but also as a method or form of practice. Michel Foucault’s thinking on ethics is important here for defining ethics as a form of practice core to the project of self-making. In his philosophy of ethics he situates the practice of ethics as located between the doing of ethics and the cultural codes the govern ethical behaviour: “the manner in which one ought to form oneself as an ethical subject acting in reference to the prescriptive elements that make up the code.” For Foucault, the “determination of the ethical substance; that is, the way in which the individual has to constitute this or that part of himself as the prime material of his moral conduct” is set in relation to “the mode of subjection (mode d’assujettissement); that is, with the way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obliged to put it into practice.”[16]

Feminist philosopher Judith Butler, who engages closely with Foucault’s ethics in Giving an Account of Oneself,[17] explores the way a subject positions him or herself in relation to norms as an ethical practice of self-making. For her this ethical endeavour, which involves accountability and recognition, takes place in relation to others and in the context of social norms. According to Carolyn Culbertson:

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler emphasizes that those that matter most are encounters with another person or group, those requiring ethical recognition.[18]

Accountability, as a core aspect of ethical practice, also features in the work of the ethnographer D. Sonyini Madison. Following Amira De Le Garza (also known as Maria Cristina Gonzalez), the ethnographer Madison, has put forward four principles for “An Ethics of Postcolonial Ethnography.” The first ethic is accountability is understood in terms of the ability to give an account or tell a story, while the second is considered in terms of context, or “an ethic of open-eyed mindfulness to one’s surroundings” which draws attention to the “political, social, environmental, physical, and emotional soundings of one’s story.” The third ethic is truthfulness, or “to see that which is on the surface but is not visible.” According to Madison, this ethic points to the need to manifest courage, to open one’s heart and expose “one’s purposes and issues in life.” Community is the fourth ethics, which “implies that once we step forward with an ethnographic tale,” it is no longer possible to “feign separation from those with whom we have shared that story.” The ethic of community, for Madison, a challenge to “open ourselves that we might better be seen and understood” in order to explore misunderstandings or oppositions.[19]

The four ethics – accountability, context, truthfulness and community – that guide Madison’s postcolonial ethnographic practice, are helpful for thinking through the important relation of ethical practice, not only to codes of governance as Foucault does, or “norms” in Butler’s terminology, but to social and cultural values. From Angela Last’s three strategies for attempting decolonial practices – caring, revaluing and refusing; to Carli Coetzee’s discussion of how “the keywords ‘ethical’ and ‘collaboration’” turned out to be “hot spots of contestation, disillusionment and complaint,” in conference panel convened to examine the framing of North–South academic collaborations and generate ethical protocols, and Keguro Macharia's “Visiting Africa, A Short Field Guide For Researchers,” these works offer critical challenges to ethical principles, codes and processes produced in by colonialising practices originating in the global north.[20] The political project of decolonisation also seeks to undo such structures and discourses, specifically those produced through colonisation as a process of physical and mental invasion and subjugation, which operating in combination with resource extraction, enslaves and dispossesses existing inhabitants. As Achilles Mbembe writes, decolonial practices might, on the one hand, aim to “recentre Africa,” following Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and, on the other, seek “self-ownership,” following Franz Fanon.[21] And following Ngugi’s arguments in Decolonising the Mind, it is clear that any practice of ethics that describes itself as decolonizing needs to take place through languages other than English.[22]

A decolonial approach to ethics, as advocated by Robin Dunford, posits “pluriversalism” as an alternative to “moral cosmopolitanism.” Dunford argues that decolonial ethics rejects both “universality” and “individualism.” “Inter-cultural dialogue amongst multiple people(s), including peoples who deem collective and non-human entities to be of fundamental moral importance,” are favoured over the abstract principles that Dunford notes are developed from within particular Western traditions. Dunford defines the importance of pluriversal rather than universal and values for a decolonial global ethics:

A value is pluriversal in a first, procedural sense, if it is constructed not through the universalisation of a particular perspective, but through dialogue across plural cultures and cosmovisions. In a second sense, pluriversality connotes a substantive value itself – the value of a world in which other worlds are possible. This value binds together equality and difference – people(s) have a right to inhabit their different worlds because they are equal.[23]

Kimberly Hutchings explains that although “Decolonial thinking shares the postcolonial concern with the material and epistemological hegemony of Western colonial modernity,” it stresses the “radical distinction between Western colonial modernity and other ways of being.” In her view, pluriversal arguments call for a “ ‘relational ontology,’ in which worlds external to one another can nevertheless coexist, without one subsuming the others.”[24] Hutchings argues that the point of global ethics is to “address ethical questions inherent in relations, situations, and contexts at the international, transnational, and global level” and to consider issues of global justice, sustainable development, women’s human rights, or the ethics of war, across various geopolitical and ideational boundaries. She points out that since much contemporary work in international and global ethics aims to generate values and principles with global reach, but at the same time takes for granted the universality of a Euromodern ontology, it is bound to reach an impasse where “the outcomes of ethical judgment are either unintelligible or unworkable in the terms of the worlds to which they are being applied.”[25] And she describes an even worse situation where “global ethics becomes part of a fundamentally colonial project in which other worlds are forced to take on a Euromodern world that is alien to them, which again would contradict the explicit ambitions of most arguments in global ethics.” [26] So for Hutchings, “taking pluriversality seriously would seem to put global ethics in an impossible position.” [27]  

Hutchings believes that the “ethical issues raised by the pluriversal critique of colonial modernity” are not “to do with either procedure or the institutionalization of a new categorical imperative for ethical theory and practice,” [28] but “rather than leave in place the notion that answers to questions about the right and the good are in some sense knowable, as long as we have the right standards and procedures.” [29] For this reason, she argues that “pluriversality pushes us away from the possibility of specifying what the attainment of global justice might mean, and toward the importance of the cultivation of particular kinds of virtue in the context of ethical practices of coexistence and collaboration,” she points in particular to two concepts of what pluriversality might mean for global ethics: “dissonance” and “negotiation:”[30]

Pluriversal ethics is not about finding new ways of sorting out the meaning of justice but rather about finding new ways of relating to ourselves and to each other in our pursuit of whatever we may think of as justice. [31]

Such a pluriversal approach involves engaging different ethical worldviews and values such as ma’at, ubuntu and buen viver.

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] Richard Hugman, A-Z of Professional Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. xiii, quoting L. H. Hinman, Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory. 5th edn. (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2012), p. 5.

[2] Entry on “Ethics,” in Britannica, accessed 7 December 2021, https://www.britannica.com/topic/ethics-philosophy

[3] Carolyn Culbertson, “The Ethics of Relationality: Judith Butler and social critique’, Continental Philosophical Review 46, 449–463 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-013-9271-z

[4] See “Keywords Project: Raymond Williams and Keywords,” accessed 7 December 2021, https://keywords.pitt.edu/williams_keywords.html

[5]“A Framework for Making Ethical Decisions,” accessed 7 December 2021, https://www.brown.edu/academics/science-and-technology-studies/framework-making-ethical-decisions

[6] Entry on “Ethics,” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 7 December 2021, https://iep.utm.edu/ethics/#H3

[7] Entry on “Ethics.”

[8] “A Framework for Making Ethical Decisions.”

[9] Entry on “Ethics.”

[10] Entry on “Ethics.”

[11] Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, accessed 7 December 2021, https://www.scu.edu/ethics/

[12] “Ethical Decision Making,” accessed 7 December 2021, https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/.

[13] “A Framework for Ethical Decision Making,” accessed 7 December 2021, https://www.scu.edu/media/ethics-center/ethical-decision-making/A-Framework-for-Ethical-Decision-Making.pdf

[14] “A Framework for Making Ethical Decisions.”

[15] Hilde Lindemann, An Invitation to Feminist Ethics, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

[16] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, [1985] translated by Robert Hurley, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 26.

[17] Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, (Fordham University, 2005).

[18] Carolyn Culbertson, “The Ethics of Relationality: Judith Butler and Social Critique,” Continental Philosophical Review 46, (2013): 449–63. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-013-9271-z

[19] D. Soyini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance, third edition, (London: Sage, 2020) 6-7.

[20] Angela Last, “Internationalisation and Interdisciplinarity: Sharing across Boundaries?” in Decolonising the University: Context and Practice, eds. G. K. Bhambra, K. Nisancioglu and D. Gebrial (London: Pluto, 2018) and Carli Coetzee “Ethical?! Collaboration?! Keywords for our Contradictory Times,” Journal of African Cultural Studies, (2019). See also Keguro Macharia, “Visiting Africa: A Short Field Guide for Researchers,” published on Pambazuka News.

[21] See for example, Achilles Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Archive,” accessed 7 December 2021, https://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf

[22] Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (Heinemann Educational, 1986).

[23] Robin Dunford, “Toward a Decolonial Global Ethics,” Journal of Global Ethics 13, n. 3 (2017): 380–97.

[24] Kimberly Hutchings, “Decolonizing Global Ethics: Thinking with the Pluriverse,” Ethics and International Affairs 33, n. 2 (2019): 115–25, 116.

[25] Hutchings, “Decolonizing Global Ethics,” 118.

[26] Hutchings, “Decolonizing Global Ethics,” 118.

[27] Hutchings, “Decolonizing Global Ethics,” 118.

[28] Hutchings, “Decolonizing Global Ethics,” 121.

[29] Hutchings, “Decolonizing Global Ethics,” 121.

[30] Hutchings, “Decolonizing Global Ethics,” 121.

[31] Hutchings, “Decolonizing Global Ethics,” 121.

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Feminist Ethics

[R]esearch itself might be a mutual healing practice.[1] 

Feminist ethics can be understood as a relational, embodied, and collective practice of activist research that has implications for undertaking, supervising, and funding work. Feminist approaches – this is plural because there are many ways to do feminism ­– to built environment research and practice make the operation of power visible.[2] They iluminate imbalances, especially structural ones which “may be seen as about as natural as the air around us,” [3] in order to propel change. Though earlier waves of feminism focused on imbalances between women and men, contemporary feminism is intersectional, accounting for the ways in which multiple identities, systems, and ideologies interact and overlap to entrench and exacerbate disadvantage.[4]

By taking intersectionality into account, feminist approaches to research reject the neutral invisible default. Bodies, and the identities ascribed to them ­­– gendered, queer, racialised, disabled, and more – matter for research. They present both opportunities and risks in terms of what you can study, where you can go and when, and whom you can speak with and how.[5] Undertaking fieldwork away from home, for example, requires mobility, which means accounting for and supporting researchers who have caring responsibilities to ensure that they can travel.[6]  And yet, research grants often do not permit funds to be used for dependent travel or, in cases where a field site is not safe or accessible, dependent care. Universities, like any other workplace, must work to ensure equity and inclusion, even, and especially, when that work is uncomfortable. Accommodating and supporting the participation of diverse bodies and life experiences in research enriches knowledge; presuming gender, racial, and other types of neutrality impoverishes it.[7]

In addition, practising feminist ethics involves committing to care. All types of care are interwoven: care for yourself, care for others, and care for the world around you. As such, empathy, not distance, is a fundamental tool for feminist research.[8] The emotional vulnerability that empathy entails offers a powerful way to understand the world,[9] enabling the co-production of knowledge based on partnerships of equivalence. [10] People behave in surprising ways, however, so feminist ethical approaches prepare researchers and institutions to expect the unexpected and treat unpredictability and its consequences as interpretable data.[11] In effect, transparency becomes part of the ethical and moral obligations that researchers have to themselves and each other, far beyond concerns about academic rigour or liability.[12] The building blocks of a feminist infrastructure of care – self-care, community-care, and institutional responsibility – ensure that everyone, and every body, can feel safe and supported in their work. Practising feminist ethics is about harnessing this care in order to care for the people and places around you and to recognise that your own liberation and healing is bound to theirs.

Written by Ariana Markowitz.

[1] Noelle Brigden, “Trauma-informed Research Methods: Understanding and Healing Embodied Violence,” in Embodied and Entangled: Conducting Research at the Intersectional Crossroads of Interpersonal, Gendered Violence, eds. April Petillo and Heather Hlavka (New York: NYU Press, Forthcoming), 1.

[2] Cynthia Enloe and Roxani Krystalli, “Doing Feminism: A Conversation between Cynthia Enloe and Roxani Krystalli,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 22, no. 2 (November 2019): 289–98.

[3] Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (September 1969): 173.

[4] Kimberlé Crenshaw, On Intersectionality: Essential Writings (New York: The New Press, 2017).

[5] Liza M. Mügge, “Sexually Harassed by Gatekeepers: Reflections on Fieldwork in Surinam and Turkey,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 16, no. 6 (November 2013): 541–46.

[6] Katy Jenkins, "Academic Motherhood and Fieldwork: Juggling Time, Emotions, and Competing Demands,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45, no. 3 (September 2020): 693–704.

[7] Karen Falconer Al-Hindi, “Vibrant Mentoring Landscapes in Feminist Geography,” Gender, Place and Culture 26, no. 12 (December 2019): 1657–63.

[8] Chih Yuan Woon, “For 'Emotional Fieldwork' in Critical Geopolitical Research on Violence and Terrorism,” Political Geography 33 (March 2013): 31_41.

[9] Gill Hubbard, Kathryn Backett-Milburn, and Debbie Kemmer, "Working with Emotion: Issues for the Researcher in Fieldwork and Teamwork,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 4, no. 2 (January 2001): 119–37.

[10] Ariana Markowitz, “The Better to Break and Bleed With: Research, Violence, and Trauma,” Geopolitics 26, no. 1 (2021): 94-117.

[11] Luisa T. Schneider, “Sexual Violence during Research: How the Unpredictability of Fieldwork and the Right to Risk Collide with Academic Bureaucracy and Expectations,” Critique of Anthropology 40, no. 2 (June 2020): 173.

[12] Roxani Krystalli, “When Humans become Data," in The Companion to Peace and Conflict Research, eds. Roger Mac Ginty, Roddy Brett, and Birte Vogel (Spring International Publishing, 2020), 35­–46.

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Feminist Figurations

Figures are never innocent. The relationship of a subject to a figure is best described as a cathexis of some kind. There is a deep connection between the writing subject and the figure. It is not just about picking an entity in the world, some kind of interesting academic object. There is a cathexis that needs to be understood here. The analyst is already bound in a cathectic relationship to the object of analysis, and s/he needs to excavate the implication of this bond, of her/his being in the world in this way rather than some other. Articulating the analytic object, figuring, for example, this family or kinship of entities, chip, gene, foetus, bomb, etc. (it is an indefinite list), is about location and historical specificity, and it is about a kind of assemblage, a kind of connectedness of the figure and the subject. [1]

In her book Modest­_Witness@Second_Millenium Donna Haraway traces the “figure” back to the semiotics of western Christian realism and to Aristotelian rhetoric. For Haraway:

Aristotelian “figures of discourse” are about the spatial arrangements in rhetoric. A figure is geometric and rhetorical; topics and tropes are both spatial concepts. The “figure” is the French term for the face, a meaning kept in English in the notion of the lineaments of a story. “To figure” means to count or to calculate and also to be in a story, to have a role. A figure is also a drawing.[2]

Examining the situated critique of representation offered by feminists like Haraway, as well as Rosi Braidotti and others, Federica Timeto stresses that, for Haraway, Aristotle’s philosophy highlights the “spatial character of figures of discourse.”[3] Timeto argues that this spatial reading is present in the strong link that Haraway’s figurations maintain with actual locations, and she notes too how Braidotti has emphasised this aspect of Haraway’s work, “outlin[ing] a cartography of spatial power relations and mak[ing] sense of the different positionalities that these define.”[4]

Timeto also draws attention to the temporal aspect of figurations, arguing that the aspect of time they embody is not “developmental” but rather assumes the “modality of ‘condensation, fusion and implosion’” which, she highlights, following Haraway, “is contrary to the modalities of ‘development, fulfilment and containment proper of figural realism.’”[5] The modes of temporality in Haraway’s figurations allow the relation of past and future to be rethought, and put forward a kind of theory which, unlike “the more ‘normal’ rhetorics of systematic critical analysis” that “seem only to repeat and sustain our entrapment in the stories and established disorders,” produce “powerful new tropes, new figures of speech, new turns of historical possibility.”[6]

Following Haraway, Timeto states: “Figurations are thus tropoi, in that they, according to Greek etymology, do not simply figure, but ‘turn’ what they figure.”[7] According to Timeto, it is “the implosion of boundaries between subject and object, or between the material and the semiotic, that puts borders in a constructive and transformative tension rather than using them as dividing lines.”[8] Here the repositioning of borders between subjects and objects in Haraway’s figurations would seem to connect to psychoanalysis, yet she has said of her work:

I do not think of the cyborg as without an unconscious. However, it is not a Freudian unconscious. There is a different kind of dreamwork going on here; it is not ethical, it is not edenic, it is not about origin stories in the garden. It is a different set of narrations, figurations, dreamwork, subject formations, and unconscious work. These sorts of figurations do not exclude many kinds of psychoanalytic work, but they are not the same thing.[9] 

The potential of feminist figuration, though never named as such, emerges in “A Cyborg Manifesto,” from 1985 when Haraway notes the importance of the relation of poetic and political in the work of Katie King and Chela Sandoval, writing:

The common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/politic unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation and taxonomic identification.[10]

In discussing the importance of story-telling and political imagination for “exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds,” Haraway goes on to cite a range of feminist writers, from Octavia Butler and Monique Wittig, to Audre Lourde and Adrienne Rich, referring to their ability to “write the body,” and to “weave eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery of embodiment.” [11] In aiming to construct a “potentially helpful cyborg myth,” Haraway turns to “constructions of women of colour,” and “monstrous selves in feminist science fiction.[12] She underscores the importance of writing for all colonized groups, and especially for black women and men in the US, since, as she points out, acquiring the skills to read and write has a history of risking death, emphasising the importance of “access to the power to signify” for the writing – the poetry and stories – of US women of colour, such that: “Releasing the play of writing” needs to be grasped and understood as “deadly serious.”[13]

Haraway’s moves towards what it might mean “to figure” near the end of the cyborg essay, when she pairs the figurative with the literal in order to highlight the role of writing in political struggle:

Figuratively and literally, language politics pervade the struggles of women of colour; and stories about language have a special power in the rich contemporary writing by US women of colour. [14]

Here Haraway refers to the poetry of Cherríe Moraga to argue that writing, because it “marks the body,” is “pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century.” [15] She states: “Cyborg politics is the struggle for language,” and makes a claim for the importance of a feminist science fiction, which does not focus on “originary innocence” and a “return to wholeness,” but rather challenges dualisms between nature and technology, man and machine, instead embracing and producing boundary transgressions. For Haraway “cyborg imagery,” her initial formulation of feminist figuration, helps promote two key arguments, first the rejection of “universal, totalizing theory,” and second the need to “take responsibility for the social relations of science and technology.” For Haraway, “[c]yborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms …” She closes the paper with this powerful statement:

This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.[16]

In “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post Human Landscape,” Haraway really digs into the practice of writing itself, to discuss its possibilities for self-making and word-building. Of Katie King’s work she writes: “She taught me in how many ways writings are always technologies for world building.[17] And of her own writing:

I am not, in fact, so much writing the same paper again and again as writing in the embrace of a complex, collective practice, in which the many writers loop through each other, tracing together the barely discernible figure of an elsewhere. [18]

By 1992 in “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post Human Landscape,” Haraway starts to make more explicit the ways in which figuration as a particular mode of writing theory is able to, not only connect people, but “reset[ting] the stage for possible pasts and futures.” Here Haraway argues that figuration is a mode of theory that can imagine beyond the repetitive cycles of a “more ‘normal’ rhetorics of systematic critical analysis,” which she understands as “entrapping” us in “stories of the established disorders.”[19] She calls for a form of “feminist humanity,” which, by resisting “literal figuration,” can “erupt in powerful new tropes, new figures of speech, new turns of historical possibility.” [20] For Haraway, the “Ecce Homo” essay is the “beginning of a project on figurations” that explores contrasting ways of “constructing ‘the human’ after World War II.”[21]

By the time we reach her “Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium” essay of 1996, Haraway is exploring more figuratively her own writing position – using the figure of the modest witness as a “sender and receiver of messages in my e-mail address.” [22] She understands this subject position as a figure in the narrative of the book, “woven into the nets traced here,” that “works to refigure the subjects, objects …” of communication around technoscience that she is discussing. [23] At this point, Haraway says she is “consumed by the project of materialized refiguration,” as she believes that this is what is “happening in the worldly projects of technoscience and feminism.” [24] And in terms of her own technologies of writing, she sums this up by saying: “A figure collects up the people; a figure embodies shared meanings in stories that inhabit their audiences.”[25]

Four years later, in 2000, in an detailed interview that pays attention to her own writing practice, Haraway reflects back on cyborgs to highlight how they are “places” where the relation between the literal and the figurative is ambiguous – in a condition of “both/and,” and how “It is this undecidability between the literal and the figurative that interests me about technoscience.”[26] Here, by linking the characteristic features of her own object of study – the ambiguities of technoscience and cyborgs – to her way of writing about that subject matter – the possibilities of texts to create ambiguities between the literal and the figurative, it becomes possible to focus on connections and relations between the content of a piece of writing and its form or style, a core feature, I would argue, of feminist figuration.

Writing in Nomadic Subjects, feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti understands this feature through the principle of “as if.” She introduces the figure of the “nomadic subject,” as her “own figuration of a situated, postmodern, culturally differentiated understanding of the subject in general and of the feminist subject in particular.”[27] Braidotti’s figurations operate according to the principle “as if:”

In some cases the figurative mode functions according to what I have called ‘the philosophy of “as if”’ … It is as if some experiences were reminiscent or evocative of others; this ability to flow from one set of experiences to another is a quality of interconnectedness that I value highly. Drawing a flow of connections need not be an act of appropriation. On the contrary; it marks transitions between communicating states or experiences.’[28] 

In identifying what she describes as “the points of exit from the phallocentric modes of thought,” Braidotti claims the work of Gilles Deleuze for the feminist project, stressing how his philosophy of the “Figure” allows the emergence of new images of thought.[29]

[t]he notion of “figurations,” the quest for an adequate style, as opposed to “metaphors,” emerges as crucial to Deleuze’s use of the imagination as a concept. Figurations are forms of literal expression which represent that which the system had declared off-limits. There are situated practices that require the awareness of the limitations as well as the specificity of one’s locations. They illuminate all the aspects of one’s subjectivity that the phallogocentric regime does not want us to become.[30]

She argues: “The notion of the figural (as opposed to the more conventional aesthetic category of the ‘figurative’) is central to this project; it stresses the need for a positive, assertive style of thought, which expresses an active state of being.”[31] This, Braidotti claims, “results in the elaboration of a new philosophical style that aims at expressing new, postmetaphysical figurations of the subject.”[32] Following the feminist and materialist account she gives of difference in Nomadic Subjects, Braidotti goes on to develop the ethics of her nomadic philosophy in a subsequent book, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. [33] Here Braidotti, according to Timeto, “explains that this distinction between figurations and metaphors is intended to overcome the classical dichotomy of identity and alterity. From a Deleuzian perspective, the figural, based on difference and becoming, is opposed to the traditional aesthetic category of the figurative (or traditional representation) which, on the contrary, is based on identification and analogy between sign and object.”[34] Braidotti describes how:

Figurations are not mere metaphors, but rather markers of more concretely situated historical positions. A figuration is the expression of one’s specific positioning in space and time. It marks certain territorial or geopolitical coordinates, but it also points out one’s sense of genealogy of historical inscription. Figurations deterritorialize and destabilize the certainties of the subject and allow for a proliferation of situated or ‘micro’ narratives of self and others.[35]

In 2015, artist Malala Andrialavidrazana began a series of works called Figures. These rework official forms of visual representation used to exert the authority of colonial powers from the nineteenth century onwards. Andrialavidrazana takes historical maps, bank notes, and stamps, and rearranges them in order to deconstruct the power of cartography, and to shift perspective through the reconstructions that reposition relations between subjects, objects and sites. As curator Yves Chatap writes:

Figures questions the meaning of the signs and the representations within images. Above all, the exploration of these different maps, produced amid the great powers’ exploratory campaigns and conquests in the 19th century, exposes the unilateral nature of their conception. This needlework, this fabrication of new images orchestrated by the artist, illustrates her dexterity when composing perspectives. Malala Andrialavidrazana uproots, crops, photographs depending on the source documents she has chosen, then superimposes the images to reinforce her reflections on the circulation and uncertainty of knowledge. All of these clues subtly overlap in successive layers to give birth to photomontages, to imaginary worlds where the oceans come to life.[36]

The image-text volume, Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment,[37] composed of texts and drawings by Design Earth – Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, explicitly refers to Haraway’s concept of feminist figuration, or what she, in Staying with the Trouble, calls “SF,” redefines as “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far.”[38] [See Poethics]

SF is practice and process, it is becoming-with each other in surprising relays; it is a figure for ongoingness in the Chthulucene.[39]

Design Earth have most recently created an “ecofeminist fable addresses the elephant in the room – the climate emergency – by telling the story of one elephant who takes action to combat environmental injustice and climate change.”[40] This feminist figuration takes the form of a short animation and graphic novella.[41] 

The fable departs from Donna Haraway's “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” in her description of the American Museum of Natural History; and in full circle serendipity, is narrated by the Distinguished Donna in the video animation, which is screened at the Glasgow Science Centre “Reimagining Museums for Climate Change” exhibition through the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP) session in November 2021.

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] Donna Haraway, “Cyborgs, Coyotes and Dogs: A Kinship of Feminist Figurations and There are always more things going on than you thought! Methodologies as Thinking Technologies: An interview with Donna Haraway conducted in two parts by Nina Lykke, Randi Markussen, and Finn Olesen,” (2000), in Donna Haraway, The Donna Haraway Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 321–42, 338.

[2] Donna Haraway, “Syntactics: The Grammar of Feminism and Technoscience,” in Donna Haraway, Modest­_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 1997), 1–22, 11.

[3] Federica Timeto, “Diffracting the Rays of Technoscience: a Situated Critique of Representation,” Poiesis Prax 8, nos 2–3 (December 2011), 151–67, 161.

[4] Timeto, “Diffracting the Rays of Technoscience,” 161.

[5]  Timeto, “Diffracting the Rays of Technoscience,” 161. See also Haraway, “Syntactics,” 12.

[6] Donna Haraway, “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape,” (1992), Haraway, The Donna Haraway Reader, 47–61, 47.

[7] Timeto, “Diffracting the Rays of Technoscience,” 161. See also Donna Haraway, “Otherwordly Conversations, Terrain Topics, Local Terms,” in S. Alamo and S. Hekman (eds), Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 157–87, 159.

[8] Timeto, “Diffracting the Rays of Technoscience,” 161.

[9] “Cyborgs, Coyotes and Dogs,” 323.

[10] Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” (1985), in Haraway, The Donna Haraway Reader, 7–45. 15

[11] Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 31.

[12] Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 32. In another earlier version of “A Cyborg Manifesto,” published in 1991 Haraway refers to “a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities and in the complex political-historical layerings of her “biomythography,’” in Audre Lorde’s Zami (1982). See Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Donna Hraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, (London: Routlledge, 1991), 149–181, 174.

[13] Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 32.

[14] Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 33.

[15] Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 33–4.

[16] Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 39.

[17]  Donna Haraway, “Introduction: A Kinship of Feminist Figurations,” in Haraway, The Donna Haraway Reader, 1–6, 6.

[18] Haraway, “Introduction,” 6.

[19] Donna Haraway, “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post Human Landscape,” (1992), in Haraway, The Donna Haraway Reader, 47–62, 47.

[20] Haraway, “Ecce Homo,” 47.

[21]  Haraway, “Ecce Homo,” 48.

[22] Donna Haraway, “Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium,” (1996), in Haraway, The Donna Haraway Reader, 223–50, 223.

[23] Haraway, “Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium,” 223.

[24] Haraway, “Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium,” 223.

[25] Haraway, “Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium,” 223.

[26] Haraway, “Cyborgs, Coyotes and Dogs,” 323.

[27] Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Colombia University Press, 1994), 4.

[28] Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 5.

[29] Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 113.

[30] Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 170.

[31] Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 113.

[32] Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 113.

[33] Braidotti, Transpositions.

[34] Timeto, “Diffracting the Rays of Technoscience,” 160. See also Braidotti, Transpositions, 170.

[35] Braidotti, Transpositions, 90.

[36] Yves Chatap, Telling Time: Rencontres de Bamako, 10th Bamako Encounters, African Biennale of Photography
in (Kehrer Verlag, 2015). See http://www.andrialavidrazana.com/upcoming-events/2017/11/17/figures.

[37] Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy (Design Earth), Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment, (New York: Actar, 2020).

[38] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 2.

[39] Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 3.

[40] Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy (Design Earth),  “Elephant in the Room,” Journal of Architectural Education 75, no. 2 (2021): 264–74. See https://doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2021.1947677, accessed 22 October 2021.

[41] Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy (Design Earth), Elephant in the Room, (short animation), (2021). See https://vimeo.com/530486400/9d830a771c, accessed 22 October 2021.

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Gathering

A landscape is a multi-species gathering of ways of being in the making. [1]

The multiple meanings of “gathering” in English, as noun and verb, refer to “collecting” and “assembling” as well as “coming to know” things, people, self. Social, political, ecological, and spatial relations between these meanings find their root in the concept of “landscape,” which as Kenneth Olwig has shown, was constituted in pre-Renaissance Northern Europe through gatherings in which customary rights to (gather on and from) land, and relations between bodies of self, community, “common” knowledge, and land were collectively and continually negotiated as customary law.[2] However, both “gathering” and “landscape” took on new meanings when state-imposed processes of enclosure, driven by a rhetoric of “progress,” not only generated a new class of landless peasants, forced to rely on gathering practices for survival, but rendered their customs of gathering transgressive, irrational, wasteful, and “obsolete.” Where women suffered most from loss of common land, they were often the leaders of peasant revolts against enclosure, and because primitive accumulation depended on control of peasant populations and their reproduction, as Silvia Federici has shown, poverty came to be feminised. By association, female practices of gathering came not only to be policed and controlled but sexualised and violently demonised by the state for their association with customary lore and feminine power/knowledge/healing, which posed a threat to the “rational” rhetoric of progress.[3] The effect was to disperse the power of gathering by uncoupling its socio-political and ecological meanings: gathering-as-resistance by an increasingly urban population of the poor, disenfranchised from the land, came to be recognised and policed as primarily socio-political and urban as centralised state power constructed a spatial opposition between the city, and the countryside it produced.[4] Meanwhile, practices of gathering “things” (berries, mushrooms, etc.) in the countryside, now rendered “obsolete” by a science-based logic, were reclaimed as a literary-antiquarian pastime, detached from precarity of subsistence and ecological interdependence with land.[5]

Where gathering-as-resistance continues to be policed by state powers across the globe, facilitators and movements for social and economic justice have recognised the crucial relation between gathering, dialogue and transformational change in addressing the divisive effects of capitalism. As Priya Parker, a facilitator with a background in conflict resolution, has argued, increasing migration and mobility mean we can no longer rely on “traditional” cultural modes of gathering, and must work creatively to generate shared new cultures, contingent communities and belonging through dialogic practices of gathering.[6] At the same time, ecopoets and ecocritics have challenged forms of nostalgia that problematically associate gathering practices with a “pastoral” image of the past,[7] while feminist writers and researchers have summoned gathering as a means to reveal and address the violence, injustice and ecological crisis wreaked by the “progress” of capitalism. Perhaps the most pertinent example of this is Ursula Le Guin’s essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” which argues that the urgently needed “other story” to the “hero story” might be told through gathering.[8] Redefining science in terms of the container – a gatherer’s bundle “full of beginnings without ends” – Le Guin’s theory of fiction challenges the “hard facts” of techno-scientific research and “progress”, drawing explicit political and ecological links between gathering, storytelling and survival. The influence of this theory is palpable in the multi-species storytelling of Anna Tsing, who, learning to gather matsutake mushrooms with communities of migrant workers in the forests of Oregon in the U.S., locates survival in human disturbed landscapes. With a nod to Olwig, Tsing tells stories that not only affirmatively regather relations between the social, spatial, political, and ecological meanings of gathering, but call up political and economic relations between city and countryside, local and global. Gathering in “pericapitalist sites” which are “simultaneously inside and outside capitalism,”[9] she notes that the “multiple temporalities and shifting assemblages of humans and non-humans” in these sites might “reveal the possibilities of history without progress.”[10] Gathering, for Tsing, is about noticing “new” nature-cultures as they unfold, rather than seeking to restore past cultures or ecologies, and developing the response-ability needed to adapt to the inexorable process of climate change. It involves an attentional “art of noticing”’ patterns in polyphonic assemblages and an embodied immersion in “the forms and tactics of precarity.”[11] This is a vulnerable, tender practice, and key to Tsing’s concept of research is understood as “loving in a time of extinction.”[12]

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.[13]

Where Tsing’s “passionate immersion” indicates an ethics of care, it also holds some resonance with Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic,” which, developed in the same Oregon forestry land in which Tsing gathers, was based on human love and moral responsibility for a “biotic community.” Yet, moving beyond Leopold’s humanism, and wary of the “sometimes fixed and bounded connotations of ecological ‘community’,”[14] Tsing refers instead to multi-species “assemblages” in which entanglements of “ways of being” intrinsically “upend”  human identities, philosophies or hegemonic ethics. Articulating gathering as collaborative survival “enacted in more-than-human sociality,”[15] she shows how gathering practices framed primarily as social and political, might be regathered in ecological relation with land, and how “landscape as a multi-species gathering of ways of being in the making,”[16] might inform collaborative social and ecological practices of belonging.

If Tsing’s work might then inform a care-ful relational practice, if not an ethic, of gathering, her research not only “upends” boundaries of self, community, and land, but also knowledge, mind and body, field, and institution. Challenging the rational underpinnings of institutional research, she urges that “work in common creates the possibilities of particular feats of individual scholarship.”[17] Emphasising the need for divergent critical strategies, she chimes with dialogical practitioners and facilitators for whom gathering is a collaborative “meaning-making” rather than a search for a singular truth.[18] Yet where Tsing’s research “emerges through collaborations” and learns how to think together with informants and with other researchers,[19] the open-endedness of such dialogical production raises ethical issues related to the boundedness of a research practice, the power of an institution, and by association, its gathering research practitioners. Here Parker stresses the importance of paying attention to the way a group is gathered, and in particular, the way love and power are balanced by a facilitator, reminding us that both love and power, as drives for growth and unity respectively, must be engaged in gathering. Tsing writes similarly in terms of love and “weedy survival” in gathering. Emphasising that any gathering includes “coordinations as well as refusals,” she observes that:

we make use of opportunities, climb over others, and form collaborations with those who allow us to proliferate. The key task is to figure out which kinds of weediness allow landscapes of more-than-human liveability. This requires history at many scales.[20]

Even if, as Tsing heeds, “there might not be a collective happy ending,”[21] her articulation of gathering resonates with Parker, who urges: “The way we gather matters.”[22]

Written by Zoë Quick.

[1] Anna Tsing, “The Buck, the Bull and the Dream of the Stag: Some Unexpected Weeds of the Anthropocene,” Suomen Antropologi 42, no. 1 (2017): 7.

[2] Kenneth Olwig, “Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape,” Kenneth Olwig, The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Environment and Justice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 18–49.

[3] Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, (New York: Autonomedia, 2014).

[4] Federici, Caliban and the Witch.

[5] Richard Mabey, “Where the Wildings Are,” The Guardian, 2 September 2006.

[6] Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering, (Penguin, 2019)

[7] For example, poet and essayist Lisa Robertson, unsentimentally summoning her gathering forebears, has suggested that we might actively regather nostalgia itself by gathering its “wastes.” See Lisa Robertson, “How Pastoral: A Manifesto,” in Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s, eds Mark Wallace and Steven Marks (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 2002).

[8] Ursula Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove, 1997).

[9] Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2015), 63.

[10] Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 23.

[11] Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 42.

[12] Anna Tsing, ‘Arts of Inclusion, or How to Love a Mushroom’, Wild Hearts: Literature, Ecology, and Inclusion, Mānoa 22, no. 2, (Winter 2010): 191–203.

[13] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (London: Oxford University Press, London 1987 [1949]), 8–9

[14] Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 22

[15] Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 152.

[16] Tsing, “The Buck, the Bull and the Dream of the Stag,” 7.

[17] Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 286

[18] See Patricia Shaw, “Making Sense of Gathering and Gathering to Make Sense,” Changing Conversations: A Complexity Approach to Organizational Change, (London: Routledge, 2002)

[19]  Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, ix.

[20] Tsing, “The Buck, the Bull and the Dream of the Stag,” 17.

[21] Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 21

[22] Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering, (Penguin, 2019), ix.

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Harm

Minimising harm is one of the central principles of contemporary institutional research ethics. It can be traced back to nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian liberalism. Mill argued that individuals should have the liberty to act as they wish, except if their actions cause harm to others.[1] This stance has influenced some of the central twentieth-century thinking about research ethics.  Thus, avoiding harm was one of the basic ethical principles of the Nuremberg Code, which was written in 1947 following the Nuremberg trials of World War Two war criminals, including medical doctors who had conducted experiments on human subjects. The Nuremberg Code set forth ten ethics principles for research involving human experimentation.[2] In the Code, harm is equated with causing suffering and injury.[3]

The principle of ‘no harm’ is often connected with the principle of benefit, and phrased as ‘benefit not harm.’[4]The importance of this phrasing lies in the balance that it suggests between the benefit of research, which could potentially positively affect ‘society’, at the expense of causing harm to specific individuals or communities participating in the research. This approach suggests that at times, it may be worth causing some harm to research subjects in the name of the ‘greater good’. Hence the Belmont Report, published in 1979 by the USA’s National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioural Research,[5] requires researchers ‘to decide when it is justifiable to seek certain benefits despite the risks involved, and when the benefits should be foregone because of the risks.’[6] This requirement is problematic because it raises serious ethical questions as to who determines the greater good, a concept that is in itself criticised as a product of ideology, as well as who are the researchers that can weigh benefit against harm, and how are such justifications made.[7]

The principle of ‘no harm’ has also been widely criticised as laconic and insufficient.[8] Critical scholars have pointed out that this conceptualisation of risk and harm represents liberal and western assumptions of moral superiority and domination, and prioritises formal and abstract concepts while ignoring power relations of race, class and gender.[9] They stress the need to move beyond ‘minimising harm’ to ensure reciprocal benefits come out of research projects.[10] Alternative approaches of care ethics use relational responsibility on a personal as well as global scale,[11] and employ notions such as empathy,[12] positive involvement,[13] and solidarity[14] in order to offer other readings of the ‘no harm’ principle, and to decolonise research ethics.

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] Clifford G. Christians, “Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Nrman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, Second edi (Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications, 2000), 142.

[2] Evelyne Shuster, “Fifty Years Later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code,” New England Journal of Medicine 337, no. 20 (November 13, 1997): 1436–40, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199711133372006.

[3] The fourth point in the Code states: ‘The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.’ Shuster, 1436.

[4] See for instance the webpage of University College London’s Research Ethics Committee: Accepted Ethical Standards ‘which all researchers and ethical committees are expected to comply with.’ The standards are: Informed Consent, Confidentiality, and Benefit not Harm. The principle of Benefit not Harm means: ‘Research involving human participants must have a benefit to society and the risks involved to participants must be balanced against the potential benefit to the overall community.’ https://ethics.grad.ucl.ac.uk/accepted-ethical-standards.php. Accessed 5 August 2020.

[5] Kenneth John Ryan et al., “The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research,” Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, USA, 1979, https://doi.org/10.1021/bi00780a005.

[6] Ryan et al., ‘The Belmont Report.’

[7] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies : Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999), 2.

[8] See for example Christians, “Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research,” 148; Catriona Mackenzie, Christopher McDowell, and Eileen Pittaway, “Beyond ‘Do No Harm’: The Challenge of Constructing Ethical Relationships in Refugee Research,” Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 2 (2007): 300, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fem008.

[9] Eve Tuck and Monique Guishard, 'Uncollapsing Ethics: Racialized Sciencism, Settler Coloniality, and an Ethical Framework of Decolonial Participatory Action Research,' in Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment: New Directions in Critical Research, ed. Tricia M. Kress, Curry Malott, and Brad Porfilio (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2013), 7–8.

[10] Mackenzie, McDowell, and Pittaway, “Beyond ‘Do No Harm’: The Challenge of Constructing Ethical Relationships in Refugee Research,” 300–301.

[11] Joan C. Tronto, “Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics,” Ethics and Social Welfare 6, no. 3 (2012): 304, https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2012.704058.

[12] Liz Bondi, 'Empathy and Identification : Conceptual Resources for Feminist Fieldwork 1,' ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 2, no. 1 (2003): 64–76.

[13] Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford University Press, 2006), 25.

[14] Samuel J Ujewe, “Ought-Onomy and Mental Health Ethics From ‘Respect for Personal Autonomy’ to ‘Preservation of Person-in-Community’ in African Ethics,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology Volume 25, no. 4 (2018): E-58.

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Honesty

Honesty is highlighted as a central ethical principle by various organisations that provide advice and guidance for encouraging good conduct in research. For example, honesty is one of the principles upheld by the UK Research Integrity Office in its Code of Practice for Research: Promoting good practice and preventing misconduct. [1] According to this Code, honesty in research means that:

Researchers should be honest in relation to their own research and that of others. They should do their utmost to ensure the accuracy of data and results, acknowledge the contributions of others, and neither engage in misconduct nor conceal it.[2]

Similarly, Universities UK in its Concordat to Support Research Integrity, lists honesty as one of the five core elements of research integrity (the others are rigour; transparency and open communication; care and respect; and accountability). The Concordat is a framework signed by various higher education, research and funding bodies, that “seeks to provide a national framework for good research conduct and its governance.”[3] In the Concordat, honesty refers to

honesty in all aspects of research, including in the presentation of research goals, intentions and findings; in reporting on research methods and procedures; in gathering data; in using and acknowledging the work of other researchers; and in conveying valid interpretations and making justifiable claims based on research findings.[4]

Honesty is also one of the virtues and values relevant for research that were at the core of the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity, held in Singapore in 2010 and attended by 340 participants from 51 countries. The conference resulted in The Singapore Statement on Research Integrity.[5] The Statement proposes four fundamental principles for research integrity: honesty, accountability, professional courtesy and fairness, and good stewardship of research. The Singapore Statement acknowledges cultural, national and disciplinary differences in approaching the organisation and conduct of research, but proposes that there are some universal core values that reflect “principles and professional responsibilities that are fundamental to the integrity of research wherever it is undertaken.”[6]

Many scholars discuss honesty as a virtue. Christian Miller, for example, suggests, as a starting point, that “An honest person … is one who is disposed to not intentionally distort the facts, either to oneself or to other people.”[7] In considering the motivation behind this disposition, Alan Wilson suggests that:

Honesty is a moral virtue when the motivation to avoid deception is grounded in a morally valuable underlying motivation, such as the motivation to protect and promote well-being or the motivation to ensure fairness.[8]

Other scholars contrast this approach and point out that protecting and promoting well-being may, in certain situations, involve deception. Timothy Christie, Louis Groarke, and William Sweet discuss honesty as one of the traits (such as courage, compassion, kindness) that form the character of an agent. Based on Aristotle’s view of the “mean” as a device for determining whether a character trait is a virtue, they point out that “we can have too much or too little of a character trait understood as a mid-point between two opposites,” and accordingly honesty is a virtue when it reflects “the correct balance between hiding and revealing the truth.” [9] In a similar vein, Bella DePaulo considers situations in which honesty may conflict with other values:

First, honesty is not simply a matter of avoiding the telling of lies ... Second, lying or withholding information may not be much of a vice when motivated by concern for another person.[10]

Christie, Groarke and Sweet suggest that a balance between conflicting values requires a virtue ethics model to take account of context and consequences.[11] Sarah Banks refers to this as a “situated understanding” of virtues, which she contends should operate alongside a critical and emotional commitment to them, in order to support researchers’ capacity to do “ethics work.”[12]

Another important lens for reflecting on honesty in “ethics work” is highlighted by Keith Hollinshead and Rukeya Suleman, who call for researchers to develop “critical multilogical” understandings of context, which they also refer to as “fluid acumen.” This, they argue, demands recognition of “honest-to-self” identifications and representations by various communities, that can resist hegemonic understandings imposed by a western-dominated global order. This type of honesty requires researchers to find new ways to think about themselves, as well as their research partners and participants.[13]

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] UK Research Integrity Office, Code of Practice For Research: Promoting Good Practice and Preventing Misconduct, (2009 and updated in 2021), accessed 5 January 2022,  https://ukrio.org/wp-content/uploads/UKRIO-Code-of-Practice-for-Research.pdf.

[2] UK Research Integrity Office, Code of Practice for Research.

[3] Universities UK, The Concordat to Support Research Integrity (United Kingdom, 2012 and updated in 2019), accessed 5 January 2022, https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-08/Updated%20FINAL-the-concordat-to-support-research-integrity.pdf. Signatories to The Concordat include the Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland; Higher Education Funding Council for Wales; National Institute for Health Research; Scottish Funding Council; UK Research and Innovation; Universities UK; Wellcome Trust; The British Academy; Cancer Research UK; GuildHE Research.

[4] Universities UK, The Concordat to Support Research Integrity.

[5] The Singapore Statement on Research Integrity (2010), accessed 5 January 2022,  https://doi.org/10.4038/sljch.v39i4.2476.

[6] The Singapore Statement on Research Integrity.

[7] Christian B. Miller, “Honesty,” in Moral Psychology, Volume 5: Virtue and Character (MIT CogNet, 2017), 241.

[8] Alan T. Wilson, “Honesty as a Virtue,” Metaphilosophy 49, no. 3 (2018): 278, https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12303.

[9] Timothy Christie, Louis Groarke, and William Sweet, “Virtue Ethics as an Alternative to Deontological and Consequential Reasoning in the Harm Reduction Debate,” International Journal of Drug Policy 19, no. 1 (2008): 56, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2007.11.020.

[10] Bella M DePaulo, “The Gift of Dishonesty,” in Moral Psychology, Volume 5: Virtue and Character, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Christian B. Miller (MIT CogNet, 2017), 293.

[11] Christie, Groarke, and Sweet, “Virtue Ethics as an Alternative to Deontological and Consequential Reasoning in the Harm Reduction Debate,” 56.

[12] Sarah Banks, “Cultivating Researcher Integrity: Virtue-Based Approaches to Research Ethics,” in Virtue Ethics in the Conduct and Governance of Social Science Research, ed. Nathan Emmerich, vol. 3 (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2018), 35, https://doi.org/10.1108/s2398-601820180000003002.

[13] Keith Hollinshead and Rukeya Suleman, “Time for Fluid Acumen: A Call for Improved Tourism Studies Dialogue with the Decolonizing World,” Tourism, Culture and Communication 17, no. 1 (2017): 61–74, https://doi.org/10.3727/109830417X14837314056933.

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Implication

Suddenly it is not about empathy it is about – I bear responsibility for this, and if I do not do something I am complicit with it.[1]

 The term implication and the meaning that is suggested here arose through a conversation between Tina Campt, Ekow Eshun, Saidiya Hartman and John Akomfrah that took place in June 2020.[2] The conversation accompanied a screening of Akomfrah’s 1986 film Handsworth Songs and reflected on the film’s relevance during a renewal of protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. A question was raised about how the circulation of images of racial violence and of protest can affect empathy. Campt’s response was to reject the notion of empathy in favour of that of implication. 

I don’t think what we are experiencing in this protest is empathy. I think it’s implication. I think it’s complicit. I think that is what is mobilising a lot of folks. Suddenly it is not about empathy it is about – I bear responsibility for this, and if I do not do something I am complicit with it. And I find that much more powerful than empathy. I really want that to be mobilising, because it is a much more honest relationship to white supremacy, it is a much more honest relationship to antiblackness. To say I am implicated, and potentially complicit. Therefore I must act.[3]

Through the Latin implicare the word implication shares its etymological origin with entwine, entangle and embrace. To be implicated means to be connected, or related to, in a way that affects consequences. While I understand solidarity as a decision take up a relationship of empathy or common action, implication – in Campt’s call for it here –describes a position of relation that one already possesses. Implication is a way to acknowledge our position in relation to structures of power and the repressive and oppressive situations which arise from them. Significantly, to be implicated positions one in a framework of power. To be implicated forces an acknowledgement of one’s complicity. As Campt appeals for it, this acknowledgement can and should be a mobilising force.

Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and her thinking on implication referred to here was prompted by a reflection on the circulation of images. However, as is the case throughout Campt’s practice, the question of the work that images do produces theories of relationality which extend beyond the image.[4] For Campt such a notion of relationality is part of a “practice of refusal” that rejects the status quo and embraces “the possibility of living otherwise.”[5] The concept of being implicated is associated with that of being incriminated, to be found guilty of a crime or wrongdoing, but as a practice of refusal, implication can be mobilised to oppose authoritative forms and propose alternative modes of relation and action: As Campt has prompted,“I am implicated … therefore I must act.”[6]

Written by Danielle Hewitt.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivatives 4.0 International Licence.

[1] Tina Campt in John Akomfrah, Tina Campt, Ekow Eshun, Saidiya Hartman, “John Akomfrah in conversation with Tina Campt, Ekow Eshun, Saidiya Hartman,” online broadcast, Lisson Gallery, London, UK, 18 June 2020, accessed 13 September 2021, https://www.lissongallery.com/studio/john-akomfrah-tina-campt-saidiya-hartman.

[2] John Akomfrah, Tina Campt, Ekow Eshun, Saidiya Hartman, “John Akomfrah in conversation with Tina Campt, Ekow Eshun, Saidiya Hartman,” online broadcast, Lisson Gallery, London, UK, 18 June 2020, accessed 13 September 2021, https://www.lissongallery.com/studio/john-akomfrah-tina-campt-saidiya-hartman

[3] Akomfrah, Campt, Eshun, Hartman, “John Akomfrah in conversation with Tina Campt, Ekow Eshun, Saidiya Hartman.”

[4] See for example Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017) and Tina Campt, “Adjacency: Luke Willis Thompson’s Poethics of Care,” Flash Art, 37 (September/October 2019) https://flash---art.com/article/adjacency-luke-willis-thompsons-poethics-of-care/

[5] See Tina Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29, no. 1, (2019): 83 and Tina Campt, “Black Visual Frequency: A Glossary/‘Refusal,’” Fotomuseum Winterhur, 24 July 2017, accessed 13 September 2021, https://www.fotomuseum.ch/de/2018/07/24/refusal/

[6] Akomfrah, Campt, Eshun, Hartman, “John Akomfrah in conversation with Tina Campt, Ekow Eshun, Saidiya Hartman.”

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Integrity

Integrity is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “[s]oundness of moral principle; the character of uncorrupted virtue, esp. in relation to truth and fair dealing; uprightness, honesty, sincerity.”[1] This view of integrity derives from a virtue-based approach to ethics, which emphasises human characteristics and social skills.[2] Looking at researcher integrity as a quality of character, Sarah Banks explores how it enables researchers to be:

aware of, and critically committed to, the purpose, values, ethical principles and standards of their discipline and/or broader research field; making sense of them as a whole; and putting them into practice in their research work, including upholding them in challenging circumstances.[3]

The virtues and values relevant for research were at the core of the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity, held in Singapore in 2010 and attended by 340 participants from 51 countries. The conference resulted in The Singapore Statement on Research Integrity.[4] The Statement proposes four principles and 14 professional responsibilities considered fundamental for research integrity in general. The four principles are: honesty, accountability, professional courtesy and fairness, and good stewardship of research. The 14 responsibilities are: integrity (defined as trustworthiness of the research); adherence to regulations and policies related to the research; using appropriate research methods; keeping accurate research records; proper sharing of data and findings; taking responsibility for contributions to outputs and listing as authors all who meet applicable authorship criteria; acknowledging in publications the names and roles of those who made significant contributions but do not meet authorship criteria; reviewing others’ work  appropriately; disclosing financial and other conflicts of interest; clearly distinguishing professional comments from opinions based on personal views when engaging in public discussions about the research findings; reporting to the appropriate authorities any suspected research misconduct; establishing of procedures by research institutions and other agencies for responding to allegations of misconduct and other irresponsible research practices, and taking appropriate actions promptly; ensuring by research institutions that research environments encourage integrity through education, clear policies, and reasonable standards for advancement, while fostering work environments that support research integrity; and recognition by researchers and research institutions that they have an ethical obligation to weigh societal benefits against risks inherent in their work.[5]

Other organisations that provide advice and guidance on ethics also focus on integrity as a central principle for encouraging good conduct in research. They include the UK Research Integrity Office,[6] the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity,[7] and the Universities UK’s Concordat to Support Research Integrity.[8] The Concordat lists five core elements of integrity: honesty, rigour, transparency and open communication, care and respect, and accountability.[9] Thinking about the meaning of integrity is crucial in collaborative research, and particularly in partnerships across disciplines and countries. The Montreal Statement on Research Integrity in Cross-Boundary Research Collaborations stresses the need to consider and address “substantial differences in regulatory and legal systems, organizational and funding structures, research cultures, and approaches to training.”[10]

This point is also underlined by Twan Huybers, Bronwyn Greene and Detlef H. Rohr, who have explore the way academic researchers perceive the relative importance of the 14 professional responsibilities listed in The Singapore Statement on Research Integrity. They found that researchers prioritised their responsibilities differently, depending on their academic background and country of employment. They conclude that “based on academic perceptions, a one-size-fits-all approach to research integrity support is not expected to be successful.”[11]  Rinchen Pelzang and Alison Hutchinson highlight the importance of establishing cultural integrity in context, and warn that without taking sociocultural and political dynamics into account, researchers may end up “inadvertently imposing their beliefs, values, and patterns of behavior upon the cultural settings and participants in which the study is being conducted.”[12] For example, in a piece of research about promise breaches as a trigger of behavioural integrity perceptions, the researchers note that “although the importance of integrity is known to be universal … we may still find cultural differences in factors that determine perceptions of integrity.”[13] The need for critical self-reflection in the application and evaluation of standards of integrity and their meanings is also highlighted by Margaret Urban Walker:

This view exchanges global wholeness for more local dependability, and inexorable consistency for responsiveness to the moral costs of error and change. It trades inward solidity for flexible resiliency at those points where lives, fortune, and several kinds of histories meet. This view of integrity takes utterly seriously to what and to whom a person is true, but looks with suspicion upon true selves. It features the role of stories in making sense of lives, but is skeptical about certain overly ambitious or monopolistic narrative demands on selves. It links our senses of meaning and responsibility to the stories we can tell, but notices that “we” are not all in the same discursive positions any more than we are all in the same social ones, and that these are importantly linked. There are moral problems with the social distribution of narrative resources and the credibility to use them, which this view can help us see.[14]

In a similar vein, Christian Golden argues that the ideal of integrity as wholeheartedness results in “steadfast conformity with norms already taken on … [that] diminishes the role and value of conflict and ambivalence.”[15] In his view, such uncertainties and contestations are essential for attuning us to the precarious conditions of human agency. Therefore, he proposes an alternative vision of integrity as a practice of humility, that “celebrates experiences of loss and transformation through which learning, growth, innovation, and dynamic relationship become possible.”[16]

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] “Integrity,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, last modified June 2021, accessed 14 January 2021, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/97366?redirectedFrom=integrity#eid.

[2] Timothy Christie, Louis Groarke, and William Sweet, “Virtue Ethics as an Alternative to Deontological and Consequential Reasoning in the Harm Reduction Debate,” International Journal of Drug Policy 19, no. 1 (2008): 56, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2007.11.020.

[3] Sarah Banks, “Cultivating Researcher Integrity: Virtue-Based Approaches to Research Ethics,” in Virtue Ethics in the Conduct and Governance of Social Science Research, ed. Nathan Emmerich, vol. 3 (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2018), 29, https://doi.org/10.1108/s2398-601820180000003002.

[4]  The Singapore Statement on Research Integrity, 2010, accessed 5 January 2022,  https://doi.org/10.4038/sljch.v39i4.2476.

[5]  The World Conferences on Research Integrity Statement, accessed 14 January 2022, https://wcrif.org/statement.

[6] UK Research Integrity Office, Code of Practice For Research: Promoting Good Practice and Preventing Misconduct (2009 and updated in 2021), accessed 5 January 2022,  https://ukrio.org/wp-content/uploads/UKRIO-Code-of-Practice-for-Research.pdf.

[7] ALLEA, The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (2017), accessed 14 January 2022, https://allea.org/code-of-conduct/.

[8] Universities UK, The Concordat to Support Research Integrity (United Kingdom, 2012, and updated in 2019), accessed 5 January 2022, https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-08/Updated%20FINAL-the-concordat-to-support-research-integrity.pdf. Signatories to The Concordat include the Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland; Higher Education Funding Council for Wales; National Institute for Health Research; Scottish Funding Council; UK Research and Innovation; Universities UK; Wellcome Trust; The British Academy; Cancer Research UK; GuildHE Research..

[9] Universities UK, The Concordat to Support Research Integrity, 6.

[10] 3rd World Conference on Research Integrity, “Montreal Statement on Research Integrity in Cross-Boundary Research Collaborations,” (2017), accessed 8 September 2021, https://wcrif.org/montreal-statement/file.

[11] Twan Huybers, Bronwyn Greene, and Detlef H. Rohr, “Academic Research Integrity: Exploring Researchers’ Perceptions of Responsibilities and Enablers,” Accountability in Research 27, no. 3 (2020): 168, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2020.1732824.

[12] Rinchen Pelzang and Alison M. Hutchinson, “Establishing Cultural Integrity in Qualitative Research: Reflections from a Cross-Cultural Study,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 17, no. 1 (2018): 1, https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917749702.

[13] Ray Friedman,  Ying-Yi Hong, Tony Simons, Shu-Cheng (Steve) Chi, Se-Hyung (David) Oh, and Mark Lachowicz, “The Impact of Culture on Reactions to Promise Breaches: Differences Between East and West in Behavioral Integrity Perceptions,” Group and Organization Management 43, no. 2 (2018): 305, https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601116678101.

[14] Margaret Urban Walker, “Picking Up Pieces : Lives, Stories, and Integrity,” In Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2008), 113, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof.

[15] Christian M. Golden, “Taking Our Selves Too Seriously: Commitment, Contestation, and the Dynamic Life of the Self,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 57, no. 4 (2019): 519, https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12361.

[16] Golden, “Taking Our Selves Too Seriously," 507.

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Intersectionality

Intersectionality is what occurs when a woman from a minority group tries to navigate the main crossing in the city … the main highway is “racism road.” One cross street can be Colonialism, then Patriarchy Street. She has to deal not only with one form of oppression but with all forms, which link together to make a double, a triple, multiple, a many layered blanket of oppression.[1]

“Intersectionality” is a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor and social theorist who first used the term in her paper “Demarginalizing The Intersection Of Race And Sex: A Black Feminist Critique Of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory And Antiracist Politics,” published in 1989.[2] The theory explains that social categories like gender, race, sexual orientation, and class can be framed as distinct systems of oppression which can overlap causing multiple injustices to occur to a person that sits at their intersection.[3] These categories are divided into structural, political, and representational intersectionality which highlight how different oppressive structures emphasise differences in experience, how these structures mould lives, and how they exclude these lives from being seen.[4]

The term was first used within the context of law under cases which dealt with gender and racial discrimination. Crenshaw uses three court cases: DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, Moore v. Hughes Helicopter, Inc., and Payne v. Travenol to show how discrimination law was practiced through a single-issue analysis rather than allowing for several types of discrimination to exist within one case.[5] By treating, for example, black women as solely women or solely black, this ignores the discrimination that exists at the intersection of both race and gender, an intersection which neither white women nor black men experience. While intersectionality was first named by Crenshaw in 1989, similar ideas had been theorised, lived, and observed by many other writers and theorists, like bell hooks,[6] Audre Lorde,[7] and Patricia Hill Collins.[8]

Today, intersectionality is used as a prism firstly to understand social justice issues through the lives of people who experience multiple systems of oppression, and secondly, to create more inclusive social justice movements,[9] which champion a truly egalitarian future.[10] Without intersectionality, movements, theories, and practices outline futures which lack foresight and inclusivity, as Marie Anna Jaimes Guerrero has said:

Any feminism that does not address land rights, sovereignty, and the state’s systemic erasure of the cultural practices of native peoples … is limited in vision and exclusionary in practice.[11]

A common critique of intersectionality, specifically in feminism today, is that it has become “stretched,” losing its “critical potential” when applied to activist movements, and becoming performative, rather than criticsl and political.[12] Yet Rekia Jibrin and Sara Salem posit that when it comes to praxis, intersectionality becomes too ambiguous and lacks conclusion due to its absence of a singular methodology, allowing for contradictions to exist within the same movement.[13] These contradictions have allowed for a common misunderstanding in the definition of intersectionality which in turn has demonized and weakened the term. It has allowed public figures, like Ben Shaprio, to spread a false definition as he and other politicians believe that instead of a demand for equality, intersectionality is a demand for the oppressed to hold a higher level of importance than the “white heterosexual male”[14] and fear that those who sit at intersections of oppression will begin to demand to be heard.[15] Given the potential for misunderstanding, it is is vital that we uphold the critical origins of intersectionality, which are to not only make the stacking of systems of oppression visible, but also to use this understanding as a tool to dismantle these systems all together.

Written by Montserrat Gutierrez Mesegue.

[1] Kimberlé Crenshaw in Nira Yuval-Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics,” European Journal of Women's Studies 13, no. 3 (2006): 196.

[2] Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 1989, iss. 1, article 8 (1989): 139–167.

[3] Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99.

[4] Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1245.

[5] Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” 141

[6] bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston and London: South End Press, 1981)

[7] Audre Lorde, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 110–14.

[8] Patricia Hill Collins “Gender, Black Feminism, and Black Political Economy," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (March 2000): 41–53.

[9] Patricia Hill Collins, “Intersectionality's definitional dilemmas,” Annual Review of Sociology, no. 41 (2015): 1-20.

[10] Jane Coaston, “The intersectionality Wars,” Vox, 28 May 28 2019, accessed 27 September 2021, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/20/18542843/intersectionality-conservatism-law-race-gender-discrimination

[11] Marie Anna Jaimes Guerrero, “Civil Rights versus Sovereignty: Native American Women in Life and Land Struggles,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997), 101–24.

[12] Rekia Jibrin and Sara Salem, “Revisiting Intersectionality: Reflections on Theory and Praxis,” Trans-Scripts, 5 (2015): 7.

[13] Jibrin and Salem, “Revisiting Intersectionality,” 8.

[14] Ben Shapiro, “What Is Intersectionality?” PragerU, 17 June 2018, video 3:55, at 0:50, accessed 27 September 2021, https://www.prageru.com/video/what-is-intersectionality/

[15] Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex:,” 142.

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Judgement Calls

The relations between art and ethics are never neutral, and even less so, when the two realities of aesthetics and ethics, which are seemingly irreconcilable in appearance are coupled upon the institutional plane of the academy, a context that does not appear to suit them. Jacques Rancière distinguishes between an aesthetic practice and an ethical practice, arguing that an ethical practice demands that individuals are treated according to the dominant ethos of the community in which they live.[1] This demand for an ethical practice can come into conflict with questions of aesthetic freedom. Despite the fact that Australia has neither a constitutional nor legislative bill of rights, aesthetic freedom continues to be considered a fundamental principle of a democratic society. Aesthetic freedom has been encapsulated in the notion of the ‘aesthetic alibi’ a principal that provides a defence or legitimation and justifies art as a privileged zone that allows artists exemption from normal social and legal constraints.[2] In Australia, the aesthetic alibi has been used to refer to defences that protect works of artistic merit that would otherwise be deemed illegal (for reasons of obscenity, pornographic content, or racial and religious vilification) and is implicitly invoked when contributors to public debate argue for the sanctity of a work on the basis that it is ‘art’. This claim of artistic freedom has been defined as:

a special case of freedom of speech, which raises it to a more purified level … what would be libelous or offensive in everyday life is granted special dispensation, if it is understood to take place within the protective shield of an aesthetic frame.[3]

Within this protective frame, artistic practices can play the role of provocateur, relatively comfortable in raising ethically sensitive issues and, potentially, assisting in the ongoing process of adjusting our collectively held values.

The aesthetic alibi has been important given that many aesthetic practices, particularly those that draw from the avant-garde tradition, see provocation of the dominant ethos as central to the task of art. Creative bio-researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr see their role as artists as contesting accepted notions, provoking and questioning what is ethical in order to create uneasiness and discomfort noting that:

As artists, we hope that we have a different “contract” with society – we ought to provoke, question and reveal hypocrisies through different tactics: whether aesthetic, absurd/ironic or subtle confrontation. Making our audience uneasy is an outcome of our own uneasiness, perusing the very things that make us uncomfortable. All we propose to offer are contestable future scenarios that are different from the canon of the contemporary trajectories.[4]

The notion that one of art’s key roles is to act as a conscience for society, to provoke, to test boundaries and bring its audience into crisis remains strong in the arts community and also amongst many creative-practice researchers.[5]

However, the claim that there is something unique about artistic activity that sets it apart from ‘everyday life’ and hence immune from ethical judgment, cannot be taken for granted, particularly amidst relatively recent shifts in legal, cultural and economic frameworks. Many contemporary art practices sit precariously on the boundary of art and life, and it is these areas of artistic practice that are particularly vulnerable to assertions of unethical conduct and to public hostility. Debates about sexism, hate speech, and “political correctness” in Australia and elsewhere have often focused on controversial artistic works.[6] Across the history of art and design, there are many significant examples of art practices that have tested those boundaries between art and life, provoking anxiety and generating ethical contemplation. For instance: relational art practices that incorporate the viewer into the work (Marina Abramovic), the use of animals in art (Marco Evaristti, Ondrej Brody and Kristofer Paetau); concerns relating to artworks that utilize surveillance techniques and appear to impinge on personal freedom and/or privacy (Sophie Calle, Willem Popolier); and instances of self-harm on the part of artists (Mike Parr, Monika Tichacek, Orlan). Design practitioners have a long-related tradition of ethical provocation through highly speculative design projects. In the contemporary sphere, the work of designers Antony Dunne and Fiona Raby and biological artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr through SymbioticA, involves laboratory based and speculative approaches in the academy to question and test the limits of technology and life.[7] Dunne and Raby’s methodological approach involves generating speculative, ethically provocative scenarios with the explicit aim of stimulating debate about the cultural, social and ethical implications of technology and to imagine possible futures.[8] Their adoption of speculative futures is approached by presenting these scenarios in ways that feel as ‘present’ as possible, testing the boundaries between art and life in a particular way. SymbioticA also involves speculative approaches that investigate and stimulate debate the nature of “life” and the ethics of manipulating living systems for both utilitarian and speculative ends.[9]

The notion of artistic freedom is a legacy of avant-gardism that runs through contemporary art and sees art as a necessary challenge to the status quo. As Kieran Cashell notes: “Associated with the cultural project of postmodernism, transgressive art … continues to constitute an important aesthetic force in post-twentieth-century vanguard culture.”[10] A belief in the provocative role of art goes hand-in-hand with the notion of aesthetic freedom and the aesthetic alibi. However, increasingly, and perhaps no more so than in the academy, the spirit of avant-gardism must now be reconciled with the requirement that creative practice research or artistic research operates within ethical codes of practice. The claim that there is something unique about artistic activity that sets it apart from “everyday life” can no longer be taken for granted and is not a defence when undertaken within the confines of the regulated academy.

The disjuncture between what happens in the academy and what happens in professional world, is a key challenge for creative practitioners once they have graduated and also for the educators who are preparing them for the world of practice.  While graduate researchers working in a university are required to observe the university’s code of conduct for research and adhere to the guidelines provided by national or university codes of conduct, artists working in the community are not similarly constrained. Once creative practice researchers graduate and leave the academy, they are no longer subject to institutional ethics processes nor are they required to gain ethics clearance for any projects that they engage in. Further, in contrast to research in more traditional research disciplines such as the Sciences and Social Sciences, practicing artists, designers and creative producers working in the community are not required to abide by national ethical guidelines for research. Their professional practice is unlikely to be considered research by them or by organizations, audiences and researchers in other research fields, and if they are constrained in any way, it is more likely to be through industry standards or codes of practice, for example, in journalism and film and television. In the visual arts, on the other hand, while art galleries and museums may demonstrate risk averse behaviour, “the true arena of ethics determination ethics is in the community” and it is through audience responses and the like that the ethics of a project come to be debated.[11] Here, where there are no ethics committees or supervisors to provide advice and support they need to be prepared to deal with the unanticipated and contingent ethical issues that arise in their practices in real-world settings.[12] In this context creative practitioners need to develop, call on and use their own sense of ethics to make “judgement calls” when issues of an ethical nature arise in their creative practice.  This will be the situation with artists, musicians, theatre makers, dancers, designers, film makers and journalists regardless of whether they deem their practice to be research.

Written by Barbara Bolt and Kate MacNeill.

This is a short extract from Barbara Bolt and Kate MacNeill, “The Meeting of Aesthetics and Ethics in Academy,” in The Meeting of Aesthetics and Ethics in the Academy: Challenges for Creative Practice Researchers in Higher Education, eds. Kate MacNeill and Barbara Bolt (London: Routledge, 2020), 1–12, 3–6. Reproduced with kind permission of the authors and editors.

[1] Jacques  Rancière, “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 36, n. 1 (2009): 1–19; Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Heterotopia,” Philosophy Today, n. 54 (2010): 15–25.

[2] Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002).

[3] Martin Jay, “The Aesthetic Alibi,” Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1998), 109–11.

[4] Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, “Vitality of Matter and the Instrumentalisation of Life,” Architectural Design, 83 no. 1 (2013), 75.

[5] Barbara Bolt and Giselle Kett, “The Trouble with CARE: Creative Arts and Research Ethics,” Quality in Postgraduate Research, (2010), 119, accessed 10 December 2021, http://qpr.edu.au/proceedings_all.html.

[6] Robert Sparrow, “Talking Sense About Political Correctness”, Journal of Australian Studies 73 (2002), 119–33; Robert Sparrow, “Censorship and Freedom of Speech” in Censorship and Free Speech, Issues in Society Series, 207, ed. Justin Healy, (Thirroul, NSW: The Spinney Press, 2004), 1–4.

[7] Antony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s critical design studio was first introduced at the Royal College of Art in London and now at Parsons New School in New York. Their Designed Realities Studio is dedicated to innovative design using critical design principles. The bio-artistic laboratory SymbioticA was set up at the University of Western Australia in 2000.

[8] Antony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming, (Cambridge Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2013).

[9] SymbioticA (2019), available: symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/research, accessed 10 December 2021.

[10] Kieran Cashell, Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 1.

[11] Barbara Bolt, Robert Vincs, Roger Alsop, Maria Sierra, and Giselle Kett, Research Ethics and the Creative Arts, (Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne Research Office, 2010), 15.

[12] Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically Important Moments’ in Research,” Qualitative Inquiry, 10, n. 2 (2004), 261–78.

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Justice

… justice is an expression of our mutual recognition of each other's basic dignity, and an acknowledgement that if we are to live together in an interdependent community we must treat each other as equals.[1]

The concept of justice is a core aspect of ethics and can be applied to laws, individual actions, and public policies, and so is a property of the law, of individuals and of institutions.[2] Justice is associated with rightness, fairness, virtue, and morality, and needs to be given due consideration in evaluating ethical decisions – we need to ask whether our actions treat all persons equally, and if not, whether the difference in treatment is justified and whether the criteria being used is relevant to the situation at hand. However, justice is not the only principle to consider in making ethical decisions, sometimes other moral claims such as rights or society's welfare come to the fore.[3]

Definitions and applications of justice vary historically and culturally. In northern/western philosophy early theories were set out by ancient Greek philosophers Plato in his work The Republic and Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. The ancient Greek view of justice, which underpinned the teachings of Socrates and Plato, can be understood, according to Richard Hugman, like this:

Justice is harmony both within the person and between people in a society. In this way of looking at the notion, justice is both a virtue and a principle that together form two parts of a whole.[4]

Other western philosophers argue, in the case of John Locke, that justice issues from God, from natural law, and according to social contract theory, from the mutual agreement of everyone. Classically justice was counted as one of the four cardinal virtues, and in modern times, John Rawls has described it as “the first virtue of social institutions.”[5]

Many different theories of justice exist in philosophy, politics, and law, for example: distributive justice, retributive justice, compensatory justice, and restorative justice. Distributive justice refers to the extent to which society's institutions ensure that benefits and burdens are distributed among society's members in ways that are fair and just; retributive justice to the extent to which punishments are fair and just; compensatory justice to the extent to which people are fairly compensated for their injuries by those who have injured them – where just compensation is proportional to the loss inflicted on a person; and restorative justice, aims, in response to a crime, for the victim and the offender to share their experience of what happened, and create a consensus for what the offender can do to repair the harm from the offense. 

Feminist political philosopher Iris Marion Young presents a relational approach to the question of justice ,based upon a group theory of oppression, in her 1990 book, Justice and the Politics of Difference. From her readings of feminist, queer, poststructuralist, and postcolonial critiques of marxism, Young argues that there are least five distinct types of oppression – exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural domination, and violence – and that these cannot be collapsed into more fundamental causes or reduced to the dimensions of distributive justice.[6] In Responsibility for Justice, a later collection of her work, published after her death, Young contributes the concept of “the social connection model,” which connects ideas of structural injustice to associated approaches to responsibility. She contrasts this with a “liability for harm” model of responsibility, which is more focused on finding guilt, blame or fault for a particular harm. Young argues that although we are all implicated in structural injustices, we are not necessarily to blame. She develops the idea of political responsibility for injustice, and explores how this differs from older ideas of guilt and blame, demanding that agents and institutions think of themselves in relation to structural injustice, and consider how each is implicated in, and responsible for, contributing to structural injustice.[7]

When we move from theories of justice to enacting justice in practice, through our everyday lives, things become even more complicated. Quite often the tensions between utilitarian and deontological ethics come into play, for example, where referencing the same example, the former might argue for justice in terms of the outcome, and the later for justice in terms of apriori principles. This is where Young’s social connection model is helpful, because not only does it shift understandings of justice from abstract and universal principles into the field of applied ethics, but it does so by connecting justice to another important ethical principle, that of political responsibility, and generating a new conceptual framework for justice out of that connection.

A more recent book relates justice, not to responsibility, but to love. Justice and Love is a text that has grown out of a long term series of dialogues between Australian writer and philosopher, Mary Zournazi, and Welsh Anglican bishop, theologian and poet, priest Rowen Williams. Such a long gestation has produced the feel of a conversation and a sense of each one coming to terms with the other’s viewpoint.[8] In his preface, “Conversations between Souls,” Ben Okri connects the concepts of love and justice, and highlights how the connection between the two is vital for survival:

Justice is a more complex idea that one might first think. In these dialogues it is linked to love, to beauty, and to witnessing. It is at the very heart of sanity or the survival of cultures and civilizations. Without love we will wilt and die, but without justice we will tear ourselves apart and perish.[9]

Okri argues that justice is not for someone  – a group, gender, class, race – but rather that it is more “intimate” and “cosmic” than that.[10]  He argues that the character of the dialogues between Zournazi and Williams is one which moves between the macro world of activism and the micro world of emotions. He focuses on “the need for a high quality of attentiveness,” and the value of “taking time to absorb the meaning of experience, allowing others time to revaluate their positions, the possibilities of learning from oneself whether one is right or wrong” – all these, Okri notes, are aspects of conflict resolution.[11] Highlighting how dialogue requires one to pay full attention to the other; he stresses that to be able to “truly respond” requires “great listening,” that “there can be no true justice where there is no true listening.” [12] “Dialogue,” for Okri, “is the micro world of democracy.” [13] He explains how the dialogues between Zournazi and Williams do not provide practical actions in response to the challenges raised or direct answers to questions, but rather that they raise “better questions,” a “more intelligent framing of the questions,” as well as “orientation” and “new perspectives.”[14] ­

Zournazi and Williams explore philosophical and theological thinking around justice, and try to separate out ideas of justice from a “sense of individual entitlement and right,” considering instead justice as a virtue.[15]  Through this approach, they seek to understand justice as a “seeing fairly or seeing wholly, which is a qualitative way of perceiving and understanding what is just.” Through literary texts and visual works, and conversations around, for example, a “just image” or whether a photograph “does someone justice,” they try – literally and figuratively – to think about the perceptual qualities of seeing and justice, and the limits of mercy, law and justice, arguing that seeing the world “wholly or fairly requires … attention to detail and fact ... promis[ing] the potential of hope.”[16]

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S. J., and Michael J. Meyer, “Justice and Fairness,” Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, accessed 8 December 2021, https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/justice-and-fairness/ This article appeared originally in Issues in Ethics 3, 2 (Spring 1990) and was updated in August 2018.

[2] Entry on “Justice,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 8 December 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice/.

[3] Velasquez et al, “Justice and Fairness. 

[4] Richard Hugman, A-Z of Professional Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 84, quoting L. H. Hinman, Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory. 5th edn. (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2012), p. 221.

[5] Entry on “Justice,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[6] Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 1990).

[7] Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice, (Oxford University Press, 2011).

[8] Mary Zournazi, Rowan Williams, and Ben Okri, Justice and Love: A Philosophical Dialogue (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

[9] Ben Okri, “Conversations between Souls,” Mary Zournazi, Rowan Williams, and Ben Okri, Justice and Love: A Philosophical Dialogue (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), viii–xiv, xi.

[10] Okri, “Conversations between Souls,” x.

[11] Okri, “Conversations between Souls,” xii.

[12] Okri, “Conversations between Souls,” xi-xii.

[13] Okri, “Conversations between Souls,” xii.

[14] Okri, “Conversations between Souls,” xiii.

[15] Zournazi and Williams, Justice and Love, 20.

[16] Zournazi and Williams, Justice and Love, 20.

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Ethical Know-How and Methdological Manner

Francisco Varela opens his book of three lectures, Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, Cognition, with a distinction between ethics as morality and ethics as situated wisdom. His interest lies in emphasising the significance of the later, where we can start to take into account the “immediate coping” and spontaneously arising ethical encounters of daily life. His lectures set out to address two interdependent questions: 1) How can one best understand ethical know-how? and 2) How does it develop and flourish in human beings?

To deal with these questions, he insists, an ethical framework based on a morality – formed through analysis of intention and evaluating the rationality of judgements – would be insufficient. This is because a focus on the mind neglects immediate, spontaneous, skilled behaviour – or the very set of actions through which we exercise and develop our ethical expertise. A wise person, he says, “is one who knows what is good and spontaneously does it.”[1] If we want to think about ethical know-how, it follows that we cannot neglect the realm of immediate action.

Varela’s questions would seem crucial for thinking about how institutional governance might best approach the ethical conduct of research. However, if the questions he poses need to be approached through a situated ethics, this raises a significant challenge to current governance approaches, which operate primarily through a form-based application process that is structurally unable to engage in anything but deliberative, reasoned judgement, or ethics as morality.

The implications of Varela’s emphasis on immediate action lies in shifting ethics away from a suite of abstract principles that one applies to situations and people and directing us toward being in the midst of inhabiting events together, responding to particularities as they unfold. Brian Massumi, coming from a related philosophical standpoint,[2] argues that:

The ethical value of an action is what it brings out in the situation, for its transformation … Ethics is about how we inhabit uncertainty, together. It’s not about judging each other right or wrong.

This emphasis on ethics-in-action has great significance for research ethics: it links the ethical value of research activity to what it brings out through its endeavours, rendering the implications of the “how” of research activity as deeply significant. For example, a researcher might be seeking to understand weaving techniques developed by a particular community in researching new approaches to the production of clothing. What matters ethically relates to the process of gathering that knowledge and considering potential impacts on that community. Much of this can be anticipated in advance and planned for.

However – and this is the important point – any method set out in advance can be carried out in an infinite number of ways, in terms of the manner with which it is carried out, the quality of relating, degrees of sensitivity, etc. These qualitative dimensions of research acts have a powerful impact on what those acts will bring out of the situations they engaged with. This is where and how”‘methodology” is always exceeded by what one might call “methodological manner.”

Methodological manner is also, arguably, the site through which creative practice research tends to make its primary contributions, simply because the qualitative aspects of process are often critical. Creative acts are embedded in situated, material realities and will commonly produce process-oriented knowledge, such as the articulation of techniques and approaches that are inextricably linked to situational particularities. For creative practice research, methods and methodological articulations are emergent and always under question[3] – particularly, I would suggest, in terms of the qualitative dimensions I am alluding to here.

One key assumption of all ethics approval forms I have encountered is that proper research begins with clear research questions and given methods through which to explore them. Enquiry led by creative practices will often not fit this formula neatly or easily. Assembling a key research question is generally possible, but in my experience it rarely operates as the important driver. Rather, one pursues hunches and curiosities through creative activities to better understand the potential therein. Through iterative creative acts, a non-linear assemblage of stepping-stones gathers, generating new ground of understanding. As this understanding gradually gathers depth and breadth, the practitioner is able to offer more precise methodological articulations which emerge and are refined through this complex, non-linear process, and are entangled with the specific approaches of the practitioner. This emergent process relies on the “immediate coping” and ethical know-how that Varela calls for us to attend to. In fact, not knowing in advance may be a crucial aspect of the integrity of the research, as maintaining due respect for the complexity of situations involves accepting the impossibility of knowing what will emerge prior to the actuality of encounter.

The way that Francisco Varela characterises the development of ethical know-how resonates deeply with this emergent mode of enquiry we find in creative practice research. Varela suggests that “intelligence should guide our actions, but in harmony with the texture of the situation at hand, not in accordance with a set of rules or procedures.”[4] This statement may seem to exclude deliberative rules and procedures, such as one encounters through an institutionalised ethics approval process; however, as he goes on it becomes clear that deliberation and know-how operate as a critical, symbiotic ecology. Insisting that “truly ethical behavior takes the middle way between spontaneity and rational calculation,” Varela sees the ethical person as an “expert” who acts spontaneously before reconstructing “the intelligent awareness that justifies the action.”[5] Importantly, “like any other kind of expert, the truly ethical person can use such an a posteriori justification as a stepping-stone for continued learning.”[6]

The modalities of spontaneous action and rational calculation work together in developing a “truly ethical person.” This process can be seen to also describe the emergent development of research methodology. To paraphrase and adapt Varela’s words quoted above: after acting spontaneously (doing/making/creating), the practitioner can reconstruct the intelligent awareness that justifies (or better comprehends) the action, using these a posteriori articulations as stepping-stones for continued learning about – and growing awareness of – the nature and manner of one’s practice-actions and their tendencies, allowing for more refined methodological articulation.

This affinity between the process of developing methodological articulations and cultivating ethical know-how struck me as a way to approach ethics in practice research contexts. This was the hunch that underscored the design of the workshop, which I named the Creative Research Ethics Workshop (CREW).

Written by Pia Ednie-Brown.

This text is a short extract reproduced from Pia Ednie-Brown, “Six Troubling Things: Cultivating Ethical Know-How through Creative Practice Research,” in The Meeting of Aesthetics and Ethics in the Academy: Challenges for Creative Practice Researchers in Higher Education, eds. Kate MacNeill and Barbara Bolt (London: Routledge, 2020), 193–209, 194–196. Reproduced with kind permission of the author and editors.

[1]  Francisco J. Varela, Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 4.

[2] Brian Massumi, “Navigating Movements,” in Hope: New Philosophies for Change, ed. Mary Zournazi  (Annandale: Pluto Press, 2002), 210–44, 218.

[3] This is how I would describe ‘pure’ or emergent creative practice research enquiry. That is not to say that a research project focussed on creative practice enquiries might not involve other kinds of methods, such as interviews, surveys or data analysis, but that where this occurs these other forms are working with more emergent processes of creative practice research.

[4] Varela, Ethical Know-How, 31.

[5] Varela, Ethical Know-How, 31–2.

[6] Varela, Ethical Know-How, 32.

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Method

The term “method” refers to ways and procedures of doing things,[1] while “research methods” can be understood as “tools used to find, collect, analyze and interpret information.”[2]

In her 1987 essay, “The Method Question,” feminist theorist Sandra Harding defined research methods as “technique[s] for gathering evidence.”[3] Exploring the question of whether there are techniques of research collection that are unique to feminist enquiry, Harding suggests there are in-built assumptions that inform and are a part of every method:

… it has been clear that methods of inquiry can not [sic] be regarded as independent of the general theories, specific hypotheses and other background assumptions that guide research (optical assumptions guiding inferences from observations; logical assumptions about the appropriate structure of inferences; assumptions about computers, questionnaires and other scientific “instruments;” assumptions about the veracity of historic archives; etc).[4]

In so doing, she draws attention to the starting–interpretations and underlying principles which structure and direct research. Harding shows how these can range from the visual, philosophical, and technical, to historiographical premises that influence how one, for example, analyses data, conducts interviews or uses varied tools and equipment.

Harding also sets out to clarify some of the rather complicated distinctions that exist between method, methodology, and epistemology. Referencing the philosopher Peter Caws, Harding characterises “a methodology” as “a theory and analysis of ‘the special ways’ in which the general structure of theory finds its application in particular scientific disciplines.”[5] Following this, one way that a theory can find an application is through the practice of a method. The quote above emphasises how, when methods operate as the application of theories, they become methodologies, and that this transition from method to methodology through an engagement with theory plays out in specific ways in relation to particular branches of knowledge.

In a discussion about feminist writing practices, the writer Mona Livholts reflects on how the term “methodology” connects “epistemological concerns (who can know and what can be known)” and “method (techniques used to collect data).”[6] Livholts highlights how the concept of “methodology” links the recipients and limits of the knowledge being made, with the “techniques” that were followed to gather that knowledge. Considered in the opposite direction, Livholt’s suggests that the methods used to carry out the research, directly affect who can know, and the ways in which that knowing is possible (or not possible, as the case may be). Livholts, like Harding, implies that it is the specific disciplinary positioning of methods in relation to specific epistemologies or theoretical constructions of knowledge which characterises the distinctions between “method” and “methodology.”

Indeed, each discipline has its own histories and traditions, ways and procedures of doing things, as well as tools for finding, collecting, analyzing, and interpreting. But importantly, many current research methodologies – or theories or philosophies of method – frequently draw from more than one area of knowledge or epistemological tradition. This results in the possibility of combining approaches in different ways and for different ends. The terminology and specificity of these practices has been much discussed and debated. In Jane Rendell's view, “multidisciplinarity describes a way of working where a number of disciplines are present but maintain their own distinct identities and ways of doing things, whereas in interdisciplinarity individuals operate between and at the edge of their discipline/s and in so doing question the ways in which they usually work.”[7] Read through this lens, multidisciplinary methodologies could be understood to use more than one theorised technique of gathering evidence in the same architectural research project, while interdisciplinary methodologies might more consciously self-reflect on and critique the traditional protocols, assumptions, and borders of architecture or another discipline through the use and exchange of specific methods from/with elsewhere.

Furthermore, methodologies can be formed not only by combining or working across one or more disciplines, but also by drawing on knowledge gained from outside academia. Indeed Peter Osbourne argues in his historical study of the emergence of transdisciplinarity, that it is precisely the inclusion of non-academic knowledge that defines transdisciplinarity.[8] Isabelle Doucet and Nel Janssens offer a related definition pertaining to architecture and space-related research “that turns around three major elements,” combining “the integration of discipline and profession (theory and practice) in knowledge production,” alongside “the ethical dimension,” and “the importance of experimental, designerly modes of inquiry.”[9] Likewise, artist Iain Biggs writes of the importance of recognising forms of knowing and doing that go beyond disciplinary categories and conventions, reflecting on the ethical importance of recognizing and incorporating the methods and specialised expertise of those traditionally excluded from academic research, including in one project, for example, “farmers, parents, the elderly, community workers, children, local political representatives, or the voluntary maintenance team at the local auxiliary pumping station.”[10] Harding also questions these kinds of exclusion and inclusion in her feminist critique of the universalist claims of “scientific method” by comparing the amount of experience individuals or groups have in relation to the status ascribed to their particular domains of knowledge:

It is … unclear how one would define this term [scientific method] in such a way that highly trained but junior members of research teams in physics counted as scientists, but farmers in simple societies (or mothers!) did not ...[11]

In the 2013 book, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, comprising published notes prepared for lectures delivered by Roland Barthes at the Collège de France in 1977, the philosopher describes the term “method” as a “manner of proceeding toward a goal, a protocol of operations with a view to achieving an end.”[12]  This definition relates to that traditionally ascribed to the meaning of the term “scientific method” – as a form of systematic enquiry that can be repeated by others in order to test a result. Crucially, Barthes was using this definition of method as a means to launch ideas about his own concept of “non-method,” a term, or perhaps better understood as a principle, which underpinned his own approach to lecturing and pedagogy.[13] With reference to the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Friedrich Nietzsche, Barthes sets out at the beginning, and returns at the end, of his lectures to the same statements about “method” in relation to “non-method,” writing:

Method = phallic mindset of attack and defense (“will,” “decision,” “premeditation,” “going straight ahead,” etc.) vs. Non-method: mindset of the journey, of extreme mutability (flitting, gleaning). We’re not following a path; we’re presenting our findings as we go along.[14]

Barthes’s gendered characterisation of method as phallic, highlights the ways that traditionally the concept of “method” has been understood to undertake a certain predetermined route in a particular direction. While a non-method, on the other hand, at least for Barthes, has “the mindset of the journey,” and places emphasis on the process, the doing of the method and on what is found along the way. The emphasis Barthes gives to “[e]xtreme mutability” foregrounds change as an attitude of non-method, while his use of the verb “flitting” suggests the importance of shifting from one place or position to another, and even adopting an attitude of inconsistency, which directly challenges the rigour usually understood as a valued characteristic of traditional research methods.

The term “gleaning” – originally an agricultural term for stripping the remaining corn from a field that has already been harvested or has not been deemed commercially viable for harvesting,[15] and later taking on the figurative meaning of “to scrape together” or collect information from different sources – suggests the importance for Barthes of finding things that have been overlooked, perhaps in places not recognized by others to be productive, or in making something new through the scraping together of the ends of many other leftover things.[16] The statement Barthes makes that “we’re presenting our findings as we go along,” also indicates that for him there is an aspect of performance or subjective self-consciousness at work in non-method, a need to pay attention to what happens and is made during the process itself.

Far from disregarding or rejecting the importance of method, Barthes’ comments on non-method place value on the need to really consider the processes that take place in conducting or practicing a method. For him, methods are not necessarily given, but can be found. This correlates strongly with discussions around practice-based, practice-informed, practice-led, and practice-related forms of research, where methods are often emergent, discovered through the practice of the research, developed in specific response to working with particular materials, evidence, data or people, over time. It is in this practice of research, and for Barthes, in the digressive qualities of non-method, that an ethics can be located: “The indirect, which is of an ethical order, will be part of it. It’ll involve an Ethics.”[17]

Written by Sophie Read.

[1] “Method,” OED Online, accessed 1 July 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/117560

[2] “Research Methods,” Methods Map: SAGE Research Methods (SAGE Publications, 2021), accessed 15 August 2021, https://methods.sagepub.com/methods-map/research-methods

[3] Sandra Harding, “The Method Question,” Hypatia 2, no. 3 (1987): 19–35, 23.

[4] Harding, “The Method Question,” 24.

[5] Harding, “The Method Question,” 24, quoting Caws, “Scientific Method,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1967), 339.

[6] Mona Livholts, “Contemporary Untimely Post/Academic Writings – Transforming the Shape of Knowledge in Feminist Studies,” in Emergent Writing Methodologies in Feminist Studies, ed. Mona Livholts (London: Routledge, 2012): 2.

[7] Jane Rendell, "Working Between and Across: Some Psychic Dimensions of Architecture’s Inter- and Transdisciplinarity," Architecture and Culture 1, no. 1 (June 2013): 125–38, 126.

[8] Peter Osbourne, “Problematizing Disciplinarity, Transdisciplinary Problematics,” Theory, Culture & Society 32, nos. 5–6  (2015): 3–35.

[9] Isabelle Doucet and Nel Janssens, “Transdisciplinarity, the Hybridisation of Knowledge Production and Space-Related Research,” in Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production in Architecture and Urbanism, eds Isabelle Doucet and Nel Janssens, Urban and Landscape Perspectives 11 (Dordrecht: Springer Science, 2011): 1–14, 2. DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0104-5_1.

[10] Iain Biggs, After Disciplinarity? Mutual Accompaniment, Ensemble Practices, and the Climate Emergency (2021), accessed 2 June 2021, http://www.iainbiggs.co.uk/2021/05/after-disciplinarity-mutual-accompaniment-ensemble-practices-and-the-climate-emergency/

[11] Harding, “The Method Question,” 28, citing herself Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986): Chapter 2.

[12] Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, [1977] 2013): 3 and 133.

[13] Knut Stene-Johansen, Christian Refsum and Johan Schimanski, “How to Live Together?”: Roland Barthes and the Phantasme of Idiorrhythmic Life," in Living Together: Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community, eds. Knut Stene-Johansen, Christian Refsum and Johan Schimanski, Culture & Theory 179 (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018): 9–19, 12, accessed 12 October 2021, https://www.transcript-verlag.de/media/pdf/bf/b6/f8/ts4431_1elBh6qSsV7kjj.pdf

[14] Barthes, How to Live Together, 3 and 133.

[15] See for example, “Gleaning,” accessed 6 October 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleaning

[16] “Gleaning,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed 1 July 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/78840

[17] Barthes, How to Live Together, 137.

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Morality

It is not possible to talk about morals without also referring to ethics, or to discuss ethics without mentioning morality. Indeed, in his introductory text on the two topics – What is this Thing called Ethics? – Christopher Bennett, argues, on the one hand, that metaethics is the study of morality, and on the other, that moral philosophy is the study of ethics:

Moral philosophy – the study of ethics – starts when we take seriously the need to get our ethical views right. [1]

Meta-ethics is the study of the logical or metaphysical status of morality. It asks what we are doing when we talk about morality. [2]

According to Bennett, moral theory or philosophy provides a context for understanding ethics and a framework for making decisions, reflecting on and judging actions from an ethical perspective. Although, as he points out, ethical thinking goes on all the time in an informal way, Bennett suggests that attempts to make ethical issues fully explicit as moral philosophy allow us to reflect on our actions and to decide therefore what we ought to believe and how we ought to act. [3] In his view, moral philosophy needs to be explanatory, comprehensive, simple, consistent, and systematic. By being more comprehensive than ordinary moral thinking, for Bennett moral philosophy allows us to construct a moral theory that explains in a systematic and consistent way the right thing to do in any situation, and in so doing provides a clear guide to action.[4]

… a good moral theory needs to explain what is right and what is wrong. It has to give us a clear way of getting answers to our questions about actual moral situations. A moral theory should also be comprehensive, giving us answers, or a way of working out answers that we can imagine applying to any situation.

… a reasonably simple moral theory will have the virtue of being able to guide the action of those who follow it.

… a good moral theory will be consistent, and will not throw up conflicting results in different situations. One way to ensure this is to start from some basic principle or principles, and to apply that principle or principles systematically to particular situations to get our answers. [5]

Yet he also notes how others “argue that the point of a moral theory is precisely to allow us to reflect on and criticise our intuitive reactions.”[6] 

In An Invitation to Feminist Ethics, feminist ethicist Hilde Lindemann, also suggests that morality is the subject matter of ethical study and that ethics is “the scholarly study of morality.”[7] In the distinctions she draws between the three branches of ethics that comprise its position as an academic discipline morality appears in the first, in metaethics, as the study of morality; and in the second, normative ethics, as the study of moral theories and concepts, for example, an ethics of care, social contract theory, utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and virtue ethics, as well as the study of key ethical principles, such as integrity, justice, and evil. In the third branch of ethics, practical ethics, which for Lindemann is defined as the study of ethical issues as they appear in specific situations or practices, and exemplified in legal ethics, medical ethics, professional ethics, and business ethics, she describes, in a similar way to Bennett, how “ethics at this level is a matter of taking the principles that you’ve logically deduced from your moral theory at the normative level and applying them to a concrete case.” However, unlike Bennett, she notes that this particular “picture of morality” is one she disagrees with, and goes on to present a view of morality that is informed by feminism.[8]

Lindemann discusses how feminist ethics “isn’t a branch of ethics” but a “way of doing ethics,”[9] and explains how the role of a feminist ethicist is to try to “understand, criticize, and correct how gender operates within our moral and social beliefs and practices.”[10] She posits that the task for feminist ethics is to challenge “on moral grounds” the powers that men hold over women, and to “claim for women, again, on moral grounds, the powers the gender denies them.” [11] So it is possible to understand here how morality can be located and through in power relations, that it is possible to produce theories about the moral meaning of different types of unequal power, and to look at the kinds of power required for “morality to operate properly at all.” [12] Lindemann suggests that feminist ethics challenges the relation of the three strands of ethics and the place of morality in them, arguing that while feminist normative ethics can be understood as “moral theory that arises out of actual social practices” and in turn “relies on those practices to help determine whether it’s on the right track,”  feminist practical ethics “offers ethical analyses of special social practices.” [13]

Lindemann describes how while moral theorising in the Western tradition can be considered to be over 2000 years old, a newer tradition has split morality off from politics, positioning politics as a concern with relations between nation-states, while morality focuses on relations between persons.[14] For feminist ethicists, she explains, the line between morality and politics is not so clear-cut, first because the “personal is political,” and second because “feminists typically subject the ethical theory they produce to critical political scrutiny,” in order to avoid political bias, but also to ensure that their theory reflects their feminist politics. For this reason, in Lindemann’s view, feminist ethicists are sceptical of an idealised version of moral theory that does not acknowledge its own political positioning, and doubtful that objectivity can be achieved when people’s difference experiences or commitments are not taking into account. [15]

Written by Jane Rendell.

 [1] Christopher Bennett, What is this thing called Ethics? (London: Routledge, 2010), 14.

[2] Bennett, What is this thing called Ethics? 23.

[3] Bennett, What is this thing called Ethics? 15.

[4] Bennett, What is this thing called Ethics? 23.

[5] Bennett, What is this thing called Ethics? 23.

[6] Bennett, What is this thing called Ethics? 24.

[7] Hilde Lindemann, An Invitation to Feminist Ethics, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 14–5.

[8] Lindemann, An Invitation to Feminist Ethics, 15–6.

[9] Lindemann, An Invitation to Feminist Ethics, 17.

[10] Lindemann, An Invitation to Feminist Ethics, 26.

[11] Lindemann, An Invitation to Feminist Ethics, 26.

[12] Lindemann, An Invitation to Feminist Ethics, 27.

[13] Lindemann, An Invitation to Feminist Ethics, 29.

[14] Lindemann, An Invitation to Feminist Ethics, 30.

[15] Lindemann, An Invitation to Feminist Ethics, 30–1.

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Poethics

Literature (in contrast to journal writing) is an entry into public conversation. At its best it enacts, explores, comments on, further articulates, radically questions the ethos of the discourses from which it springs. Hence my use of the word poethics. Every poetics is a consequential form of life. Any making of forms out of language (poesis) is a practice with a discernible character (ethos).[1]

Writing that draws attention to the relation between the poetic and the ethical, has been described by poets such as Seamus Healey and Joan Retallack as “poethical,” and developed more recently through “black feminist poethics,” in the work of theorists such as Denise Ferreira Da Silva and Tina Marie Campt.

According to Eugene O’Brian, in Seamus Heaney’s 2001 collection, Electric Light, in the seventh section entitled “W. H. Auden, 1907–30,” Heaney includes a single sentence: “A pause for po-ethics.”[2] According to O’Brian, for Heaney poetry and ethics are entwined, and O’Brian “contend[s] that his [Heaney’s] notion of po-ethics is just this – seeing poetry as a genre through which forms of truth can be accessed and expressed in a way that is not accessible to the more normative discourse.” O’Brian draws out the importance of Heaney’s poethics for allowing “a slanted perspective, a swerve, which looks at the ethical demands on life from just such a different perspective.” And in her 2003 book, The Poethical Wager, Joan Retallack writes too of poethics as “a poetics of the swerve” or in terms of “opportunities to usefully rethink habits of thought.”[3] For Retallack, poethics is a “distancing form of play” located in the “intermediate zone between self and world,” and it is in the distance “engendered by a poethical recognition of reciprocal alterity” that “curiosity and exploration” are stimulated.[4]

More recently Ferreira Da Silva’s “black feminist poethics” articulates, as Andrea Phillips has described, “a mode of living and thinking which apprehends and moves beyond the categories of slavery.” [5] For Phillips, “this call to the absolute unpicking of the bonds of the capitalist slave narrative of Black history, written through capital accumulation,” requires “a total rethink of the temporal–spatial structures of what we serve to display and cherish in the name of poethics.”[6] And for da Silva herself, “the Black Feminist Critical worksite is located both in the poet’s intention that the Category of Blackness can be emancipated from the scientific and historical ways of knowing that produced it in the first place,” and through the ethical as a mandate for “opening up other ways of knowing and doing.”[7] With Valentina Desideri, Ferreira da Silva hosts The Sensing Salon, a studio practice, that “facilitate[s] collaborative studying and experimenting with different practices and tools for reading (e.g. Tarot and Astrology) and healing (e.g. Reiki and Political Therapy).” Individual and group sessions use different tools to perform “Poethical Readings” to “image and discuss the questions brought forward by the participants,” in order to “foster[s] a form of sociality that attends to our deeply implicated existence.”[8]

Black feminist visual arts historian and critic Tina Marie Campt also uses the term poethics in her work. In her entries to this lexicon, Danielle Hewitt refers to two related terms in Campt’s writing – adjacency and implication.[9] Poethics features as an unnamed yet vital concept motivating her “Black Visual Frequency: A Glossary,” which consists of five key terms – “frequency, still-moving-images, slow walking, refusal and black visuality.”[10]

The term poethics can be understood in relation to ethopoiesis, as conceptualised with regard to rapport a soi, relations to the self, or askesis, in Michel Foucault’s genealogy of ethics, referred to in the self-making entry in this lexicon. For Foucault, such ethical practices, like those of Stoicism and Christianity, required particular forms of techne (or know how), involving specific forms of written, bodily, and meditative practices.[11] And as Foucault, in his Self Writing essay from 1983, writes: “No technique, no professional skill can be acquired without exercise; nor can the art of living, the technê tou biou, be learned without askesis that should be understood as a training of the self by oneself.”[12]

In Rosi Braidotti’s book Transpositions, in a section called “Becoming-Ethical: An Eco-Philosophy of Multiple Belongings,” she discusses how the ecological crisis has created a need to reconstitute “ethics, politics and a new processual ethics.”[13] She turns to the work of Vandana Shiva and the distinction she draws, proposed by Francisco Varela and Maturana (1972), between autopoietic and allopoietic systems. The former are mostly biological organisms, that are self-organising and self-renewing, while the latter are mainly technical artefacts that require outside intervention to function.[14] Braidotti then moves to focus on the distinction Felix Guattari makes between autopoietic and allopoietic systems in order to redefine subjectivity, extending autopoiesis to machines, and using the term “chaosmosis” to describe, according to Braidotti, “autosubjectivation.”[15] By moving beyond the distinction proposed by Shiva, Guattari is able to “propose[s] a more collective machinism without delimited unity, whose autonomy accommodates diverse mediums of alterity.” [16] Braidotti explains that as a “schizo-analyst,” Guattari stresses the “non-human” aspects of human subjectivity, showing that the human does not need to coincide with the person or individual. As Braidotti points out, in Guattari’s aesthetic and political paradigm, his vision of the subject is as a dynamic, self-organising or “autopoietic system.” [17]

This focus on autopoiesis as a form of self-making is challenged by the concept of sympoiesis, referred to, for example, by Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble. When Haraway reconceptualises the Anthropocene as the Chthulucene, as a “time of mortal compositions at stake to and with each other,”[18] she notes that this epoch, in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked, is sympoietic, and not, she writes, autopoietic. Here Haraway takes the term sympoiesis from M. Beth Dempster, and argues that mortal worlds “do not make themselves,” [19] but rather require a poiesis that thinks-with, makes-with and becomes-with. This is what she calls “SF,” defined as “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far.”[20] For Haraway:

SF is practice and process, it is becoming-with each other in surprising relays; it is a figure for ongoingness in the Chthulucene. [21]

In an intriguing endnote, though, right at the end of the book, Haraways suggests that autocritique or self-examination or might not be antithetical to thinking-with:

 Thinking-with in the sf compost pile of this essay is not an enemy to the profound secular self-examination of Arendt’s historically situated human figure, but that is an argument for another day.[22]

This leaves us with the possibility that poethical practice is both auto and sympoietic – that processes of self-making take place in relation to and with others, while at the same time, processes of relating to and with others involve re-relating and re-making selves.

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 11.

[2] Eugene O’Brien, “ ‘A Pause for Po-Ethics:’ Seamus Heaney and the Ethics of Aesthetics,” Humanities 8, no. 3 (2019): 138; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8030138

[3] Retallack, The Poethical Wager, 1.

[4] Retallack, The Poethical Wager, 7.

[5] https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/annotated_library/

[6] https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/annotated_library/

[7] Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 81–97.

[8] See Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “The Sensing Salon,” accessed 4 November 2021, https://www.thesensingsalon.org/

[9] See for example, Tina Campt, “Adjacency: Luke Willis Thompson’s Poethics of Care,” Flash Art, 37 (September/October 2019) https://flash---art.com/article/adjacency-luke-willis-thompsons-poethics-of-care/

[10] See Tina Campt, “Black Visual Frequency – A Glossary,” accessed 4 November 2021 https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/series/black-visual-frequency-a-glossary/

[11] Matthew Sharpe, “ ‘Critique’ as Technology of the Self,” Foucault Studies, no. 2 (2005): 97-116, 106.

[12] Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” translated from Corps écrit, no. 5 (February 1983): 3–23. See, accessed 16 September 2021, https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.hypomnemata.en/,

[13] Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 123.

[14] Braidotti, Transpositions, 124. 

[15] Braidotti, Transpositions, 124.

[16] Braidotti, Transpositions, 124.

[17] Braidotti, Transpositions, 125.

[18] “Chthulucene Manifesto from Santa Cruz,” revised from “Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe in Conversation,” Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). See https://laboratoryplanet.org/en/manifeste-chthulucene-de-santa-cruz/.

[19] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 33.

[20] Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2.

[21] Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 3.

[22] Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 177, note 18.

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Positionality

In theorising subjectivity, identity, and experience, feminists suggest positioning is integral to knowing and relating. Many have used spatial concepts, such as Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledge,” Jane Flax’s “standpoint theory,” as well as Elspeth Probyn’s notion of “locality” to negotiate ongoing theoretical disputes such as the essentialism/constructionism debate.[1] Despite the differences of opinion held in feminism regarding “standpoint theory,” and its relation to marxist politics and historical materialism, writing in 1997, Susan Hekman argued that throughout the development of standpoint theory:

feminist stand-point theorists’ quest for truth and politics has been shaped by two central understandings: that knowledge is situated and perspectival and that there are multiple standpoints from which knowledge is produced. As the theory has developed, feminist standpoint theorists have explored, first, how knowledge can be situated yet “true,” and, second, how we can acknowledge difference without obviating the possibility of critique and thus a viable feminist politics … Recently there has been much discussion among feminists of the parameters of a “politics of difference.” I believe that feminist standpoint theory has laid the groundwork for such a politics by initiating the discussion of situated knowledge.[2]

The positioning of female subjectivity at the crossing point of capitalist and patriarchal systems of power has required both feminist and marxist critiques as well as a theory for relating them, something debated extensively in feminism.[3] Intersectional feminism extends this to include the dominating effects of racialised power, explored, for example, through the Combahee River Collective ‘s recognition of “interlocking systems of oppression,” [4] and Deborah King’s understanding of how individuals with multiple minority statuses experience interlocking systems of inequality or “multiple jeopardy,” and so develop a “multiple consciousness.” [5]  Catherine E. Harnois summarises the importance of developing “an awareness of multiple systems of inequality working with and through one another,”[6] while the later work of legal scholar Kimberley Crenshaw articulates the implications of race, class and gender intersections.[7]

In the social sciences, in particular geography and anthropology, the understanding that women are “differently positioned in the webs of power relations that structure our identities,”[8] has had profound implications on the developments of feminist research methodologies, in terms of the ways in which researching and researched subjects are positioned (and take positions) through gendered, classed, and raced identities, and life experiences.[9]

Another importance aspect of understanding positionality in terms of developing a self-aware practice of research ethics is the degree to which one’s positionality can be reflected upon, and the impact such an act of reflexivity can have on those with whom conducts research. W. B. Knight and K. Keifer-Boyd summarise positionality in research as follows: 

We all have experiences that shape our perspectives. Therefore, we each bring unique life experiences to our work. Positionality is based on situating, locating, and positioning self. Our position is a political point of departure. It is not fixed, but relational.[10]

We have varied positionalities. Delineating our positions supports the notion that our position may influence facets of our teaching and our research, such as what we incorporate into our lessons or what types of information we gather in our inquiry and how we interpret it. [11]

Knight and Keifer-Boyd refer to the work of Linda Alcoff who defines positionality as the “knower’s specific position within any given context, a position always defined by gender, race, class, and other socially significant dimensions.”[12] Alcoff draws out how positionality is not fixed but rather a process for the interpretation and construction of values:

… the concept of positionality includes two points: first … that the concept of woman is a relational term identifiable only within a (constantly moving) con- text; but, second, that the position that women find themselves in can be actively utilized (rather than transcended) as a location for the construction of meaning, a place from where meaning is con- structed, rather than simply the place where a meaning can be discovered (the meaning of femaleness). The concept of woman as positionality shows how women use their positional perspective as a place from which values are interpreted and constructed rather than as a locus of an already determined set of values.[13]

Feminist theories of standpoint, and, developing out of these, positionality, have been vital in producing critiques of normative research methods in the social sciences, as well as new research practices which reflect upon their own methodologies from ethical perspectives. In a paper exploring connections between positionality and reflectivity, feminist geography Gillian Rose starts by considering how “I should situate myself and my interpretations of those interviews by reflexively examining my positionality.” She turns to the work of fellow feminist geographer, Linda McDowell and quotes her argument that: “we must recognize and take account of our own position, as well as that of our research participants, and write this into our research practice.”[14]

Rose draws on McDowell’s work to focus on how, in being conscious of “position,” one needs to acknowledge the powerful position academics often hold within institutions and the impact of this positioning upon the production of knowledge. [15] 

Feminists of many kinds have elaborated their own role in the complex relations of power by exploring their “position” and frequently ascribe the politics of knowledge production to a geography of “positionality.” Facets of the self – institutional privilege, for example, as well as aspects of social identity – are articulated as “positions” in a multidimensional geography of power relations. [16] 

With reference to the work of Haraway, on the theorisation of position, Rose elaborates how “‘position’ indicates the kind of power that enabled a certain kind of knowledge. Knowledge thus positioned, or situated, can no longer claim universality.”[17]

Knight and Keifer-Boyd emphasise the importance of taking into account the specific experience of the individual, as well as more general social characteristics and fixed categories of identity. They highlight, with reference to the work of J. Robertson and David Takacs, the importance of both reflecting on our own positions, and also recognising the limitations of our experience.[18] They note how reflection produces feelings of both empowerment, recognising that “we have unique claims to knowledge that others do not,” but also disempowerment, as others “can lay claims to knowledge that we do not have,” and that this can produce a questioning of a researcher’s position as an expert and thus the “correctness” of a view underscored through the position s/he holds.[19] Knight and Keifer-Boyd focus on how any understanding of positionality needs to refer “to the stance or positioning of the researcher in relation to the social and political context of the study – the community, the organization or the participant group.”[20] Suggesting that the researcher start instead with the position of the researched, they highlight the relational aspects of positionality:

Only by listening to the researched can we gain a deep awareness of our positionality and biased filters concerning the experiences that have shaped the identities of those we research.[21]

Knight and Keifer-Boyd underscore how positionality affects every phase of the research process, right from the initial posing of a question or a problem, to the processes of carrying out the research and involving others, right through to the design of the outcomes and the ways in which research is made public.[22]

Discussing positionality in terms of action research, Wendy E. Rowe has explored how the positionality of the researcher can be understood in relation to insider and outsider roles and dynamics.[23] Rowe discusses how Kathryn Herr and Gary Anderson define an insider as “a researcher or participant who works for or is a member of the participant community,” and an outsider or academic researcher as a non-member. Herr and Anderson suggest six positions for inside-outside relations set along a continuum: from insider (researcher studies own practice), to insider in collaboration with other insiders, to insider(s) in collaboration with outsider(s), to reciprocal collaboration (equal insider and outsider teams), to outsider(s) in collaboration with insider(s) (non-equivalent relationships), to outsider(s) studies.[24] For Rowe, the “first five ‘positions’” fit with the core principles of action research – as a “participatory and reflexive practice that involves researchers and participants in a process of co-inquiry to address identified problems, create change or explore opportunities,” whereas in the sixth position is more typical of “traditional research,” where the researcher is positioned as outside “gathering data about others as objectified research subjects.” [25]  

Rowe notes how the “degrees of relatedness” a researcher has to participants in terms of culture, race, age, gender, religion, and sexual orientation, may influence their insider-outsider role,[26] with insider researchers often having more in common with participants than outsider researchers. She also discusses the importance of positionality in action research not only in terms of how research is conducted, but also how it can determine outcomes and influence “whose voice(s) will be represented in the final reports or decisions.” Positionality can also determine the impact of the research, Rowe argues, and following S. Ospina, J. Dodge, E. G. Foldy, and A. Hofmann-Pinilla, she notes that a funder's power can elevate “the position and perspective of the outsiders while minimizing or ignoring the interests of some community participants.”[27]

… researchers must be acutely conscious of [the] positionality issues and how they will influence the course and reported outcomes of an action research project, continually bringing them to the forefront for discussion with participants and seeking to redress power imbalances that disenfranchise or minimize the voice of key participant groups.[28]  

Importantly Rowe also notes that positionality is not static or fixed and can, and most likely will, change over the time of the research.[29]

Given the importance of long-term field work, and “deep hanging out,” as a research practice, ethnography as a discipline has been highly attentive to questions of positionality. Referring to the work of D. Wolf and D. Patai, as well as D. Wolf and M. Hammersley, Elizabeth Murphy and Robert Dingwall in “The Ethics of Ethnography,” note how while positionalities, in terms of race, class, nationality, gender, and education, may “render participants vulnerable to exploitation,” they still, have “substantial capacity for exerting power over ethnographers.”[30]

Ethnographer, Sonyini Madison, devotes a substantial part of her influential book, Critical Ethnography, to an exploration of positionality with respect to ethics, stating:

Positionality is vital because it forces us to acknowledge our own power, privilege, and biases just as we denounce the power structures that surround our subjects. A concern for positionality is a reflexive ethnography; it is a turning back on ourselves. When we turn back on ourselves, we examine our intentions, our methods, and our possible effects. We are accountable for our research paradigms, our authority, and our moral responsibility relative to representation and interpretation.[31]

Please see David Roberts’ reading list in the “Publications” part of practisingethics.org for a discussion of this important text.

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] See Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 232; and Elspeth Probyn, “Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (London: Routledge, 1990), 176–89, 178.

[2] Susan Hekman, “Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited,” Signs 22, n. 2 (Winter 1997): 341–65. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3175275.

[3] Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Toward a More Progressive Union,” in Women and Revolution, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1980).

[4] Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement (1977),” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1988).

[5] Deborah K. King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs 14, n. 2 (1988): 42–72. 

[6] Catherine E. Harnois, “Jeopardy, Consciousness, and Multiple Discrimination: Intersecting Inequalities in Contemporary Western Europe,” Sociological Forum, (28 September 2015). https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12204

[7] Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” in Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, eds. Katharine T. Bartlett and Rosanne Kennedy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), and Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, n. 6 (1991): 1241–99.

[8] Lynn A. Staeheli and Victoria A. Lawson, “A Discussion of ‘Women in the Field’: The Politics of Feminist Fieldwork,” The Professional Geographer 46, n. 1 (1994): 96-102. DOI: 10.1111/j.0033-0124.1994.00096.x

[9] Kim V. L. England, “Getting Personal: Reflexivity, Positionality, and Feminist Research,” The Professional Geographer 46, n. 1, (1994): 80-89. DOI: 10.1111/ j.0033-0124.1994.00080.x

[10] W. B. Knight and K. Keifer-Boyd, “Revealing Researcher’s Positionality and Perception,” Transdisciplinary Inquiry, Practice, and Possibilities in Art Education (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Libraries Open Publishing, 2019). DOI: 10.26209/arted50-07

[11] Knight and Keifer-Boyd, “Revealing Researcher’s Positionality and Perception.”

[12] Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Signs 13, n. 3 (Spring 1988): 405–36, referred to Knight and Keifer-Boyd, “Revealing Researcher’s Positionality and Perception.”

[13] Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism,” 434.

[14] Linda McDowell, “Doing Gender: Feminism, Feminists and Research Methods in Human Geography,” Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 17, (1992): 399–416, quoted in Gillian Rose, “Positionality, Reflexivities and other Tactics,”  Progress in Human Geography 21, n. 3 (1997): 305–20, 305.

[15] Rose, “Positionality, Reflexivities and other Tactics,” 307–8.

[16] Rose, “Positionality, Reflexivities and other Tactics,” 307–8.

[17] Rose, “Positionality, Reflexivities and other Tactics,” 307–8.

[18] Knight and Keifer-Boyd, “Revealing Researcher’s Positionality and Perception.” See also J. Robertson, “Reflexivity Redux: A Pithy Polemic on ‘Positionality,’” Anthropological Quarterly 75, n. 4, 2002): 785–92 and D. Takacs, “How does your Positionality bias your Epistemology? NEA Higher Education Journal, (Summer 2003): 27–38.

[19] Knight and Keifer-Boyd, “Revealing Researcher’s Positionality and Perception.”

[20] Knight and Keifer-Boyd, “Revealing Researcher’s Positionality and Perception.”

[21] Knight and Keifer-Boyd, “Revealing Researcher’s Positionality and Perception.”

[22] Knight and Keifer-Boyd, “Revealing Researcher’s Positionality and Perception.”

[23] Wendy E. Rowe, “Positionality,” in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research, eds. David Coghlan and Mary Brydon-Miller (London, England: Sage, 2014) http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446294406.n277.

[24] Rowe, “Positionality.”

[25] Rowe, “Positionality.”

[26] Rowe, “Positionality.”

[27] S. Ospina, J. Dodge, E. G. Foldy, and A. Hofmann-Pinilla, “Taking the Action Turn: Lessons from Bringing Participation to Qualitative Research,” in Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, eds. P. Reason and R. Bradbury (London, Sage Publications, 2008), 420–38.

[28] Rowe, “Positionality.”

[29] Rowe, “Positionality.”

[30] Elizabeth Murphy and Robert Dingwall, “The Ethics of Ethnography,” in The Handbook of Ethnography, eds. Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, and John Lo (London: Sage Publications, 2001), 339–51, 344. See also D. Wolf, “Situating Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork,” in Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork, ed. D. Wolf (Oxford: Westview Press, 1996), 1–55; M. Hammersley, “On Feminist Methodology,” in What's Wrong With Ethnography? ed. M. Hammersley (London: Routledge, 1992), 187–206; D. Patai, “US Academics and Third World Women: Is Ethical Research Possible?,” Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, eds. S. Gluck and D. Patai (New York: Routledge, 1991), 137–53; and L. Wong, “The Ethics of Rapport: Institutional Safeguards, Resistance and Betrayal,” Qualitative Inquiry 4, n. 2. (1998): 178–99.

[31] D. Soyini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance, third edition, (London: Sage, 2020) 6–7.

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Practice

A “practice” (Praktik) is a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge. A practice – a way of cooking, of consuming, of working, of investigating, of taking care of oneself or of others, etc. ...[1]

A key feature of sociologist Andreas Reckwitz’s 2005 definition is the range and type of “interconnected” things which make up a practice: these include physical and conceptual undertakings (“bodily activities, forms of mental activities”), alongside technical knowledge, affective experience, desire, and reason (“know-how, states of emotion or affect, and motivational knowledge”). Reckwitz’s definition is useful because it does not binarise thinking and doing, and rather reminds us that practices can encompass both activities at the same time.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites several different meanings for the word “practice,” beginning with: “The carrying out or exercise of a profession.”[2]  In the world of built environment research, this could include the “carrying out” of any professional activity, including architecture, and so requires us to consider the codification of “practice” ­­­– how practices are carried out within codes and protocols set out by institutional bodies. Following this, to practice architecture professionally means operating as a chartered, accredited architect.

A second meaning given by the OED configures “practice” as: “The actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to the theory or principles of it.” Key synonyms are also given, including “performance, execution [and] achievement”.[3] Often, as is shown above, it is explicitly defined through being an applied, “real-world” version of a “theory,” while at other times, this distinction is not given; it is just a “the action of doing something.”[4]

The realities of delivering and realizing a physical building are performed and done by different built environment professionals (and may or may not be framed in distinction to a former or simultaneous projection – in drawn or BIM form, or perhaps through a written specification etc.). But to practice architecture is just as likely to mean doing so outside of professional codes, and may not involve or result in the production of a building. So a person who is not necessarily accredited by a profession can also practice architecture, for example, through theorizing,[5] activism,[6] writing or speaking about architecture,[7] researching architecture and studying its history,[8] and/or by practising architecture differently or “otherwise.”[9]

A third meaning of practice given by the OED introduces the important notion of conventions, habits, and ways of doing or working, that are iterated over time. Here “practice” is described as: “The habitual doing or carrying on of something; usual, customary, or constant action or performance;”[10] and, as: “A habitual action or pattern of behaviour; an established procedure or system.”[11]  Many architecture-related uses of the term “practice”  encompass this sense, for example, by making reference to “customary” and “established” ways and methods of designing. The transmission of particular conventions of designing and building between specific different territories and eras can be described as practices, as can the use of specific material forms, stylistic features, nature-based solutions, resource economies, enactments of care, or systems of labour etc.

The length of time it takes for a doing to become “established” as a “practice” is not definitive. Nevertheless, this third meaning prompts a deeper consideration of the concept of process in “practice” and the significance of an activity developed through its “habitual,” that is to say, repeated doing. Importantly, practices of architecture and space do not only include their design, but also involve occupation, experience and use, which are also processual, can be habitual, and of course, develop and change over time.

A sense of process is further emphasised through the OED’s fourth definition of “practice,” that is, as a: “Repeated exercise in or performance of an activity so as to acquire, improve, or maintain proficiency in it; activity undertaken to this end.”[12] This meaning also relates to the verb “to practice,” i.e., the process of gaining a skill over time, encapsulated by the familiar refrain of  “practice makes perfect.”

In my own work, to recognize architectural history as practice means drawing attention to the “execution” or performance of the project, and to the development of “ways” of doing the enquiry over time. This includes but is not limited to reading; writing; archival work; inhabiting material spaces; reading, handling images, and drawings; reading between words, images, and spaces; and using words and images to communicate this history on the page and stage. By examining and making visible to the reader the process of doing the history, and reading and questioning the evidence in particular ways over time – I aim to examine and demonstrate for others how a historical story is made. Furthermore, I advocate that history is not only a conceptual (and far from an objective) endeavour, but crucially also involves practical, embodied, and creative forms of research. Through emphasizing architectural history “as practice” I show how history is always performative, political, and situated, and that successive material engagements with evidence directly influence access to the past, as well as inform the specific way the past presses in on the present.

If we consider ethics through this extended definition of the various meanings of practice, it is possible to consider how the practice of ethics is composed of various processes – both experiential and methodological – conducted in relation to theoretical principles and in response to their codification in professional protocols. Understanding the performance of a practice of ethics, pays attention to the significance of the “doing” of ethics and the importance of focusing on the very process of this doing. The ways in which the doing of ethics is developed over time, routinised, and habitualised through repetition is vital to take into account. An understanding of what it means to become an ethical practitioner involves recognizing ethical dilemmas and the balancing of the various possible “performances” in response to these dilemmas, as a set of activities and experiences, which by being repeated allow the practitioners to “acquire, improve, or maintain proficiency” in ethics.

Written by Sophie Read.

[1] Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorising,” in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn, ed. Gabrielle M. Spiegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 245–63, 251.

[2] “1. practice, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed 5 June 2021, http://www.oed.com./view/Entry/149226.

[3] “2a. practice, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, (accessed 5 June 2021,

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/149226.

[4] “2c. practice, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed 5 June 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/149226.

[5] Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: IB Tauris, 2006), 26­–7.

[6] See, for example, the work of UK Architects Declare, accessed 8 December 2021, https://www.architectsdeclare.com/; Architects! Climate Action Network, accessed 8 December 2021, https://www.architectscan.org/; or Failed Architecture, accessed 8 December 2021, https://failedarchitecture.com/.

[7] Katja Hilevaara and Emily Orley, The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice (London: Routledge, 2018).

[8] Jane Rendell, “Subjective Space: A Feminist Architectural History of the Burlington Arcade,” in Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender and the Interdisciplinary, eds. Katerina Rüedi, Sarah Wigglesworth and Duncan McCorquodale (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1996), 217–33, 218; Sophie Read, In, Out, and Again: Reading and Drawing John Soane’s Lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1817 & 1820) (London: UCL PhD Thesis, 2018).

[9] Doina Petrescu (ed.), Altering Practices: Feminist Politics and Poetics of Space (London: Routledge, 2007).

[10] “3a. practice, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed 5 June 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/149226.

[11] “3b. practice, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed 5 June 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/149226.

[12] “4. practice, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed 5 June 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/149226.

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Pre-Ethics

Pre-ethics procedures are intended to protect the rights of subjects of research as both participants and co-producers of knowledge. The notion of pre-ethics presented here, foregrounds Indigenous knowledges and relationships premised on the needs, rights and aspirations of Indigenous peoples, communities and entities.[1]

Relationality
Working with Indigenous researchers and participants in Australia has revealed that here is a need to go beyond institutional guidelines for ethical research when researching within diverse communities. Pre-ethics refers to engagement with participants and the building of strong relational connections with participants of research – including negotiating the terms of research – prior to the design and commencement of the enquiry.[2]  Pre-ethics requires researchers to position themselves and their own research frameworks in mutual relations with participants before any research can take place.

Situating and Positioning Researchers and Participants 
Who the researcher is as a person and as a researcher will have an impact on, and influence the relationality between researcher and participants. Relationships built on trust need to be established through agreed negotiation of the aims and parameters of the research before the research commences.

Recognising that there are multiple social locations from which to speak does not remove the issue of power, privilege, and the incommensurability between Indigenous and colonial or non-Indigenous perspectives based on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. Aileen Moreton-Robinson suggests that an Indigenous standpoint underpinned by the recognition of the legacy of dispossession, racism, and sexism as well as those meanings grounded in different realities may open the way for voices from those locations to make differential experiences visible.[3]

By building relationships prior to the commencement of the research, the researcher gains inside knowledge, whilst maintaining that Indigenous participants are not “something” to be studied, but are themselves active participant/researchers in the process. Pre-ethics involves building relationality through the creation of a different positioning to ensure that wittingly or unwittingly, coercive practices are avoided.

Homogenisation
Research within diverse communities raises numerous ethical issues that emerge from diversity, clan, linguistic, age, gender, and geographical boundaries. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers often occupy insider/outsider positions. Whilst the term “Indigenous” can be seen as a collectivising or homogenising of distinct populations from vastly differing backgrounds and locations, it can be used to strategically internationalize Indigenous struggles and question modes of research and the assumed nature and ideals of western researchers. Pre-ethics can assist in identifying what is particular to a community and what connects them to others.[4]

Storytelling
Participants share their knowledge through lived experience and storytelling or “yarning,” viewed as a valid research methodology. The narratives of lived experience contribute to research through storytelling or yarning in a participatory and academic manner and produce knowledge that has practical benefits.[5] Oral consent to conduct the research and negotiating the location of the research can be negotiated in the same way through pre-ethics engagement. 

The two terms “relationality” and “interpolation” help to articulate how knowledge can occur through story telling. [6] Through story telling prior to and during the research process, understanding emerges as an open and ethical conversation that involves positioning oneself – one’s being – self-reflexively by interpolating (approximating, predicting, and intuiting) one’s own experiences, ideas, and values, as well as those of others to arrive at mutual and situated understanding.

The Right to Consent Orally
As co-producers of the research, including a pre-ethics procedure means that the participants have the right to consent to the research orally. An oral agreement negotiated prior to commencing research may also hold more validity in some communities.

Community Approval of the Location of The Research
Including a pre-ethics procedure means that the locality of the research needs to be negotiated with participants and have community support. This support needs to be gained prior to research taking place with regular member checking during the research process.

Appropriation
Including a pre-ethics procedure means that the participants are producers of content and therefore take on the position of both the subject of the research as well as the co-producer of knowledge. Participants are owners of their own cultural knowledge some of which may not be shared or (mis) appropriated by outsiders. Pre-ethics involves negotiating ownership of intellectual property that will emerge from the research.[7]

Incommensurability and Metaphorisation
The fundamental incommensurability between Aboriginal and Western worldviews, assumptions, and epistemologies is primarily derived from the relationship to land and how this relationship articulates Aboriginal spirituality. Aileen Moreton-Robinson observes that to know an Indigenously constructed world one must experience it from within rather than imposing a conceptual framework from outside.[8] Indigenous knowledge is holistic and dependent on relationships to living, non-living and other entities.

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Wang contend that any disruption of Indigenous relationship to land represents a profound “epistemic, ontological and cosmological violence.” They point to the problems of abstracting theory from material realities through the metaphorising tendency of academic and theoretical discourse.[9]  The western metaphor, terra nullius, is a typical example given the negation of Indigenous sovereignty and ongoing material, social, and economic ramifications. Pre-ethics involves negotiating the disparity between academic convention, as well as Indigenous notions of spirituality and its connection to material communal needs.  

Flexibility of Time and Negotiated Principles
Negotiated principles that emerge from pre-ethics engagement are not absolutely binding because lived experience and actuality are ever moving. Time needs to be recognised from the perspective of the participants’ commitments and world view. Schedules and the times allocated with participants and communities may need to be re-negotiated during the research process. Research timelines need to allow for this negotiation and flexibility.

Conclusion
Pre-ethics procedures are related to two aspects of research: engagement with participants and actual methodologies and procedures of conducting research. These are intrinsically interrelated within Indigenous contexts. Understanding how differing ontologies influence interactions with participants through relational positioning of researcher and participants may help to avoid the following pitfalls:

• Failure to establish appropriated and situated relationality with participants;

• Homogenisation of participants through disregard for national and international diversity of First Nations peoples;

• A lack of acknowledgement and validation of oral tradition or storytelling as a mode of knowledge production and transmission;

• A lack of understanding of the importance of Country and the relation of this to establishing locations and schedules for the research;

• The appropriation and misappropriation of Indigenous knowledges by non–Indigenous researchers;

• Failing to recognise the incommensurability of academic conventions with Indigenous ways of being, doing, and knowing.  The latter can lead to the abstracting of theory from practice and from the ongoing material realities and the needs of communities, including struggles related to Indigenous land ownership and sovereignty within socially, politically, and ideologically entrenched colonial/settler systems and structures.

Written by Estelle Barrett.

[1] Japanangka Errol West cited in Dennis Foley “Indigenous Epistemology and Indigenous Standpoint Theory,” Social Alternatives 22, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 40–55. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256702869_Indigenous_Standpoint_Theory_An_Indigenous_Epistemology

[2] Estelle Barrett, Brian Martin, Janis Koolmatrie, Lexine Solomon, Cheryl Creed, Deborah Swan, Bradley Webb, Daphne Toby, Dee Bassaraba, Monica Stevens, Davena Monro, Debra Dank, “Guidelines and Principles for Pre-Ethical Approaches to Indigenous Research,” Art, Ethics and Indigeneity Symposium VCA University of Melbourne (1 June 2016): https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Guidelines-and-principles-for-pre-ethical-to- Barrett-Martin/1abc39901900b2169d2cd6fc6919670840e63f56.

[3] Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (Australia: University of Queensland Press, 2000).

[4] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books Ltd. 1999).

[5] Dawn Bessarab and  Bridget Ng'Andu,“Yarning About Yarning as a Legitimate Method in Indigenous Research,” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 3, no. 1 (2010): 37–50, accessed 5 May 2017. http://www.isrn.qut.edu.au/pdf/ijcis/v3n1_2010/Final_Bessarab_Bridget_IJCIS.pdf

[6] Estelle Barrett, “Interpolation and Relationality: Extending the Field Through Creative Arts and Research Approaches,” in Provoking the Field: International Perspectives on Visual Arts PhDs in Education, eds. Anita Sinner, Rita Irwin and Jeff Adams (Bristol UK and Chicago USA: Intellect: 2019), 25–37. 

[7] Terrence Kildea and Margaret Kumar, “Aboriginal Spirituality and its Relationship to the Positioning of research,” in Positioning Research: Shifting Paradigms, Interdisciplinarity and Indigeneity eds Margaret Kumar  and Supriya Pattanayak (New Delhi: Sage Publications India Pty Ltd., 2018), 196­–213.

[8] Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the white woman, 9. 

[9] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” in Decolonization: Indigeneity and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40, accessed 6 September 2021, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630/15554.

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Privacy

One of the key ways that researchers come into contact with the concept of privacy in the context of ethics is through the need to protect the data gathered from research participants. Connected to confidentiality and consent, privacy is a core principle regarding ethical research, and features in the majority of UK-based ethical codes and protocols. As noted in the confidentiality entry in this lexicon, privacy protection is a central principle of contemporary institutional research ethics. This refers to the collecting and handling of personal data defined in the UK through specific data protection legislation, including the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA).[1] According to the DPA, the GDPR, and the UK GDPR, personal data is defined as “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person, whereby the person can be identified directly or indirectly,”[2] and special categories data as:

Personal data that is combined with information on a person’s race, ethnic origin, political opinion, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, genetic data, biometric data, data concerning health, sex life or sexual orientation.[3]

Exactly what constitutes personal data, who has the legal right to process it, and in what way, depends on the status of the person or institution processing the data, and the uses to which the data is being put. The DPA and UK GDPR define six principles for processing personal data, as follows:

1. Be processed lawfully, fairly and transparently.

2. Be kept to the original purpose.

3. Be minimised (i.e. Only the personal data that is necessary is collected).

4. Have the accuracy upheld.

5. Be removed if they are not necessary.

6. Be kept confidential and their integrity maintained. [4]

And the legal basis for processing personal data is defined as follows:

1. Consent of the data subject.

2. Necessary for the performance of a contract.

3. Legal obligation placed upon controller.

4. Necessary to protect the vital interests of the data subject.

5. Carried out in the public interest or is in the exercise of official authority.

6. Legitimate interest pursued by controller. [5]

In the context of research, it should be noted that the three most applicable grounds for the processing of personal data are “consent, public interest (public task) or legitimate interest,” and that consent is most likely to be used as a grounds for processing of personal data. For the UK GDPR consent “needs to be freely given, informed, unambiguous, specific (granular) and a clear affirmative action.” [6] It also lists “the rights” that “a data subject has when their personal data are processed.” [7]

Institutions and other entities that process personal data, have to, by law, explain their procedures for so doing publicly via “Privacy Notices.” For example, the one on the UKRI website describes how the Economic Social Science Research Council and other UK Research and Innovation Councils handle personal data.[8] While University College London’s (UCL) Privacy Notice states that it:

… aims to conduct research to the highest standards of research integrity Our research is underpinned by policies and procedures that ensure we comply with regulations and legislation that govern the conduct of research; this includes data protection legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA).[9] 

UCL as a publicly-funded organisation incorporated under a Royal Charter, can use personal data to conduct research, as long as that research is carried out in the public interest, for example, in order to improve health, care and services in the interests of “society as a whole.” For this reason most UCL health and care research follows the UK Policy Framework for Health and Social Care Research. Since research has a special status under data protection legislation, it needs carefully defining – as  such research is understood to “make an original contribution to knowledge.”

As Tania Guerrero Rios and Jens Kandt note in “Analyzing Secondary Data,” number 7 in the series, Practising Ethics Guides to Built Environment Research, the digitisation of society has massively increased the amount of data circulating, there is an associated increase in need for the categorisation of this data and its safe-guarding under ethical codes. Given that the main concerns of data breaches are often connected to extensive data sets, the assumption is that the best way, indeed the research “norm,” for ensuring the protection of participants’ data is via confidentiality and anonymity.

However, in some cases this is not possible, and so pseudonymisation can also be considered as an alternative way of keeping personal data private. If the “key linkage between the identifiers and the personally identifying information” is destroyed, then data is classified as anonymised and no longer falls under the requirements of the UK GDPR. Pseudonymisation is when the personal data is processed “in such a manner that it can no longer be attributed to a specific data subject without the use of additional information, which needs to be kept separately and subject to technical and organisational measures.”[10] It can also be possible, as BERA advices, to use “’fictionalising’ approaches” when reporting data, in order to maintain privacy.[11] 

In situations where participants’ understandings of their own privacy levels are ambiguous or even inaccurate, for example, in an online space or where information and opinions around sensitive or illegal topics are shared, it becomes even more important for researchers to explain to their participants how they are processing data – in other words, gathering it, storing it, and sharing it.[12] In some cases, as the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth (ASA) explains, where “it may not be possible to fully guarantee research participants' interests,” researchers might decide not to pursue a particular piece of research; and in cases where there might be a conflict of interest, researcher should prioritise obligations to keeping the data of research participants private.[13]

Given the importance of respecting researcher participants’ rights to confidentiality, anonymity, and privacy, and the cultural and legal differences between societies in defining these terms, ASA recommend taking care “not to infringe uninvited upon the “private space” (as locally defined) of an individual or group,” and to “anticipat[ing potential threats to confidentiality and anonymity.” ASA goes as far as to suggest that researchers should consider whether it is even necessary to “record certain information at all,” certainly to “take appropriate measures relating to the storage and security of records during and after fieldwork,” and where appropriate to remove identifiers, use pseudonyms and “other technical solutions to the problems of privacy in field records and in oral and written forms of data dissemination (whether or not this is enjoined by law or administrative regulation).”[14] ASA also stresses that if “guarantees of privacy and confidentiality are made,” these “must be honoured unless they are clear and over-riding ethical reasons not to do so,” and that “confidential information must be treated as such by the anthropologist even when it enjoys no legal protection or privilege.”[15]

From this we start to see that concepts of privacy, while being important for data protection, are not free from contestation, especially when understood in terms of cultural and historical difference, and political philosophy. Laws around data protection, for example, often work in tension with Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, which can require that data is released into the public realm in the public interest. FOIs are often required when, for commercial reasons, financial data is protected from entering the public realm via non-disclosure agreements or NDAs, raising awareness around concepts of privacy and how rights around a private individual or entities are not universal nor always in “everyone’s interest," and can be in conflict with the rights of a community or public.

A non-disclosure agreement (NDA), also known as a confidentiality agreement (CA), confidential disclosure agreement (CDA), proprietary information agreement (PIA), secrecy agreement (SA), or non-disparagement agreement, is a legal contract that is drawn up between two entities that wish to share information with each other for certain purposes – usually but not always the setting up of a business relation – but wish to restrict further access to this information. An NDA creates a confidential relation or private relation between these entities to protect information. NDAs can be restrict both entities’ use of the information, in which case the NDA is described as mutual, or an NDA can restrict the use of material by a single entity.

Conceptually a number of problems can emerge when with the terms public and private are defined too loosely, and it seems important to end this entry by opening out some discussions on broader definitions of privacy to connect with political and philosophical issues also relevant to ethical practices. The term privacy often works in relation to its “opposite” term, the public, as well as to the commons, and these terms are used in various ways in different discourses to refer to social and spatial organisational forms, kinds of property ownership and legal definitions, attitudes towards political liberty and citizenship, as well as types of activity. The concepts they refer to are not neutral but culturally and historically constructed, and as such denote specific value systems. Appearing as social and spatial metaphors in geography, anthropology and sociology; as forms of ownership in economics; and as political spheres in political philosophy and law; private, public, and the variations between them, mean different things to different people – protected isolation or unwelcome containment, intrusion or invitation, exclusion or segregation.

In the Western democratic tradition, “public” stands for all that is “good,” for democracy, accessibility, participation, and egalitarianism set against the private world of ownership and elitism. Democratic public space is frequently endowed with unified properties, but one of the problems of aiming for a homogenous public is the avoidance of difference. Philosopher Chantal Mouffe has argued instead for radical democracy, a form of democracy that is able to embrace conflict and passion.[16] And if we take instead a liberal-rights-based perspective, then privacy is understood to provide positive qualities, such as the right to be alone, to confidentiality, and the safeguarding of individuality.[17] And yet, because “private” and “privacy” are often associated with exclusive rules restricting entry and use, they can also be considered to operate in opposition to freedom.

 Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] UKRI, “Privacy Notice,” accessed 7 December 2021, https://www.ukri.org/about-us/privacy-notice/. Currently the GDPR and UK GDPR are aligned, but now that the UK has left the EU, this situation might change.

[2] UK Data Service, “The Data Protection Act and GDPR,” accessed 7 December 2021, https://ukdataservice.ac.uk/learning-hub/research-data-management/data-protection/data-protection-legislation/data-protection-act-and-gdpr/

[3] UK Data Service, “The Data Protection Act and GDPR.”

[4] UK Data Service, “The Data Protection Act and GDPR.”

[5] UK Data Service, “The Data Protection Act and GDPR.”

[6] UK Data Service, “The Data Protection Act and GDPR.”

[7] UK Data Service, “The Data Protection Act and GDPR.”

[8] UKRI, “Privacy Notice.”

[9] UCL, “UCL General Privacy Notice for Participants and Researchers in Health and Care Research Studies,” accessed 7 December 2021, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/legal-services/privacy/ucl-general-privacy-notice-participants-and-researchers-health-and-care-research-studies

[10] UK Data Service, “The Data Protection Act and GDPR.”

[11] British Educational Research Association, “Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research,” (4th Edition) (2018), 40, accessed 7 December 2021, https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-2018

[12] British Educational Research Association, “Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research.”

[13] Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth, “Ethical Guidelines for Good Research Practice,” (1999), accessed 7 December 2021, https://www.theasa.org/downloads/ethics/Ethical_guidelines.pdf

[14] Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth, “Ethical Guidelines for Good Research Practice.”

[15] Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth, “Ethical Guidelines for Good Research Practice.”

[16] See Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993). See also Ernesto Laclau and Mouffe Chantal (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics, translated by Winston Mooore and Paul Cammack (London: Verso, 1985).

[17] See for example, Judith Squires, “Private Lives, Secluded Places: Privacy as Political Possibility,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12 (1994): 387–410.

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Reciprocity

Reciprocity in research ethics refers to mutuality and equality in the exchanges between the different stakeholders. It is often considered in relation to benefits which are accrued from research projects by researchers and research participants. Negotiating mutual benefits from research raises questions of how to define mutuality, and how to ensure that exchanges, either tangible or abstract, are understood as having relatively equal value.[1] The complexity of reciprocal benefits is highlighted by some scholars who have raised concerns about benefits being potentially coercive, contributing to unrealistic expectations, or providing incentives that may undermine voluntary participation. [2] Raising such issues and negotiating them openly can enable stakeholders to build reciprocal relations by acknowledging each other’s limitations and what they are able to deliver, making informed decisions and developing realistic expectations.[3]

There are other lenses through which to view reciprocity, beyond the sharing of benefits of research projects. One of them refers to the positionality of researchers, but also highlights the need to examine the positionality which shapes the identities and experiences of their research participants. For example, Mona Domosh reminds us that in a reciprocal research process, researchers need to ascribe the same subjectivity to their research participants as they do to themselves.[4] Another lens examines the connections between reciprocity and solidarity as expressions of relations of mutual care and commitment. Despite the fact that solidarity, and particularly solidarity on a global scale, is not necessarily mutual, Carol Gould points out that “to the extent that everyone can find themselves at some time or other in a situation of oppression or suffering, the need for support from others and expressions or actions of solidarity from them is a standing possibility,”[5] suggesting that such reciprocity could be mobilised under conditions of need.

These two lenses also highlight the problematics of reciprocity in situations of unequal power relations, and question the possibility of non-hierarchical mutual communication and action.[6] Furthermore, in the context of research, developing meaningful reciprocal relations is a dynamic process which begins with acknowledging that communities or groups that participate in any research are far from being homogenous. Power relations within groups and different needs and interests complicate and question the achievement of egalitarian research relationships and fully symmetrical exchanges.[7]

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] A. B. Zwi et al., “Placing Ethics in the Centre: Negotiating New Spaces for Ethical Research in Conflict Situations,” Global Public Health 1, no. 3 (2006): 267, https://doi.org/10.1080/17441690600673866.

[2] Catriona Mackenzie, Christopher McDowell, and Eileen Pittaway, “Beyond ‘Do No Harm’: The Challenge of Constructing Ethical Relationships in Refugee Research,” Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 2 (2007): 311, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fem008.

[3] Scott D. Neufeld et al., "Research 101: A Process for Developing Local Guidelines for Ethical Research in Heavily Researched Communities," Harm Reduction Journal 16, no. 1 (2019): 5, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12954-019-0315-5.; Mackenzie, McDowell, and Pittaway, “Beyond ‘Do No Harm,’” 311.

[4] Mona Domosh, "Toward a More Fully Reciprocal Feminist Inquiry," Acme 2, no. 1 (2003): 110.

[5] Carol C. Gould, “Transnational Solidarities,” Journal of Social Philosophy 38, no. 1 (2007): 160, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00371.x.

[6] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "Intercultural Translation," in Epistemologies of the South : Justice against Epistemicide (New York: Routledge, 2014), 214.

[7] Sarah Maiter et al., "Reciprocity: An Ethic for Community-Based Participatory Action Research," Action Research 6, no. 3 (2008): 313, https://doi.org/10.1177/1476750307083720.

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Recognition

Recognition as an organizing idea may be thought of in two ways: first, as a psychic position in which we know the other’s mind as an equal source of intention and agency, affecting and being affected; and second as a process of action, the essence of responsiveness in interaction.[1]

Recognition is an interpersonal and relational practice and as such vital to ethical practice. It can be understood to operate at different scales, from the level of the nation, to the institution through to the person. Recognition is explored theoretically through disciplines such as politics, philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, suggests that recognition can be understood in four ways.[2] First as a form of elementary recognition, following Hegel, where human subjects gain ‘self-consciousness only through a process of mutual recognition’, and in which ‘Only mutual recognition that grants others the status of an epistemic authority allows us to construct a normative space of reasons: I know that the truth of my judgment depends on you being able to share it.’ The second, form of recognition is respect, which, in following the modernist idea of universal human rights, asserts that a central dimension of recognition is the assignment of equal dignity or respect, though it is noted that this modernist ideal has been critiqued, by feminists and others, for its lack of attention to difference. A third form of recognition is esteem, where recognition is understood within the context of identity politics – so a politics of recognition – where equal respect and rights are understood in terms of the specific identities denigrated by dominant value systems, and as fought for, for example, by the women’s and civil rights movements in the US. And finally a fourth form of recognition is located in love and friendship, where recognition is understood in terms of human experience and focused within psychological and psychoanalytic theories of intersubjectivity and interaction.

This entry focuses on this fourth form of recognition, and on recognition specifically as it is theorised by the psychoanalytic practitioner Jessica Benjamin, who understands recognition in terms of intersubjective processes between:

two knowing and not-knowing subjects in the room – each one potentially engaged in recognition of the other’s alterity, the other’s different center of perspective, or perhaps equally unsettled and engaged in avoiding that recognition.[3]

Benjamin understands recognition as moving between experiencing the other as “a responsive agent who can reciprocate” a desire for recognition, and the other as “an object of need” to be “managed within our own mental web.” For Benjamin these two kinds of recognition correspond to two psychic dimensions, and to intersubjective and intrapsychic theories, which she sees, not as exclusive options, but as interrelated “phenomenologies of psychic life.”

Indeed the oscillations between them correspond to our shifts in relational states between feelings of self being with an other self, and self being in complementary relation to an object. [4]

In Benjamin’s work this process of reciprocating – whether according to the same terms, a struggle to find our terms, or mismatching on different terms – she summarises by suggesting that it depends on whether our mental gears are “meshing or jamming.”

In short, the question is whether doing is with or to: doing to me implies that complementary two ness of opposing doer and done to, while doing with suggests that shared state of fitting in, coordination, or purposeful negotiation of difference that will be called thirdness.[5]

The concept of the third is vital in Benjamin’s work as it takes us from the ethics of the dyad to wider collective conceptions of the “we.” Thirding involves processes of matching and mis-matching, which for her are not about mirroring, symmetry or synchrony, but are rather non-linear and related to attunement and reciprocrity in interaction. In theorising recognition, Benjamin moves beyond the Melanie Klein’s view of ambivalence, or the holding of opposites in tension, towards a consideration of shifts between intra- and inter-subjective relating, conceptualised, following D. W. Winnicott, not as a “static condition but a continual oscillation between relating to an outside other and an inner object.” [6]

Anna Yeatman describes how Benjamin’s notion of inter-subjectivity is able to offer a two-person concept of freedom which “dynamically entwines self-assertion and mutual recognition,” which enables “a both/and understanding of the relationship between creativity and limit, self and other, freedom and law, and autonomy and dependency.” [7]  

If ethics is understood to be a practice of relating, one to the other, then the practice of how we relate to one another becomes a key ethical problematic. Here the processes involved in intra- and inter-relating are core to developing ethical research practices, both through psychoanalytic terms, such as empathy and identification, and political terms, such as accountability and responsibility.

Bringing her expertise in psychoanalysis to the field of research, feminist geographer Liz Bondi has explored the relationship between researcher and researched through what each can and cannot know, and specifically through processes of empathy, identification, and recognition. Bondi locates recognition in terms of empathy, arguing that “empathy provides space for difference, while also enabling the researcher to communicate respect and recognition.”[8]  She suggests that “Responding to people empathically creates psychic and intersubjective spaces in which experiences of difference and similarity can be respected without necessarily being remarked upon or even consciously recognised.” For Bondi, empathy is a process which include recognising both similarities and differences, and not recognising.[9]

… empathy entails oscillating between participating in processes of (unconscious) identification, and remaining aware of – observing – some distinction (however fragile) between one’s own and the other person’s inner realities. This communicates (usually non-verbally and often unconsciously) respect for differences as well recognition of similarities, and it is this process that matters, enabling us to communicate (however falteringly) across differences we can easily name (such as gender) and many others of which we are not consciously aware. [10]

Judith Butler’s work can be located between political philosophy and psychoanalysis, and central to her understanding of ethics is her theorisation of how one relates to another and her focus on accountability and recognition.

The question most central to recognition is a direct one, and it is addressed to the other: “Who are you?” This question assumes that there is an other before us whom we do not know and cannot fully apprehend, one whose uniqueness and nonsubstitutability set a limit to the model of reciprocal recognition offered within the Hegelian scheme and to the possibility of knowing another more generally.[11]

Butler acknowledges that the ability to recognise is not gained by acquiring a set of special skills – be they critical or psychological – but rather that the “possibility of recognition” is conditioned by norms, and that “it still matters that we feel more properly recognized by some people than we do by others.” [12] 

In Butler’s “Giving an Account of Oneself,” her extended theorisation of ethics through relations of recognition, she discusses how subjects are constituted by and through others. She refers at length to the work of Adriana Cavarero who she points out grounds the social in the dyadic encounter:

The “you’ comes before the we, before the plural you and before the they. Symptomatically, the “you” is a term that is not at home in modern and contemporary developments of ethics and politics. The “you” is ignored by individualistic doctrines, which are too preoccupied with praising the rights of the I, and the “you” is masked by a Kantian form of ethics that is only capable of staging an I that addresses itself as a familiar “you.” Neither does the “you” find a home in the schools of thought to which individualism is opposed — these schools reveal themselves for the most part to be affected by a moralistic vice, which, in order to avoid falling into the decadence of the I, avoids the contiguity of the you, and privileges collective, plural pronouns. Indeed, many revolutionary movements (which range from traditional communism to the feminism of sisterhood) seem to share a curious linguistic code based on the intrinsic morality of pronouns. The we is always positive, the plural you is a possible ally, the they has the face of an antagonist, the I is unseemly, and the you is, of course, superfluous.[13]

Butler argues that who we choose to recognise, and who we need to recognise us, and how, are subject to norms.

Certain breakdowns in the practice of recognition mark a site of rupture within the horizon of normativity and implicitly call for the institution of new norms, putting into question the givenness of the prevailing normative horizon. The normative horizon within which I see the other or, indeed, within which the other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a critical opening.[14]

For Butler two practices are essential to any “substantive account of ethical life” – self-reflection and social recognition. [15]

And yet Hannah Stark has taken issue with Butler’s reliance on what Stark calls a “Hegelian concept of recognition” for her theory of ethics. Stark discusses how Elizabeth Grosz sees recognition as “the force of conservatism,” that seeks to tie “the new and the never-conceived to that which is already cognized,”[16] and how Alain Badiou argues for valuing what lies “beyond our recognition.”[17] Quoting Rey Chow, Stark sees “the turn to ethics” and the “rise of interest in alterity and such humanistic terms as ‘friendship, hospitality, responsibility, care, and love’” as problematic.[18] For Chow, “what is emphasised in ‘so many forms of mea culpa, self-analysis, self-reflexivity, and self- admonition,’ is ‘the self, the subject, the centre, and the origin that is the West’ (2004: 685).” [19] Stark ends by arguing that a “critique of recognition is imperative because it is the first step in rethinking difference, identity and political community,”[20] and that we need to extend the way that subjectivities are theorised in ethics such that we can imagine intersubjectivity, otherness and difference.[21]

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] Jessica Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (London: Routledge, 2018), 3.

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/recognition/

[3] Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To, 4.

[4] Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To, 4.

[5] Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To, 5.

[6] Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To, 5.

[7] Anna Yeatman, “A Two-Person Conception of Freedom: The Significance of Jessica Benjamin’s Idea of Intersubjectivity,” Journal of Classical Sociology 15, n. 1 (2015): 3–23.

[8] Liz Bondi, “Empathy and Identification: Conceptual Resources for Feminist Fieldwork,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographers (2003), accessed 7 December 2021, https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/708.

[9] Bondi, “Empathy and Identification.”

[10] Bondi, “Empathy and Identification.”

[11] Judith Butler, “Giving an Account of Oneself,” Diacritics 31, n. 4 (2001): 22–40, accessed 7 December 2021,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566427.

[12] Butler, “Giving an Account of Oneself.”

[13] Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman (London: Routledge, 2000), 90–1, quoted in Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, (Fordham University, 2005).

[14] Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 24.

[15] Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 49.

[16] Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 103, quoted in Hannah Stark, “Judith Butler’s Post-Hegelian Ethics and the Problem with Recognition,” Feminist Theory 15, n. 1 (2014): 89–100, 96.

[17] Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 25 quoted in Stark, “Judith Butler’s Post-Hegelian Ethics,” 96.

[18] Rey Chow, “Toward an Ethics of Postvisuality: Some Thoughts on the Recent Work of Zhang Yimou,” Poetics Today 25, n. 2 (2004): 673–88, 685, quoted in Stark, “Judith Butler’s Post-Hegelian Ethics,” 96.

[19] Chow, “Toward an Ethics of Postvisuality”, 685, quoted in Stark, “Judith Butler’s Post-Hegelian ethics,” 96.

[20] Stark, “Judith Butler’s Post-Hegelian Ethics,” 97.

[21] Stark, “Judith Butler’s Post-Hegelian Ethics,” 97.

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Reflexivity

Although reflexivity is a familiar concept in the qualitative tradition, we suggest that it has not previously been seen as an ethical notion. We propose that reflexivity is a helpful conceptual tool for understanding both the nature of ethics in qualitative research and how ethical practice in research can be achieved.[1]

Australian researchers of medical science, Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, describe “ethically important moments,”[2] as marking an important “ethical dimension” in the decision-making that takes place around the everyday dilemmas that occur in research practice. They are interested in “the difficult, often subtle, and usually unpredictable situations that arise in the practice of doing research” and in how “existing ethical principles and frameworks” both limit and offer potential to researchers.[3] Guillemin and Gillam describe ethical dilemmas as “situations in which there is a stark choice between different options,” and they discuss how the processes of negotiating these dilemmas, and their relation to institutional ethical procedures, requires a degree of reflexivity on the researcher’s part. Guillemin and Gillam note the lack of conceptual tools for articulating ethical issues and “making sense” of them,[4] in particular the relation of reflexivity to ethical practice in research, and they suggest that reflexivity is a “potential tool” for ethical research practice. They argue that being reflexive means being alert not only to formal ethical positions but also stances, and that knowledge of this kind can help a researcher work with participants and go beyond formal procedures such as “informed consent” to frame questions, choose methods, and use findings in ways that are proactive. [5] Guillemin and Gillam believe that reflexivity is not only a resource for dealing with ethical dilemmas, but also an ethical notion that is “a helpful conceptual tool for understanding both the nature of ethics in qualitative research and how ethical practice in research can be achieved.”[6] They “distinguish two different dimensions of ethics in research,” and term these “procedural ethics” and “ethics in practice,” and argue for the need for “a framework for thinking through” the ethical issues that arise during research practice. [7] Showing that procedural ethics is not adequate for dealing with ethically important moments, Guillemin and Gillam propose that “at the level of ‘ethics in practice,’ the ‘homegrown’ notion of reflexivity actually encapsulates and extends the concerns of procedural ethics.” [8]

Taking a more critical position regarding reflexivity, cultural geographer Audrey Kobayashi has criticized researcher reflexivity as “navel gazing.”[9] She writes:

For several years now, I have struggled with a mounting disease over the reflexive turn in human geography, and with a mounting conviction that much of what passes for anti-racist scholarship, by including a reflexive acknowledgement of the writer’s “positionality” with respect to her subjects, is actually a privileged and self-indulgent focus on the self that provides anything but an anti-racist lens and ends up instead distancing the writer – by virtue of her power to name (even if she is only naming herself) and to situate – from the very people whose conditions she might hope to change. [10]

Kobayashi asks if there is a “relative hierarchy of reflexive scholarship,” and whether some have “a greater entitlement than others,” a “greater moral need,” or “a greater social obligation?” She goes on to ask if some kinds of reflexivity are more relevant, better justified, or more significant that others, and if so,  whether this is due to the standard of the research, the social issue being researched, or the distance between researcher and researched.[11] Posing reflexivity as a dilemma, Kobayashi writes:

While reflexivity is an important, and some may say essential, aspect of recognising the difference between the studier and the studied, and even in some cases of taking moral responsibility for that difference, indulgence in reflexivity is ironically the very act that sets us apart. … Reflexivity thus opens us to the charge not only that it is a selfish, self-centred act that is the very antithesis of activism, but that it can even work actively to construct a sense of the other, to deny the reflexivity of others, and to emphasise the condition of detached alterity. … Failure to acknowledge this dilemma, on the other hand, seems antithetical to the most fundamental tenets of feminism and anti-racism. [12]

Feminist geographer, Mona Domosh has also noted that by focusing on the researcher’s own positionality the researched subject’s positionality runs the risk of being overlooked.[13] And looking at the problems of reflexive research methods, Lee Ann Fujii discusses how “over-concern about positionality and reflexivity appear to have paralyzed some scholars into avoiding fieldwork,” while fears of research “perpetuating neo-colonial representations,” as well as (mis)representation and (in)authenticity, “have led to a general withdrawal from fieldwork in the Global South.”[14] However, Fujii notes that concerns around reflexivity have also led to new approaches to writing – to less writing about or on behalf of, and more writing with.

Starting out with the work of feminist philosopher Donna Haraway, feminist geographer, Gillian Rose explores a particular aspect of reflexivity – its relation to visibility and related spatialities:

As Haraway argues, situatedness is not given; it must be developed, its technologies revised and invented. For many feminist geographers, reflexivity is one of those situating technologies.[15]

Rose underscores how Haraway’s “description of reflexivity is formulated in terms of visibility” and “a particular spatiality.” Rose explores how this kind of reflexivity can look both “inward” to the identity of the researcher, and “outward” to her research and the “the wider world,” Referring to Pamela Moss, who describes this as a “double reflexive gaze” and the spatial division this creates between inside and outside, Rose clarifies her understanding of inward to mean “those introspective aspects of thought that are self-critical and self-consciously analytical” and points to the work of a range of feminist geographers who have explored reflexive positionality in terms of the specificity of their own positions, and developed a conscious awareness of their situatedness and the methods they use.[16]  Rose refers, for example, to how Cindi Katz advocates for “an analysis of position that if consciously appropriated can lead to, be part of, and inform collective oppositional practice,”[17] and to how Kim England writes of the importance of making a position conscious, and how described this way, reflexivity can be understood as a process of “self-discovery.” Reflection can, as Rose discusses through the work of Heidi Nast, lead to considerations of the extent to which we are transparent to ourselves, and to asking whether a researcher-self is a “knowable agent whose motivations can be fully known.” Countering the downside of the inward gaze of reflection, Rose proposes the possibility that:

This transparent self then looks outward, to understand its place in the world, to chart its position in the arenas of knowledge production, to see its own place in the relations of power. [18]

She goes on to describe how looking out, to fields of power, connecting researcher and participant audiences “is a particular reflexive process,” which when scrutinised “raises questions such as ‘where are one's fields,’ ‘what are the displacements,’ and ‘how does the work deploy and confront power – whose power, where, and under what conditions?’”[19] Returning to the work of both Katz and Nast, Rose emphasises the need for a full contextualisation of both fieldwork and written research as part of the process of reflection,[20] while at the same time recognising that “the search for positionality through transparent reflexivity is bound to fail.” [21]

A geographer and interdisciplinary scholar whose work also engages critically, theoretically and methodologically with the ethical theme of reflexivity, Farhana Sultana argues that “being reflexive about one’s own positionality is not to self-indulge but to reflect on how one is inserted in grids of power relations and how that influences methods, interpretations, and knowledge production.”[22] With reference to the work of many other geographers, she draws attention to the detail of the methods used and how reflexivity is undertaken. Sultana notes the extensive range of discussions on “reflexivity, positionality, difference and representation” in feminist geography, especially with relation to participatory research, and how many have debated “how to undertake reflexive research while still engaging in material and political struggles that have meaning and relevance.”[23]

Sultana discusses how feminist methods “emphasize non-hierarchical interactions, understanding, and mutual learning,” and how they pay close attention to the ways in which research methods “may be embedded in unequal power relations between the researcher and research participants.”[24] For Sultana it is “by being analytical and reflexive about their fieldwork and research process,” that feminist researchers are able to “challeng[e] pre-given categories and narratives,” and be “attentive to power, knowledge and context.” [25]

Reflexivity in research involves reflection on self, process, and representation, and critically examining power relations and politics in the research process, and researcher accountability in data collection and interpretation.[26]

Sultana stresses the importance of conducting a reflexive research processes throughout a project, from beginning to end, [27] extending into the development of reflexive writing techniques. [28] She points to the potential reflexive methods have for opening up research to “more complex and nuanced understandings of issues, where boundaries between process and content can get blurred,” [29]  and rather than seeing reflexivity as a form of researcher self-indulgence, she underscores its potential for thinking about “how one is inserted in grids of power relations and how that influences methods, interpretations, and knowledge production.” For Sultana, a reflexive method offers the potential for relating to research participants and assessing the possibilities for conducting research with respect to “institutional, social, and political realities.” In sum, she states that reflexivity is “integral to conducting ethical research,” [30] for engaging with issues of “social justice, equity and democracy” at micro and global scales, and for moving from the “strict codes of institutional paperwork” towards maintaining ethical commitments and moral understandings. [31]   

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically Important Moments’ in Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 10, n. 2 (2004): 261–280, 262–3.

[2] Guillemin and Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically Important Moments’ in Research.” 

[3] Guillemin and Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically Important Moments’ in Research,” 262–3.

[4] Guillemin and Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically Important Moments’ in Research,” 265.

[5] Guillemin and Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically Important Moments’ in Research.” 262–3.

[6] Guillemin and Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically Important Moments’ in Research,” 263.

[7] Guillemin and Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically Important Moments’ in Research,” 263.

[8] Guillemin and Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically Important Moments’ in Research,” 262–3.

[9] Audrey Kobayashi, “GPC Ten Years On: Is Self-reflexivity Enough?” Gender, Place and Culture 10, n. 4, (2003): 345–9.

[10] Kobayashi, “GPC Ten Years On: Is Self-reflexivity Enough?” 345–9.

[11] Kobayashi, “GPC Ten Years On: Is Self-reflexivity Enough?” 345–9.

[12] Kobayashi, “GPC Ten Years On: Is Self-reflexivity Enough?” 345–9, 348.

[13] Mona Domosh, “Towards a More Fully Reciprocal Feminist Inquiry,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 2, n. 1 (2003): 107–11.

[14] Lee Ann Fujii, “Research Ethics 101: Dilemmas and Responsibilities,” PS: Political Science & Politics 45, n. 4, (2012): 717–23.

[15] Gillian Rose, “Situating Knowledges: Positionality, Reflexivities and other Tactics,” Progress in Human Geography 21, n. 3 (1997): 305–20.

[16] Rose, “Situating Knowledges.”

[17] Rose, “Situating Knowledges.”

[18] Rose, “Situating Knowledges.”

[19] Rose, “Situating Knowledges.”

[20] Rose, “Situating Knowledges.”

[21] Rose, “Situating Knowledges.”

[22] Farhana Sultana, “Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 6, n. 1, (2007): 374–85.

[23] Sultana, “Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics.”

[24] Sultana, “Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics.”

[25] Sultana, “Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics.”

[26] Sultana, “Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics.”

[27] Sultana, “Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics.”

[28] Sultana, “Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics.”

[29] Sultana, “Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics.”

[30] Sultana, “Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics.”

[31] Sultana, “Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics.”

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Relationality

Relationality refers to an understanding of social existence as networks of relationships between people. Relationality is a central concept of care ethics, which focuses on relations as interactions that lead to responsibility. Virginia Held argues that the perception of persons as relational beings stands in contrast to that of dominant western theories of ethics (such as deontological ethics and utilitarian and consequentialist approaches) which place the individual in the centre, as an independent, self-sufficient, autonomous agent, bound by abstract ethical principles.[1]  Klaartje Klaver, Eric van Elst, and Andries J. Baart point out that relationality and relational ethics are not limited to interpersonal relationships, but exist also within professional, institutional, public, and national contexts.[2] Furthermore, Joan Tronto emphasises that relational responsibility takes place within power asymmetries, and is affected by the political, social and epistemological context in which it is practiced.[3] The broader scope of relationality refers to responsibilities between people in a global context. Iris Marion Young notes that through their participation in the acts of institutions such as states and corporations, people across the globe are socially connected,[4] and that by recognising the existence of these ‘”inextricable interdependencies”[5] some global relational responsibilities become evident.

Relationality is also a key aspect of research partnerships.[6] While institutional research ethics principles offer little guidance about how to tackle the various ethics relational issues that come up during research, relationality suggests an alternative approach based on mutuality and care. Nevertheless, it is important to also think about relationality critically. Pat Noxolo, Parvati Raghuram and Clare Madge show how a  postcolonial reading uncovers the discontinuities and limitations of relationality practiced under unequal power relations, and presents the need to reveal obscured or unrecognised layers of relationships.[7] They argue that relationality can be interpreted in different ways, making it a contested and complicated interaction,[8] that may be challenged, rejected, or refused.

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford University Press, 2006), 13.

[2] Klaartje Klaver, Eric van Elst, and Andries J. Baart, "Demarcation of the Ethics of Care as a Discipline: Discussion Article," Nursing Ethics 21, no. 7 (2014): 759, https://doi.org/10.1177/0969733013500162.

[3] Joan C. Tronto, “Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics,” Ethics and Social Welfare 6, no. 3 (2012): 308–10, https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2012.704058.

[4] Iris Marion Young, “Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model,” Justice and Global Politics 4, no. 4 (2006): 102–30, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511550744.005.

[5] Termed by Eva Feder Kittay, "A Theory of Justice as Fair Terms of Social Life given Our Inevitable Dependency and Our Inextricable Interdependency," in Care Ethics and Political Theory, ed. Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2015), 52, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198716341.001.0001.

[6] See for example Tula Brannelly, "An Ethics of Care Research Manifesto," International Journal of Care and Caring 2, no. 3 (2018): 368, https://doi.org/10.1332/239788218x15351944886756.

[7] Pat Noxolo, Parvati Raghuram, and Clare Madge, "Unsettling Responsibility: Postcolonial Interventions," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37, no. 3 (2012): 421, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00474.x.

[8] Parvati Raghuram, Clare Madge, and Pat Noxolo, "Rethinking Responsibility and Care for a Postcolonial World," Geoforum 40, no. 1 (2009): 10–11, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.07.007.

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Responsibility

Responsibility is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “[c]apability of fulfilling an obligation or duty; the quality of being reliable or trustworthy. … A moral obligation to behave correctly towards or in respect of a person or thing.”[1]

The meaning of obligations and duties and the ways of performing them vary in different contexts and reflect differences in understanding the concept of responsibility over time and across geographical space.  For example, Benjamin Rubbers and Alessandro Jedlowski trace the semantic origins of “responsibility” to the Latin respondere, refering to “answering a charge,” which is associated with the obligation to compensate or be punished for damage to others. They trace the evolution of its meaning over time:

At first confined to legal thought, and centred on the problem of fault imputation, the concept has taken on a new meaning in social contract theories, which take it as a starting point from which to think about the limits of government. Finally, the understanding of responsibility as being part of everyday ethics can be associated with more recent essays in moral philosophy.[2]

In “everyday ethics,” responsibility is a central relational action for practices of care. Arguing against the formation of a detached understanding of responsibility, Clive Barnett and David Land stress that responsible care action can only be motivated by encountering, listening and responding to others.[3] Similarly, Joan Tronto argues that practices of care are based on an understanding that “people, other beings, and the environment are interdependent, … assigning responsibility is a collective act, not an abstract or scientific or legal endeavour.”[4] Tronto points out that although responsibility authorises action, it is negotiated in the context of social and political conditions, that determine its possibilities and limitations.[5]

This raises the question of responsibility at a distance, including on a global scale, where no direct encounter is made with others. The question is discussed by Iris Marion Young in her “social connection” model, which refers to obligations of justice resulting from structural social and political processes.[6] Young argues that this type of responsibility is inherently political in the sense that it aims to transform unjust structures through collective action.[7] While legal understandings of responsibility seek to trace entities that can be directly blamed and held liable for harm,[8] the social connection model suggests that “all agents who contribute by their actions to the structural processes that produce injustice have responsibilities to work to remedy these injustices.”[9] Young’s social connection model is based on five main features: “it does not isolate perpetrators; it judges background conditions of action; it is more forward-looking than backward-looking; its responsibility is essentially shared; and it can be discharged only through collective action.”[10] 

Since the social norms and structural conditions through which responsibility is allocated differ in different societies, Rubbers and Jedlowski caution that there is a need “to escape from the ethnocentrism that is implicit in many reflections about responsibility in the West.”[11] Philosopher Munamato Chemhuru compares western and African philosophical traditions regarding responsibility and shows that they differ considerably. Chemhuru argues that while the western conception allocates responsibility to the will and reason of the individual, an African approach additionally recognises responsibility in the context of the communitarian ethos.[12] Although he contends that various communities in Africa do not necessarily share a similar conception of epistemic responsibility, Chemhuru suggests that many share its communitarian view:

The community plays a very central epistemological and moral role in inculcating what responsibility is, and how it ought to be understood and evaluated in community. Accordingly, the community ought to be responsible for knowledge of what individuals do because the community makes what the individual is. [13]

Chemhuru criticises the western view of “all human beings … [which] ought to be responsible for their individual human actions because they must be in possession of knowledge of their actions as well as being in control of whatever they do.”[14] He argues that this anthropocentric approach is focused on an “atomistic individual”, whereas an African philosophical approach relies not only on a communitarian view of epistemic responsibility, but also on its understanding in a wider context, across generations, cultural and historical contexts. In this line of thought, “it is impossible to look at epistemic responsibility from an individualist perspective but rather from a collectivist view where both the living and the departed bear epistemic responsibility for human intentions and actions.”[15]

Understanding these complexities is part of the ethics of research practices and knowledge co-production processes, particularly those related to the built environment, which focus on the specificity of place. Research partnerships in a globalised postcolonial world call for collective thinking about responsibility.

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] “Responsibility,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, last modified March 2021, accessed 9 September 2021, https://www-oed-com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/view/Entry/163862?redirectedFrom=Responsibility&

[2] Benjamin Rubbers and Alessandro Jedlowski, “Introduction: Regimes of Responsibility in Africa: Towards a New Theoretical Approach,” in Regimes of Responsibility in Africa : Genealogies, Rationalities and Conflicts, ed. Benjamin Rubbers and Alessandro Jedlowski (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2020), 3.

[3] Clive Barnett and David Land, “Geographies of Generosity: Beyond the ‘Moral Turn,’” Geoforum 38, no. 6 (2007): 1069, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.02.006.

[4] Joan Tronto, “Theories of Care as a Challenge to Weberian Paradigms in Social Science,” in Care Ethics and Political Theory, ed. Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2015), 263, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198716341.001.0001.

[5] Tronto, "Theories of Care," 263.

[6] Iris Marion Young, “Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model,” Justice and Global Politics 4, no. 4 (2006): 102, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511550744.005.

[7] Young, "Responsibility and Global Justice," 123.

[8] Young, "Responsibility and Global Justice," 115.

[9] Young, "Responsibility and Global Justice," 102–3.

[10] Iris Marion Young, “A Social Connection Model,” in Responsibility for Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011), 103, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195392388.003.0004.

[11] Rubbers and Jedlowski, “Regimes of Responsibility in Africa,” 5.

[12] Munamato Chemhuru, “An African Communitarian View of Epistemic Responsibility,” Politikon 46, no. 1 (2019): 71–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2019.1571290.

[13] Chemhuru, “An African Communitarian View," 2.

[14] Chemhuru, “An African Communitarian View," 5.

[15] Chemhuru, “An African Communitarian View," 9.

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Rigour

… rigour is less about adherence to the letter of rules and procedures than it is about fidelity to spirit of qualitative work.[1]

Rigour is defined in the OED as: “Strict sense or interpretation; precision, exactness; (in later use also) the quality or condition of being highly detailed, accurate, and thorough.”[2]

The Concordat to Support Research Integrity [3] which is referenced by research ethics codes and policies across most UK institutions, defines “rigour” as one of five core elements which define integrity in research. Rigour is defined here as: 

[research which] … is in line with prevailing disciplinary norms and standards, and in performing research and using appropriate methods; in agreeing to and agreed protocol where appropriate; in drawing interpretations and conclusion from the research; and in communicating the results.

The other four core elements of research integrity are defined by the Concordat as honesty, transparency or open communication, care and respect, and accountability.  

The Concordat, whose signatories include UK Research and Innovation, Universities UK, the Scottish Funding Council, the Northern Ireland Higher Education Funding Council, and the Wellcome Trust, is committed to applying these five core elements across all aspects of research, and across research in all disciplines.

It is used as a measure of research excellence in many institutional contexts associated with research, for example, the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) which assesses and grades the research produced by UK universities, named “rigour” as one of the three indicators of excellence in research alongside “significance” and “originality”. At that time, RAE 2008 Panel O, which included art, architecture, dance, design, drama, music, and performing arts, defined a broader conception of rigour for the assessment of applied and practice-based research in the arts and humanities subjects represented in that panel. Panel O criteria stipulated that rigour was to be measured by: “The degree of intellectual precision and/or systematic method and/or integrity embodied in the research.”[4]  Widening this definition of rigour to include embodied integrity, highlighted both the difficulty in measuring rigour in applied and practice-based research, and the “richness and complexity” of its methods.[5]

Margerte Sandelowski’s work on “the problem of rigor” notes the difficulty of applying the idea to qualitative research. The institutional definition of rigour is derived from measures of the reliability, and implied trustworthiness, of quantitative research methods. Sandelowski observes that when used as a measure of the integrity or ethical quality of qualitative work it is often insufficient: moreover it can be misleading, as rigour neither defines trustworthiness nor quality in this type of research. She notes the issue with the term itself and its connotations:

… there is an inflexibility and an uncompromising harshness and rigidity implied in the term “rigor” that threatens to take us too far from the artfulness, versatility, and sensitivity to meaning and context that mark qualitative works of distinction.[6]

Sandelowski suggests that our idea of rigour should become broader – less strict and less exacting in order to preserve the “spirit of qualitative work.” She argues that non-traditional research methods can secure different information and that, indeed, research which is conventionally considered rigorous may inadvertently misrepresent the situation the researcher wants to understand. 

This conclusion is echoed in the work of Estelle Barrett. When assessing the quality of creative arts-practice research approaches, Barrett argues that conventional ideas of rigour are not always preferable:

It can be argued that the generative capacity of creative arts research is derived from the alternative approaches it employs – those subjective, emergent and interdisciplinary approaches – that continue to be viewed less favourably by funding assessors and others still to be convinced of the innovative and critical potential of artistic research.[7]

Sandelowski and Barrett are from departments of Women’s and Children’s Health, and Fine Art, respectively; yet their arguments are closely aligned. Both argue that integrity and quality in research do not always call for research which is “in line with prevailing disciplinary norms and standards”, as outlined in The Concordat to Support Research Integrity, and call for an expansion of the idea of rigour in research in order to privilege multiple voices and kinds of knowledge.[8] 

Written by Rachel Siobhán Tyler.

[1] Margarete Sandelowski, "Rigor or Rigor Mortis: The Problem of Rigor in Qualitative Research Revisited," ANS: Advances in Nursing Science 16, no. 2 (December 1993): 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1097/00012272-199312000-00002.

[2] “Rigour,” OED, Oxford English Dictionary, last modified June 2021, accessed 6 October 2021, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/165946?redirectedFrom=rigour.

[3] “The Concordat to Support Research Integrity,” accessed 6 October 2021, https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/topics/research-and-innovation/concordat-research-integrity.

[4] “RAE 2008, Panel Criteria and Working Methods, Panel O,”  20, accessed 6 October 2021,  http://www.rae.ac.uk/pubs/2006/01/docs/oall.pdf

[5] “RAE 2008, Panel Criteria and Working Methods, Panel O,”  19.

[6] Sandelowski, "Rigor or Rigor Mortis: The Problem of Rigor in Qualitative Research Revisited," 1.

[7] Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, (eds), Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (London: IB Tauris, 2007), 3.

[8] “The Concordat to Support Research Integrity.”

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Risk

Risk is closely related with harm, a central principles of contemporary institutional research ethics. The Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) of the UK guidelines state that ‘Risk is often defined by reference to the potential physical or psychological harm, discomfort, stress or reputational risk to human participants (and participating groups, organisations and funders) that a research project might generate.’[1] One of the key texts that inform institutional research ethics is the Belmont Report,[2] which states that risk should be considered in advance of every research project, and assigns responsibility to the researchers ‘to decide when it is justifiable to seek certain benefits despite the risks involved, and when the benefits should be foregone because of the risks.’[3]

Assessing risk is complicated, since beyond physical risk of harm, there are many other possible types of harm that could result from research. For example, the Association of Social Anthropologists ethical guidelines point out that negative consequences should be considered for both the immediate research participants, and the long-term effects for other members of the social group or even wider society.[4] Other types of non-physical risk may include ‘risk to a participant’s personal social standing, privacy, personal values and beliefs, their links to family and the wider community, and their position within occupational settings.’[5] In addition to risks for research participants, there could be risks to the researchers as well.  The ethical guidelines provided by the British Educational Research Association (BERA) remind us that ‘Safeguarding the physical and psychological wellbeing of researchers is part of the ethical responsibility of employing institutions and sponsors, as well as of researchers themselves.’[6]

Academic institutions classify research into ‘high risk’ and ‘low risk’ categories, which must be approved by a relevant ethics board. High risk is generally defined as research involving children and young people, those with a learning disability or cognitive impairment, individuals in a dependent or unequal relationship, and other potentially vulnerable groups. This applies also to ‘sensitive research’, involving ‘sensitive research topics’, such as‘participants’ sexual behaviour, illegal or political behaviour, experience of violence, abuse or exploitation, mental health, their personal or family lives, or their gender or ethnic status.’[7]

Safety for researchers and research participants is not only a moral duty but also a legal responsibility (detailed in the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999), and research institutions require a risk assessment to be carried out before the research commences, to recognise situations that are potentially risky and identify measures for control and minimisation of risk.[8] However, the acts of assessing and managing risk are in themselves social, political and culturally-dependant constructs. One way to consider this, suggested by the BERA guidelines, is for researchers to think through their duty of care.[9]

Care ethics provides valuable tools for considering risk, because its emphasis on ‘relationships of responsibility’ opens the possibility for understanding risk and prevention of harm as relationships of care and commitments.[10] Care ethics allows for the very notion of risk to be considered under the specific context of the research. For example, Flicker et al. point out that in some cases, ‘What constitutes “risk” to an outsider may be part of everyday experience for individuals within a community.’[11] This stresses the importance of ethical thinking regarding the political, cultural and situated conditions of risk, and further amplifies the question regarding who decides what constitutes risk and how to address it. 

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] 'ESRC Framework for Research Ethics'  https://esrc.ukri.org/files/funding/guidance-for-applicants/esrc-framework-for-research-ethics-2015/, p.27.

[2] The Belmont Report was published in 1979 by the USA’s National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioural Research.

[3] Kenneth John Ryan et al., “The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research,” Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, USA, 1979, https://doi.org/10.1021/bi00780a005.

[4] The ASA Ethical Guidelines for Good Research Practice https://www.theasa.org/ethics/guidelines.shtml.

[5] 'ESRC Framework for Research Ethics.'  https://esrc.ukri.org/files/funding/guidance-for-applicants/esrc-framework-for-research-ethics-2015/, p. 27.

[6] ‘BERA Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (4th ed.)’ https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-2018-online#harm

[7] ‘ESRC Framework for research ethics, Updated January 2015’ https://esrc.ukri.org/files/funding/guidance-for-applicants/esrc-framework-for-research-ethics-2015/, p.9.

[8] ‘BERA Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (4th ed.)’ https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-2018-online#harm.

[9] BERA Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (4th ed.)’  https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-2018-online#harm.

[10] Joan C. Tronto, “Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics,” Ethics and Social Welfare 6, no. 3 (2012): 303–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2012.704058.

[11] Sarah Flicker et al., 'Ethical Dilemmas in Community-Based Participatory Research: Recommendations for Institutional Review Boards,' Journal of Urban Health 84, no. 4 (2007): 487, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-007-9165-7.

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Self-Making

Philosopher Michel Foucault understands ethics as an active experience, intellectual and practical, related, according to Paul Rabinow, to how “who one is […] emerges acutely out of the problems with which one struggles.”[1] Foucault distinguishes between the rule of conduct, the conduct measured by the rule, and “the manner in which one ought to ‘conduct oneself’: ‘that is, the manner in which one ought to form oneself as an ethical subject acting in reference to the prescriptive elements that make up the code.” These are concerned with what he calls the “determination of the ethical substance; that is, the way in which the individual has to constitute this or that part of himself as the prime material of his moral conduct” and “the mode of subjection (mode d’assujettissement); that is, with the way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obliged to put it into practice.”[2]

It is important to distinguish subjectivation from subjection in Foucault’s work. Frédéric Gros, for example, argues that “The history of the subject, from the perspective of the practices of the self and the procedures of subjectivation, is completely separate from the project, formulated in the 1970s, of the history of the production of subjectivities, of the procedures of subjection by the machines of power.” [3] Clive Barnett also argues that in Foucault’s later work, subjectivity is not subjection, but rather a mode of subjectivation; he writes, “Foucault formally articulated the notion of problematization as the object of a program of research on practices through which people wilfully take aspects of their own selves to be the material of ethical concern.” Barnett discusses how in The Use of Pleasure, the second volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault outlined a framework for analysing the “history of ethical problematizations based on practices of the self.”[4]

It has been argued by scholars, such as Gros, that Foucault’s central intervention in The Hermeneutics of the Subject (his College de France lectures from 1982) is to shift focus from “care of the self” (epimeleia heautou) to self-knowledge or “know thyself” (gnothi seauton).[5] Edward McGushin describes how, when, in the introduction to The Use of Pleasure, Foucault, analyzes subjectivity and subjectivization within a framework he calls “care of the self,” he juxtaposes care of the self with confessional and hermeneutic modes of self-examination more concerned with self-knowledge.[6] These techniques and practices of self-care are examined in extraordinary detail in Foucault’s late work, and as Matthew Sharpe outlines, the schema Foucault uses to analyse the “different ethical modes of rapport a soi” consists of four aspects:

Each historical form of ethical self-relationship is analysed as to its “substance” (“the material that is going to be worked over by ethics”); a mode of subjectivation (“the way in which people are invited or incited to recognize their moral obligations”); the means by which ethical self-transformation is undertaken, and the telos that orients the entire rapport.[7]

Sharpe discusses the textual practices involved in the ethical process of self-formation, or askesis, and draws our attention to how Foucault considers “meditation” to be a form of “self-writing” or “written techniques through which individuals in Stoicism and Christianity monitored and transformed his rapport a soi (relationship to her/himself).”[8] In examining Foucault’s genealogy of ethics from the Stoics to the Greeks, Sharpe notes how Foucault pays close scrutiny to the ways in which the truth that subjects have to relate to in Stoic askesis comes from the outside, from the logos of teachers. Sharpe explores how the “‘ethico-poetic’ ways in which this external truth is made personal or ‘subjectivised,’” for the Stoics, defined a particular mode of techne (or know how)[9] that related specific forms of written, bodily and meditative practices.[10]

In his Self Writing essay from 1983, Foucault explore this relation of ethics and poetics through the practice of writing, what he describes as writing’s “ethopoietic” function, and what we might now called poethics. Foucault notes: “No technique, no professional skill can be acquired without exercise; nor can the art of living, the technê tou biou, be learned without askesis that should be understood as a training of the self by oneself.” [11] This training of the self, a traditional principle which Foucault explains was of central importance to the Pythagoreans, the Socratics, and the Cynics, included “abstinences, memorizations, self-examinations, meditations, silence, and listening to others,” as well as writing “for oneself and for others.” [12] Foucault explains in great detail how the Stoics understood the relation between the practices of writing and thinking:

… writing is associated with the exercise of thought in two different ways. One takes the form of a linear “series:” it goes from meditation to the activity of writing and from there to gumnazein, that is, to training and trial in a real situation —a labor of thought, a labor through writing, a labor in reality. The other is circular: the meditation precedes the notes which enable the rereading which in turn reinitiates the meditation. In any case, whatever the cycle of exercise in which it takes place, writing constitutes an essential stage in the process to which the whole askesis leads: namely, the fashioning of accepted discourses, recognized as true, into rational principles of action. As an element of self-training, writing has, to use an expression that one finds in Plutarch, an ethopoietic function: it is an agent of the transformation of truth into ethos.[13]

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler stresses how intrinsically linked processes of self-making and subjectivation are in the formation of the ethical subject. On the one hand, she writes, “There is … no forming of the ethical subject without ‘modes of subjectivation’ and an ‘ascetics or ‘practices of the self’ that support them,”[14] and on the other, that: “There is no making of oneself (poiesis) outside of a mode of subjectivation (assujettisement).”[15] In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler faults Foucault for “not making more room explicitly for the other in his consideration of ethics.”[16] Yet we do find mention of the other in Foucault, for example, he stresses the role of the other person as “indispensable for telling the truth about oneself,” even though this other person may “appear[s] with a number of different aspects and profiles – medical, political, and pedagogical – which mean that it is not always easy to grasp exactly what his role is.”[17] And in his discussion of Stoic writing practices, Foucault distinguishes between hupomnemata and the correspondence as two modes of writing which figure different kinds of reading and writing, in relation to the ways in which they address not only the self, but also the other:

To write is thus to “show oneself,” to project oneself into view, to make one’s own face appear in the other’s presence. And by this it should be understood that the letter [correspondence] is both a gaze that one focuses on the addressee (through the missive he receives, he feels looked at) and a way of offering oneself to his gaze by what one tells him about oneself.

… The work the letter carries out on the recipient, but is also brought to bear on the writer by the very letter he sends, thus involves an “introspection;” but the latter is to be understood not so much as a decipherment of the self by the self as an opening one gives the other onto oneself.[18]

In his reading of Giving an Account of Oneself, Chris Lundberg, although acknowledging that Butler’s ethical project is concerned with the “messy and contingent” world of “practices and investments,” suggests that she does not go far enough in considering the practice of rhetoric itself, and needs to “engage in greater detail” with two specifically “rhetorical problematics, the problem of affects and the problem of practices.” He writes:

One’s relation to the self and others is first and foremost as affective relationship. An “I” does not tend towards narcissism because it inappropriately theorizes the conditions of its emergence, rather, it does so because it is bound by a set of affective, emotive and enjoyable investments in figuring itself in particular ways. So a “rhetorical question” to Butler’s ethical project: what is the role of the subject’s affects in its project of self-figuration?[19]

Lundberg’s commentary places emphasis on the importance of affect and emotion in the figuring of the self, and the ethics of self-making.

In feminist life-writing, and a more recent specific strand of such work called “autotheory,” autobiography itself operates as a mode of theory, described by Lauren Fournier as “the practices of engaging with theory, life, and art from the perspective of one’s lived experiences.”[20] It is possible, as Stacey Young has done, to locate the early history of such an approach in the feminist writing of women of colour.[21] Audre Lorde is well known for stating that: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,”[22] while bell hooks looks more explicitly at the role of space, both real and metaphorical, in shaping our through lived experience, choosing the margin as a positive space, not only of domination and resistance, but also of hope and radical possibility.[23] Referring to the borderland between the USA and Mexico as a painful division and potential space of creativity, Gloria Anzaldúa’s border figure of the “new mestiza,” writes across linguistic borders of languages, encouraging readers to find new hybrid forms of expression, through the edges and other marginal conditions of the border.[24] The words of these feminists show the role that writing one’s life can play in political struggles, and how the poetic imagination can invent new ways of relating to others and ourselves that are life-sustaining.

Written by Jane Rendell.

 [1] See Paul Rabinow, “Introduction: The History of Systems of Thought,” Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley and others, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, v. 1 (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1997), xi–xlii, xix.

[2] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, [1985] translated by Robert Hurley, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 26.

[3] See Frédéric Gros, “Le souci de soi chez Michel Foucault, A review of The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, nos 5-6 (2005): 697–708, 698

[4] See Clive Barnett, “On Problematization: Elaborations on a Theme in ‘Late Foucault,’” nonsite.org, issue 16, 16, accessed 16 September 2021. Barnett examines two strands of work concerning problemmatization in social theory, one in which problematization is an object of study, where the “process by which modes of living or modes of self-care become problems,” and the other in which problematization is located in the mode of interpretation itself, “in which the task of analysis is primarily to call into question taken-for granted assumptions and identities and settlements.” For Barnett, in the work of Foucault problematization exists as both noun and verb, in the ethical framing of the theme of problematization, and in how problems relate to the practical conduct of people’s lives.

[5] Gros, “Le souci de soi chez Michel Foucault,” 698.

[6] Edward McGushin, “Foucault’s Theory and Practice of Subjectivity,” in Foucault: Key Concepts, ed. Diana Taylor (London: Routledge, 2011), 131–46, 139.

[7] Matthew Sharpe, “’Critique’ as Technology of the Self,” Foucault Studies, no. 2 (2005): 97-116, 106.

[8] Sharpe, “’Critique’ as Technology of the Self,” 100.

[9] See B. Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 55–7. In comparing Aristotle’s definition of ethics as the relationship you have to society and politics when you act, to Foucault’s definition “as the relationship you have to yourself when you act,” B. Flyvbjerg draws out a definition of ethics as episteme (know why), techne (know how), and phronesis (practical ethics).

[10] Sharpe, ‘“Critique” as Technology of the Self’, p. 105.

[11] Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” translated from Corps écrit, no. 5 (February 1983): 3–23. See https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.hypomnemata.en/, (accessed 16 September 2021).

[12] Foucault, “Self Writing.”

[13] Foucault, “Self Writing.”

[14] Judith Butler, Giving An Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 21 (digital edition). See also Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure. She cites the page number as 28, referring to the English translation.

[15] Butler, Giving An Account of Oneself, 21

[16] Butler, Giving An Account of Oneself, p. 26.

[17] Michel Foucault, “1st February 1984, 1st Hour,” The Courage of Truth, Lectures at the College de France, 1983-4, [2007] edited by Frédéric Gros, translated by Graham Burchell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 6.

[18] Foucault, “Self Writing.”

[19] Chris Lundberg’s Review of Judith Butler’s, Giving an Account of Oneself, Philosophy & Rhetoric, 40, no. 3 (2007): 329–33, 333.

[20] Lauren Fournier, “Sick Women, Sad Girls, and Selfie Theory: Autotheory as Contemporary Feminist Practice,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 33, no. 3, (2018): 643.

[21] Stacey Young, Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics, and the Feminist Movement (London: Routledge, 1997), especially Chapter 3 on the history of feminist autotheory.

[22] Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” [1984] in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. ed. Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 2007), 112. See also Audre Lourde, Zami: a New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography. [1982] (London: Penguin, 2018).

[23] bell hooks, Yearnings: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (London: Turnaround Press, 1989), 145–53.

[24] Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera – The New Mestiza [1987] (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999). See also Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Persephone Press: 1981).

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Sentipensar

The heart, as much as or more than the reason, has been to these day an effective defence of the spaces of grassroots peoples. Such is our secret strength, still latent, because another world is possible.[1]

The notion of sentipensar emerges from the Colombian north coast in the context of Participatory Action Research (PAR). Sentipensar as a verb can be translated into English as feeling-thinking or sensing-thinking and sentipensante as a noun can be translated as the one who feels while thinking.   Sentipensar is a notion currently used mainly in decolonial debates, post development studies, and political ecology. Sentipensante was a term expressed by Afro Colombian and fisherman in the San Jorge River and shared with the sociologist Orlando Fals Borda (1925 – 2008) during his participatory action research in the 1980’s. Fals Borda is the pioneer of Participatory Action Research. He was committed to a radical interdisciplinarity, a questioning of when and how research takes place, and an insistence on the breaking down of the hierarchies that even today separate researchers from researched “advocating” according to Robles Lomeli and Rapport, “the elimination of sharp distinctions between observers and the observed by creating a new research methodology that valued popular knowledge while defending empirical rigor.”[2] For Botero, the sentipensante thinks and feels with the territory using ancestral knowledges, collective affection, and people’s economies.[3] The sentipensante centres the production of an empathic knowledge and links this to the poetics of everyday life. Fals Borda considered the population he engaged with to be the “protagonists of history,” and therefore, “interlocutors” rather than “informants;” positioning  the role of the researcher as central to the conversion of stories into usable political tools. In this light, social processes can be considered as intimately connected with people’s feelings and desires, and the notion of the sentipensante is a way of expressing the interlocking of politics, research, and sentiment.[4]

An attentiveness to popular art and to storytelling as an epistemology is essential for Fals Borda’s work. It was precisely the knowledge and poetics contained in festivals and in the songs of troubadours – vallenatos – that allowed Fals Borda to frame the ethos of the place and also the “intranslatability” of the sentiments contained in the lyrics of the songs. Amplifying in their lyrics the collective affection for the place, for Fals Borda, the inhabitants of the region were the storytellers of the territory.

In a later articulation of the notion of sentipensante, the writer Eduardo Galeano in his Libro de los Abrazos (1989) expanded the definition as “the language that says the truth is the sensing-thinking language. It is the one able to think feeling and feeling thinking. Without divorcing the head from the body and the emotion from reason.”[5] This interpretation of the notion of the sentipensante adds a relevant element of truth-telling as an integral part of conceiving the relationship between body, landscape, and political projects. Along these lines, Fals Borda argued that “the heart, as much as or more than the reason, has been to these day an effective defence of the spaces of grassroots peoples. Such is our secret strength, still latent, because another world is possible.”[6] Thus, in the storytellers’ epistemology, the notion of sentipensar encapsulates the rhythms of place, territorial struggles, celebration, truth-telling, popular resistance, and collective affections.

By Catalina Ortiz.

[1] Orlando Fals Borda, Una sociología sentipensante para América Latina, (Buenos Aires: CLACSO; Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre, 2009), 60. See also for example, Orlando Fals Borda, Historia doble de la costa, (Bogotá, Carlos Valencia: 1986) and Orlando Fals Borda, Participación popular: retos del future, (Bogotá: ICFES-IEPRI-COLCIENCIAS, 1998).

[2] J. D. Robles Lomeli and J. Rappaport, “Imagining Latin American Social Science from the Global South: Orlando Fals Borda and Participatory Action Research,” Latin American Research Review 53, no. 3 (2018): 597–612.

[3] P. Botero, “Sentipensante,” in Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary, edited by A. Kothari at al., (India: Tulika Books, 2019), 339.

[4] Robles Lomeli and Rappaport, “Imagining Latin American Social Science from the Global South.”

[5] Eduardo Galeano, El libro de los abrazos (creación literaria) (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1989), 234.

[6] Fals Borda, Una sociología sentipensante para América Latina, 60.

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Situatedness

If a site is a location that can be defined in physical and material terms, a situation can be both spatial and temporal – the location of something in space but also a set of circumstances bounded in time – the conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event. The associated verb “to situate” describes the action of positioning something in a particular place, while the adjective “situated” defines something’s site or situation. “Situatedness,” then, is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or being situated.[1]

Feminist epistemology conceives of knowers as situated in particular relations to what is known and to other knowers. What is known, and how it is known, reflects the situation and perspective of the knower.[2]

Feminist geographers and philosophers engaging with postmodern and poststructuralist discussions of subjectivity, have frequently relied on spatial metaphors and concepts to emphasize the importance of physical location and social position in the construction of gendered and sexed identities and subjectivities.[3] From the late 1980s onwards the language of many feminist texts across the social sciences, and arts and humanities, became highly spatialised, with words such as “mapping,” “locating,” “situating,” “positioning” and “boundaries” appearing frequently. Discussions of new ways of knowing and being were articulated through spatial terms, with conceptual and critical tools such as “standpoint theory” and “situated knowledge” developed for examining the relationship between the construction of subjects and the politics of location. As Jane Flax writes in 1987:

Feminist theorists enter into and echo postmodernist discourses as we have begun to deconstruct notions of reason, knowledge, or the self and to reveal the effects of the gender arrangements that lay beneath their “neutral” and universalizing facades.[4]

Ten years later, Susan Hekman argued that Nancy Hartstock’s critique of positivism and her introduction of “standpoint theory” in Money, Sex, and Power (1983) “changed the landscape of feminist theory.” Heckman notes:

[Hartsock's] goal is to define the nature of the truth claims that feminists advance and to provide a methodological grounding that will validate those claims. The method she defines is the feminist standpoint. Borrowing heavily from Marx, yet adapting her insights to her specifically feminist ends, Hartsock claims that it is women's unique standpoint in society that provides the justification for the truth claims of feminism while also providing it with a method with which to analyse reality. [5]  

Hekman discusses how Hartsock's 1983 essay “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” brought the concept of “standpoint theory” to a philosophical audience.[6] At the start of this essay, Hartstock acknowledges how the title responds to “Iris Young’s call for the development of a specifically feminist historical materialism,”[7]  and that her own work is “deeply indebted to a number of women whose ideas are incorporated here, although not always used in the ways they might wish” – these women include Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding and Flax.[8] In Harding’s identification of three kinds of feminist epistemology, she puts forward feminist stand-point theory, based on a feminist angle of interpretation, alongside feminist empiricism, based on women’s authentic experience, and feminist postmodernism, as a stance rejecting the possibility of any universal theory, as three modes of feminist knowing.[9]

In her 1988 essay “Situated Knowledges,” Haraway argued, most memorably, that “feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges.”[10] And, as Gillian Rose has noted, in

its use of terms like “position” and “situated,” Haraway's analysis is spatialized. But she also develops her understanding of situated knowledge by using what she describes as visual metaphors. She characterizes oppressive knowledges that present themselves as universal, for example, as knowledges that claim to see everything from nowhere.[11]

Although Haraway’s essay has become (possibly) the most cited text from this period of feminist scholarship, from Seyla Benhabib’s critical articulation of “feminism as situated criticism” in Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics,[12] to bell hooks’ exploration the margin as both a site of possibility and repression,[13] it is clear that Haraway was by no means the only one to argue that knowledge is spatially constructed and subjectivity contingent on situatedness. Indeed writing by women of colour in the 1980s arguably led the way in developing theories of female difference – raced, classed, sexed, and gendered – through accounts of situated life experiences located often around notions of home.[14]

That knowledge is situated suggests that the ways in which people know are shaped by where they stand – by their location, position and situation. The “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science” entry in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for example, summarises eight key qualities of situated knowledge: embodiment; first-person v. third person knowledge; emotions, attitudes, interests and values; personal knowledge of others; know-how; cognitive styles; background beliefs and worldviews; and relations to other inquirers. [15]

Situatedness influences knowers’ access to information and the terms in which they represent what they know. They bear on the form of their knowledge (articulate/implicit, formal/informal, and so forth). They affect their attitudes toward their beliefs (certainty/doubt, dogmatic/open to revision), their standards of justification, and the authority with which they lay claim to their beliefs and offer them to others. They affect knowers’ assessment of which claims are significant or important. [16]

Feminist epistemology focuses on how the social location of the knower affects not only what but also how she knows.

Individuals are subject to different norms that prescribe different virtues, habits, emotions, and skills thought to be appropriate for their roles. They also have different subjective identities – identities incorporated into their self-understandings – and attitudes toward their ascribed identities, such as affirmation, rejection, pride, and shame. [17]

Taking a situated approach to the practice of research ethics engages with the concept of situatedness itself, addressing the particularities of the sites in which researcher-practitioners might be researching and their position and location in relation to those sites. Taking a situated approach to the practice of research ethics suggests that the researcher-practitioner pay attention to the material, political, and emotional qualities of their own subjectivity and the ways in which they are positioned and situated with respect to their research, something I have described as “site-writing” in relation to art, architectural and urban criticism.[18]

In her essay “Thinking about Feeling Historical,” Lauren Berlant discusses what constitutes a change or transformation in a condition or situation and how this can bring us into a state of critical awareness. She writes the following about two men “in the now:”

A situation has forced them to think. A situation has changed the ordinary into something they can no longer presume. … A situation is a state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amidst the usual activity of life.[19]

The process of taking notice and becoming aware of a situation is an embodied experience. Iris Marion Young, drawing on Toril Moi’s work and existentialist philosophy, uses the term “body-in-situation” to argue that the lived body is a better concept for theorizing subjectivity than gender. Young writes, “The lived body is a unified idea of a physical body acting and experiencing in a specific sociocultural context; it is body-in-situation.”[20]

The relation between the noun – situation, and the verb – to situate, can be understood with respect to processes of problematization. In his study of Michel Foucault, Clive Barnett explores how “Problematization is an object of study,” for Foucault where the “process by which modes of living or modes of self-care become problems.” Problematization is located in the mode of interpretation itself, “in which the task of analysis is primarily to call into question taken-for-granted assumptions and identities and settlements.”[21] Barnett notes that as part of Foucault’s thinking about problems is “his particular understanding of the situational emergence of problems and of their manifestation in ‘thought’”[22] and “how experience and thought, understood as functions of practices of reflection, are historically variable, and in turn how thought in this sense is occasioned by uncertain situations.”[23]

Despite the critiques levelled at Foucault by feminists for his gender blindness, the techniques and practices of the self – forms of self-making – which he examines in extraordinary detail in his late work, are helpful for understanding how the experiential process of situating oneself in a situation can prompt ethical reflection and so the beginnings of an ethical practice.

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] For a longer version of this discussion see Jane Rendell, “Sites, Situations, and other kinds of Situatedness,” Expanded Modes of Practice, ed. Bryony Roberts, special issue of Log 48, (2020).

[2] Entry on “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 8 December 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/#SituKnow

[3] See the ground-breaking work produced in the mid 1990s by Liz Bondi, Linda McDowell, Doreen Massey, Steve Pile, and Gillian Rose.

[4] Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory,” Signs, special issue: Within and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory 12, n. 4 (Summer 1987): 621–43, 626. Flax references Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 80 (1983)” 65–107; Kathy E. Ferguson, The Feminist Case against Bureaucracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); and Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).

[5] Susan Hekman, “Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited,” Signs 22, n. 2  (Winter,1997): 341–65, 341. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3175275.

[6] Nancy C. M Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, eds. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (Netherlands: Springer, 1983): 283–310.

[7] Iris Young, “Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory,” Socialist Review 10, 2/3 (March–June 1980).

[8] Hartstock references Jane Flax, “Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Epistemology and Metaphysics.” See also See Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).

[9] See Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press and Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press, 1986).

[10] Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Knowledge,” Feminist Studies 14, n. 3 (Fall 1988): 575–99, 581.

[11] Gillian Rose, “Positionality, Reflexivities and other Tactics,”  Progress in Human Geography 21, n. 3 (1997): 305–20, 307–8.

[12] Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). 

[13] bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End, 1984). See also bell hooks, Yearnings: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (London: Turnaround Press, 1989).

[14] Cherrie Moraga, “From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (eds.) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, (New York: Kitchen Table, 1983); Barbara Smith, “Introduction,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table, 1983), xix-lvi; and Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing, 1984), 114–23.

[15] Entry on “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[16] Entry on “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[17] Entry on “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[18] Jane Rendell, Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (London: IB Tauris, 2010). See also

[19] Lauren Berlant, “Thinking about Feeling Historical,” Emotion, Space and Society 1 (October 2008): 4.

[20] Young quotes Moi: “To claim that the body is a situation is to acknowledge that the meaning of a woman’s body is bound up with the way she uses her freedom.” See Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing like a Girl” and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 16. See Toril Moi, “What is a Woman?” in What is a Woman?: And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

[21] Clive Barnett, “On Problematization: Elaborations on a Theme in ‘Late Foucault,’” nonsite.org 16, 22 June 2015, accessed 8 December 2021, https://nonsite.org/article/on-problematization/.

[22] Barnett, “On Problematization,” 14.

[23] Barnett, “On Problematization,” 15.

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Transcription

... the seductiveness of the transcribed text is given in its illusive naturalness. On the surface, its referent points to the lived experiences of a real person. This reality, however, is one-dimensional. It is a construction, one of many possible slices or images of reality selected by the scribe.[1]

Transcription refers to the process of creating a written or paper record of a transitory act for the purpose of its analysis and study. It is a process used in research involving human participants, in the collection and study of interviews, oral histories, focus groups and observational studies – situations where there is a need to have an accurate written record of what is or has been said. There is no standard way to transcribe speech, but a variety of conventions exist, from the Jefferson System of transcription used in conversation analysis,[2] to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).[3] Researchers such as Dennis Tedlock have created systems particular to the aims of their own work, such as transcriptions made with their re-enactment in mind.[4] The approach taken depends on what it is that the researcher seeks to study.[5]

According to Sabine Kowal and Daniel C. O’Connell the process of transcription involves “transcribers, a system of notation, the product in the form of a transcript, and the transcript readers.”[6] Missing from this list, but running as a thread through it, is the researcher, subject carrying out the research: transcripts are made from audio/video recordings of participants and content consists of information provided by participants, by researchers or transcribers, or researchers acting as transcribers, but often acting within projects set up by researchers. When the act of transcription is set within the context of a research project, then protocols regarding research ethics apply. In these cases the practice of transcribing and the use of the subsequent transcripts need to be considered in relation to ethical issues around confidentiality, privacy, and anonymization in order to minimise the risk of harm to participants. It is these ethical responsibilities that the researcher takes on when setting up and carrying out research that involves transcription. In addition, transcription involves the handling, transferring, storing and possible archiving of personal and/or sensitive information; all activities that require careful planning and assessing in line with GDPR guidance.[7] For the integrity of the research, it is important that participants are fully informed about these issues and how their information will be processed. In the case of transcription, this means deciding how the transcript will be made and what it will contain. For example, the researcher may choose to share transcripts in order to be transparent with participants about how their information is being processed, and invite the participants to request further edits/redactions should they have concerns about the transcript content.

Confidentiality is linked to the handling and processing of the recorded material and the ways in which the material is transcribed, as well as who makes the transcript. The researcher is able to maintain the most control for ensuring the integrity of the transcription and confidentiality of the research material if they, or a member of their research team, make the transcription themselves. However, transcription is a long and labour-intensive process; if there are multiple recordings requiring transcription and limited time available, other approaches may be taken, but these require scrutiny to ensure their compliance with GDPR. One approach is to outsource transcribing to another person or agency and to enter into a data processing agreement with them (See Practising Ethics Guides to Built Environment Research: # 7 Analysing Secondary Data).[8] A second is to use an ai transcription service, such as Otter.ai, Trint and Scrintal. However, as these services rely on machine learning (learning from data provided by users), and transcription requires research recordings to be transferred to and stored on third party servers, using cloud-based ai transcription services may compromise the confidentiality and security of the recorded material.[9] The location of these servers is significant – the transferral of personal data to servers based outside of the UK, EEA or countries not covered by UK adequacy regulations can contravene GDPR.[10]

Written by Naomi Gibson.

[1] Norman K. Denzin, Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century (London: SAGE Publications, 1997), 42.

[2] Gail Jefferson, “Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction,” in Conversation Analysis, ed. Gene H. Lerner, (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004), 13–31.

[3] Alexa Hepburn and Galina B. Bolden, “Comparisons, Concerns and Conclusions,” in Transcribing for Social Research (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2017), 171–84.

[4] Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1983).

[5] Deborah Cameron, Working with Spoken Discourse (London: SAGE, 2001).

[6] Sabine Kowal and Daniel C. O’Connell, “The Transcription of Conversations,” in A Companion to Qualitative Research, eds. Uwe Flick, Ernst von Kardoff and Ines Steinke (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2004), 248.

[7] Information Commissioner's Office, “Data Protection Impact Assessments,” https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/accountability-and-governance/data-protection-impact-assessments/ accessed 8 July 2021.

[8] Information Commissioner's Office, “Contracts,” https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/accountability-and-governance/contracts/ accessed 8 July 2021.

[9] Joseph Da Silva, “Producing ‘Good Enough’ Automated Transcripts Securely: Extending Bokhove and Downey (2018) to Address Security Concerns,” Methodological Innovations, (January 2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/2059799120987766.

[10] Information Commissioner's Office, “International transfers after the UK exit from the EU Implementation Period,” https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/international-transfers-after-uk-exit/ accessed 7 July 2021. 

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Translation

The process of translation changes to varying extents not just the forms of knowledge but the people and places that come into relation with knowledge.[1]

The term translation, originating from French and Latin, speaks to the meaning of being “carried over.” [2] The term often describes a process of communication from one language into another. Practices of translation, equality and ethics are often linked to questions of accessibility and comprehension. However, the ethical considerations for translation go beyond questions of access. They include recognising the layered socio-political and contextual meanings within language. Further, the process of translation is itself a site of power where the translator holds agency. Translation is not simply a transfer, but is an additive site of meaning-making, with ability to frame and reframe, conceal and reveal priorities, values and systems of knowledge.

In the context of practice in the built environment, translation appears through different moments of research, practice, deliberation and capacity-building. Considerations of translation include questions that address hierarchies of language across contexts and scales, and a need to recognise language as a site of implicit power relations. Translation can occur across different types of languages, and registers, forms of communication, representation, disciplines and modes of practice. These have vocabularies of their own, languages that codify particular systems of knowledge within an “ecosystem of knowledges.”[3] Recognising this is important for engaging with questions of epistemic justice[4] – listening to and acknowledging the diverse perspectives, experiences, practices and knowledges held within these vocabularies.

Translation may be used for different ends – to open up accessibility, to learn,[5] to unsettle power dynamics and assumptions,[6] or to build new vocabularies for practice. Outcomes of translation are often described in terms of loss and erasure – “lost in translation,”[7] – where layers of meaning may be hidden or missed. However, translation can also be described as “a space of encounter.”[8] The process of translation can enable the creation of a perspective beyond either language, that is more than the sum of its parts, with possibilities of building new vocabularies and practices. It is important then to think of translation as a process – in and of itself a site of power. Here, the translator can be seen as an actor in the process with agency and their own positionality.  The translator may be a person, an institution, and in contemporary times may also be an automated software.

The practice of translation can be considered then a site of ethical reflection, a practice that requires reflexivity – thinking of translation as both a process, as well as its motives or ends. Some questions to enable this understanding of translation as a reflective practice could include: What choices can be made during processes of translation to enable practitioners to listen more fully? How can practitioners recognise, represent and honour people’s voices, stories, and their aspirations through processes of translation? How can translation speak to questions of epistemic justice and unsettle assumptions framed by hierarchies of power?

Written by Ruchika Lall.

[1] Colin McFarlane, “Knowledge, Learning and Development: a Post-rationalist Approach,” Progress in Development Studies, 6, no. 4 (2006): 287–305.

[2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/translate, accessed 7 September 2021.

[3] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of The Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Durban and London: Duke University Press, 2018).

[4] Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

[5] Colin McFarlane, “The Comparative City: Knowledge, Learning and Urbanism," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34, no. 4, (2010): 725-42.

[6] Geetika Anand, Ruchika Lall, Julia Wesley, and Adriana Allen, “One Amongst Many: Higher Education Institutions in an Ecosystem of Urban Pedagogies,”(Educacao & Realidade, forthcoming).

[7] Stefania Gandin, “What is Really Lost in Translation? Some Observations on the Importance and the Ethics of Translation,” Lost in Translation/Testi e culture allo specchio, Workshop Papers, AnnalSS, 6, (2009): 77–92. See https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11689702.pdf, accessed 7 September 2021.

[8] Alexandre Aspan Frediani, Camila Cocina, and Michele Acuto, “Translating Knowledge for Urban Equality: Alternative Geographies for Encounters between Planning Research and Practice,” KNOW Working Paper no. 2 (2019): 3-13. See https://www.urban-know.com/no-2-working-paper-know, accessed 7 September 2021.

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The Unconscious

In Sigmund Freud's first topography, the psychical apparatus is comprised of unconscious, preconscious, and conscious systems or functions. They appear as layers in his diagrams. In his second topography, proposed two decades later, the psychical apparatus comprises three agencies: id, ego, and superego. The id is the agonistic agent of unconscious desire, the ego is the agent of conscious attachment to the world, the superego is the presiding judge, but all three agents have both unconscious and conscious functions.[1] The French structuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan crosses Freud’s topographies to produce a human subject comprising ego and unconscious, an agency and a function, more precisely an agency in a field, for the unconscious is constituted of the field of signifiers. Lacan was Freud's closest reader. He was largely responsible for lifting Freud's thought out of its biologism and residual attachment to metaphysical entities and grounding it in twentieth-century linguistics. Freud claimed that the unconscious was his Copernican discovery.[2] Lacan claimed that nothing about Freud’s psychoanalytic thought made sense without the unconscious. Although the unconscious appears in nineteenth-century romantic fiction, Freud put it at the centre of psychoanalysis and instrumentalised it in precise ways.[3] Henceforth the psychical life of the human subject was centred on something unknown and outside itself – something which the ego largely disowns and scarcely recognises except when forced to by others, as in the case of slips of the tongue or bungled actions. Lacan coined the term extimate (= exterior+intimate) to indicate that the unconscious stymies the binary logic of inside/outside that is so familiar to architectural thought. The ego finds itself in the field of signifiers upon which its subjective life depends but over which it has little awareness. It is probably safe to say that most people don’t really get it. Perhaps no one does.

This short lexicon entry on the unconscious will selectively sketch the landmarks of the Freudian/Lacanian unconscious. It will focus on desire and the field of signifiers that supports it. Lacan calls this “the field of the Other.” It will treat the unconscious as a spatial and a linguistic phenomenon. It will conclude by arguing that the unconscious and ethics are linked in psychoanalytic thought. Whilst the I want of the ego pertains to the individual; the unconscious desire of the subject is always desire of/for/from the other. The ego is selfish. The unconscious is other-ish. This attention to the other, which is the hallmark of unconscious desire, is the fundamental substrate of ethics and the basis for what we might call an ethical commons.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued that dreams are the “royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind,” and that “a dream is the fulfilment of an unconscious wish.”[4] Lacan translates “unconscious wish” as “desire.”[5] The path from desire to action is labyrinthine. Desire is enunciated by the dream whose fragmentary images I remember upon waking. They may have an internal coherence, but never seem to have the significance for the dreamer that s/he would wish them to have. These dream fragments are produced by unconscious processes Freud calls “dream work,” chief among them condensation and displacement (what he calls the primary processes).[6] In condensation many images congregate to create one semantically dense image, as in the linguistic trope of metaphor. In displacement, one image replaces another, as in metonymy. The unconscious wish is approached by the process of free association, which seeks to reorganise these condensed and displaced images into a pattern of desire that makes sense to the subject. This usually happens in the analytic setting. It is important to note that the work of association is never complete, in the sense that the speech of subject and analyst never arrives at latent content condensed into an apprehensible object. At a certain point (impossibility? exhaustion?) analysis simply stops. Freud called it the navel of the dream; in Lacan's text it becomes, objet petit a, the little object a (a is for autre). Not the object of desire but the cause of desire. Objet a is a hole in the signifier field. Think of it as a productive absence in the signifier field.[7] In Lacan's diagram of the drive, it organises the field like a vortex.[8] There is an aim but no target; there is only more interpretation. Desire is an orientation, a path through the subject’s world of signifiers. It is also important to note here that the unconscious is an effect of repression which will be important when we conclude with ethics.[9]

“The unconscious is constituted by the effects of speech on the subject,... consequently the unconscious is structured like a language.”[10] Lacan's close attention to speech is a theorisation of analytic practice. It is relentlessly empirical. It is not the remembered elements of the dream that constitute the royal road, but what the subject says of them in the analytic setting, how s/he punctuates, pauses, inflects. The unconscious is not a language – we don’t use it as such, and the field of the Other encompasses everything that signifies for a subject, not simply words – but it is structured like one. It was Lacan, reading the linguist Roman Jakobson, who made the link between condensation and metaphor, and displacement and metonymy. It is difficult to convey the intersubjective nature of the unconscious in a few strokes. The unconscious is a feedback loop with others. The unconscious is what we don’t know about ourselves that others tell us because it emerges in our encounters with them – you slip your tongue; someone calls you out on it; you say that’s not me! Some residuum of the unconscious may exist in a solipsistic world, but it would be inoperative and unrealised. Lacan says “the unconscious is the discourse of the other:”[11] my unconscious, the one that is mine, the one that I disown, is the discourse of others. The analytic setting is a model for such discourse. Analysis puts into play the subject’s signifiers, so that the subject can reposition him/herself within them and they can be instrumentalised in new ways. It is like re-finding your bearings in a city. The unconscious may be unknown, but it is as externalized and inter-subjective as the language of which it is an effect. If it is anywhere, it is between you and others.

We would stress the collective nature of the unconscious except that Jung used the term collective to indicate an unconscious very different from the unconscious of Freud and Lacan. For Jung the unconscious was populated by archetypal figures that are autonomous from individuals. [12] You could excavate and find a mythical redemptive goddess in the cultural sediment. The Freudian/Lacanian unconscious is individual and held in common, like a continuous murmur with others. Like Marx’s class consciousness, or political philosopher Paulo Virno’s grammar of the multitude,[13] the unconscious is a common articulation that organises and links individuals but is never in the forefront of intention and attention. It is perhaps best to think of the unconscious as a special form of consciousness, a consciousness that is un, rather than as the absence of consciousness (comatose) or indifference to consciousness (cause and effect). It shadows the public realm of the city, politics, and media.[14]

Ethics is about doing good to others. I don’t like to see tax taken from my income, but I know that it funds the collective goods that edify us all. Ethics goes back to Leviticus and love thy neighbour. Leviticus interpreted this in material ways. Love thy neighbour and leave the edges of your fields unharvested for the wayfaring indigent. Love thy neighbour and pay your employees on time.[15] In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the Freud who wrote Civilisation and its Discontents, was horrified by this prospect. How can you ask me to love my neighbour when more likely than not I hate him? He segues to one of Freud's late texts, whose concluding statement is Wo Es war soll Ich werden.[16] This is a textual detail upon which the whole edifice hinges, and Lacan returns to it many times. In “Science and Truth,” Lacan gives it one of its simplest glosses: “Where it was, there I must come to be as a subject.”[17] Where desire is, there the subject should be; follow your desire, it is a moral imperative. Probably the most agonistic elaboration is found in “The Freudian Thing or Reason Since Freud.”[18] Ethics is not exactly about loving your neighbour (although that is not a bad thing) but about being attentive to your unconscious desire. It is the ethical duty of the subject to itself and to others. The subject takes care of itself and, by so doing, takes care of others. This psychoanalytic approach to ethics begins with the self, but it extends outwards to others. It involves resisting the siren call of the ego’s I want in favour of something more fulfilling that is always marked by temporising, delay, and displacement, and will entail being attentive to others. We can see where this would lead. It would deactivate the subject from the environmentally damaging discourse of commodity capitalism and re-engage it with what we might call environmental consciousness. In his late work, Lacan attempted to formalise discourse.[19] Discourse is about the social bond, which Freud addressed so alarmingly in Civilisation… Lacan argued that capitalist discourse is predicated upon the fantasy that the subject is only accidentally incomplete and can be made complete by the acquisition of an object. Whereas psychoanalytic discourse recognises the constitutive incompleteness of the subject of desire.[20] The unconscious is always under construction. This incompleteness is – to borrow a phrase without permission from Hannah Arendt – the human condition.

Freud and Lacan treat the city as a metaphor for the unconscious.[21] Arguably, it is more than that. The environment we build for ourselves in order to live well in it is the most material instance of the field of the Other. With the analogical city, the architect Aldo Rossi proposed the extraordinary idea that the city was subject to the same linguistic rules of substitution that structure the unconscious. It is this linguistic condition of the city, which opens it to the field of unconscious desire, such that groups like the Situationists could make it the subject of their wandersome urban practice. The Situationists realised that the city was ripe for inscription and that by wandering, it was possible to re-inscribe it with the path of their unconscious desire.[22]

Climate change is above all an ethical crisis because it is a failure to attend to our desire. We can speculate about the ethical role of architecture with respect to climate change. Political discourse has failed to stop us from damaging our environment and by damaging our environment we damage ourselves. The parliaments, debating chambers, boulevards, speakers’ corners, news media, and social media, all these public platforms have failed. We know they have failed because the world continues to get dirtier. If political discourse stages and manages conflict, ethical discourse stages and manages mindfulness of ourselves and others. We need a new form of public participatory ethical discourse and a new form of discourse platform that will allow us to replace our current political discourse with ethical discourse. This discourse has an aim but no targets. It would be tentative and exploratory. It would accept repression as the flip side of the unconscious and distinguish it from dishonesty. Architectural research needs to focus on the design of new forms of public space. We do not know what form these platforms will take, because the research has not yet been done. The psychoanalytic brief for architecture would be to develop a form of public collective analytic setting, a space in which unconscious desire and the attention to others emerges, analytic way stations in the field of the city.[23]

Written by Lorens Holm.

Lorens Holm is author of Reading Architecture With Freud and Lacan – Shadowing the Public Realm (London: Routledge, 2022).

[1] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [1900] trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971). Freud's three diagrams of the psychical apparatus as a series of memory or mnemic layers which filter perception input on one end and motor output on the other, are found in the chapter on Regression. See p. 541 for the third and final figure. The agency diagram is found in the paper “The Ego and the Id,” [1923] in Sigmund Freud: On Metapsychology, eds. Angela Richards and James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991), 363.

[2] Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” [1917] in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. J. Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1956–74), volume XVII.

[3] For a history of the unconscious, written by a critic of architecture, see John Shannon Hendrix, Unconscious Thought in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

[4] Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 122­–33.

[5] See Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996) 35-36 for a discussion of Freud's “wunsch” (German), the French translation “désir” and Strachey’s “wish” (English). Evans, An Introductory Dictionary is the best reference for Lacanian psychoanalysis.

[6] Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 588-609, for the main discussion of primary and secondary processes.

[7] Objet a is distributed throughout Lacan's text. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Seminar Xi). trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton Press, 1981), 67–119 in relation to vision, 161–86 in relation to the drive, 105 for absence, 168 for cause of desire.

[8] For the navel, see Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 118. In Lacan's diagram of the drive, signifiers circumnavigate objet a but do not attach to it. See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 178.

[9] The best reference for Freudian psychoanalysis is the dictionary, J. Laplanche, and J-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis. trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. ed. Masud R. Khan (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1973). See the entries for the unconscious, repression, dream work, etc.

[10] Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 149.

[11] Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 131.

[12] Carl Jung, Collected Works vol. 9 part 1, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959).

[13] Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson, Semiotext(E) Foreign Agents Series (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004).

[14] For a discussion of the collective in relation to architecture, see Lorens Holm and Cameron McEwan, “Introduction: We Construct Collective Life by Constructing Our Environment,” Architecture and Culture 8, nos. 3 and 4 (2021): 529–48. This special double issue, guest edited by Holm and McEwan, was an output from the AHRA conference Architecture & Collective Life held in Dundee 2019.

[15] Leviticus 19: 18 and 34 (love thy neighbour), 9 and 10 (harvests), 13 (wages). Mary Douglas writes that emotive words like “love” and “joy” in Old Testament texts connote “uncoerced action” rather than emotional entanglements, things you do of your own volition rather than because they are law. The word love connotes something akin to care. Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 42–3.

[16] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter and ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1986/1992), 7. He returns to love thy neighbour on 186.

[17] Jacques Lacan, “Science and Truth” [1966] in Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English (New York: W. W. Norton 2006), 726–45. On 734, Lacan relates Freud’s statement to Descartes’ “I think therefore I am.” The subject of conscious thought, the subject of unconscious desire. Both are existential conditions. For Freud's statement, see Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis [1933] trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1974), 80. Strachey’s translation – “Where id was, there ego shall be” – has the opposite sense to Lacan’s, for it replaces desire with ego rather than ego with desire.

[18] Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis,” [1955] Ecrits, 334–63. See in particular 347 where Lacan notes that Freud does not use the article “das” with “Es” or “Ich”. There are at least six papers in Ecrits that translate and discuss Freud’s “Wo Es war …”

[19] Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Analysis 1969–1970, trans. Russell Grigg. ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 11–83. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972–1973 (Encore), trans. Bruce Fink, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 1–25.

[20] A number of contemporary Lacanians are working on capitalism. See for instance Stijn Vanheule, “Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis,” Frontiers in Psychology, 7 (2016).

[21] See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents [1930]. trans. Joan Riviere and James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1975). For example, “Now let us … suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity…” 7. See Jacques Lacan, “Of Structure as an in-Mixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970/1972). See for example, “The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.” 189.

[22] Aldo Rossi, Architecture of the City, trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966/1982), 165–7; and Rossi, “An Analogical Architecture,” Architecture and Urbanism issue 56 (1976), 74–6. The linguistic nature of the city is developed in the forthcoming Cameron McEwan, The Analogical City: towards a Grammar of the Critical Project (Punctum Books).

[23] This thesis and the link between the unconscious and the public realm are developed in my forthcoming book Reading Architecture With Freud and Lacan – Shadowing the Public Realm (London: Routledge, 2022).

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Virtue

A virtue[1] is an excellent trait of character. It is a disposition, well entrenched in its possessor – something that, as we say, goes all the way down, unlike a habit such as being a tea-drinker – to notice, expect, value, feel, desire, choose, act, and react in certain characteristic ways. To possess a virtue is to be a certain sort of person with a certain complex mindset.[2] 

In eastern philosophy, virtue ethics can be traced back to Mencius and Confucius, and in the west, where it is one of the oldest normative traditions of ethics theory, to Plato and Aristotle. Plato, for example, emphasized four virtues, later called cardinal virtues, in particular, wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. Other important virtues include fortitude, generosity, self-respect, good temper, and sincerity. As well as arguing for good habits of character, virtue theorists also advise against acquiring bad character traits, or vices, such as cowardice, insensibility, injustice, and vanity.[3]

In Aristotle’s understanding of virtue it is related to character, which is understood to concern “a state of being,” to have “the appropriate inner states,” and to involve “the right sort of emotions and inner states with respect to our feelings towards others.”[4] For Aristotle, “character is also about doing:”

Aristotelian theory is a theory of action, since having the virtuous inner dispositions will also involve being moved to act in accordance with them. Realizing that kindness is the appropriate response to a situation and feeling appropriately kindly disposed will also lead to a corresponding attempt to act kindly.[5]

Virtue ethics that follows Aristotle’s work focuses on three concepts: “arête (excellence or virtue), phronesis (practical or moral wisdom) and eudaimonia (usually translated as happiness or flourishing).”[6] A key feature of virtue ethics holds that character traits are developed over a long period of time, and are also stable over time, and consistent:

If an agent possesses the character trait of kindness, we would expect him or her to act kindly in all sorts of situations, towards all kinds of people, and over a long period of time, even when it is difficult to do so. A person with a certain character can be relied upon to act consistently over a time. [7]

People might be born with positive and negative natural tendencies, which can be encouraged or discouraged, so people’s exposure to different situations and people will influence how a character forms and habits develop. For this reason, processes of moral education are important, as the development of virtues depends on good role models. Since virtuous character traits are developed in one’s youth, virtue theory emphasizes adults responsibility for instilling virtues in the young.[8]

Other theories of normative ethics focus on universal principles which can be applied in any moral situation, and duty ethics, in particular, places emphasis on rules, and ensuring one’s actions follow rules. But in virtue ethics the focus is on the importance of learning ‘good habits of character’. Virtue ethics asks such broad questions as “How should I live?” and “What is the good life?”

Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism). Two concepts that are central to all forms of virtue ethics, namely, virtue and practical wisdom.[9]

Virtue ethics was a dominant approach in Western moral philosophy until at least the Enlightenment, became less important during the nineteenth century. It is argued to have re-emerged in Anglo-American philosophy in the late 1950s, due to the publication of Elizabeth Anscombe’s famous article “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) which “crystallized an increasing dissatisfaction with the forms of deontology and utilitarianism then prevailing.”[10] Since then, modern virtue ethics is considered to have developed different strands, while holding core aspects in common:

While all forms of virtue ethics agree that virtue is central and practical wisdom required, they differ in how they combine these and other concepts to illuminate what we should do in particular contexts and how we should live our lives as a whole. [11]

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets out four distinct forms of contemporary virtue ethics “a) eudaimonist virtue ethics, b) agent-based and exemplarist virtue ethics, c) target-centered virtue ethics, and d) Platonistic virtue ethics,” [12] arguing that a “complete account of virtue” will map out a virtue’s field, basis of moral acknowledgement, mode of responsiveness and target. Different virtues are concerned with different fields, and the basis for the acknowledgment of a virtue is the feature of the virtue in the field to which it responds. A virtue’s mode concerns the way in which it responds to the basis of acknowledgment within its field, and a virtue’s target is that at which it is aimed.[13]  Objections raised against virtue ethics include a) application, b) adequacy, c) relativism, d) conflict, e) self-effacement, f) justification, g) egoism, and h) situationist problems.[14]

However, according to The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy there are three branches of virtue ethics: eudaimonism, which bases virtues in human flourishing, where flourishing is equated with performing one’s distinctive function well; agent-based theory which emphasizes how virtues are determined by judging admirable traits in other people; and an ethics of care, which has been developed out of feminist thinking, and challenges an ethics that focuses solely on justice and autonomy, arguing instead for traits such as caring and nurturing.[15]

Another way of considering virtue and ethics is via Michel Foucault’s work on governance and critique. In Judith Butler’s close analysis of Michel Foucault’s 1978 lecture “What is Critique” from The Politics of Truth, she focuses on the position of virtue in relation to critique, noting how “critique is always a critique of some instituted practice, discourse, episteme, institution, and it loses it character the moment in which it is abstracted from its operation and made to stand alone as a purely generalizable practice.”[16]  Butler talks of how, for Foucault, “critique is precisely a practice that not only suspends judgment …  but offers a new practice of values based on that very suspension.” [17]  Pointing to the way in which the practice of critique emerges from “the tear in the fabric of our epistemological web,”  she outlines that, for Foucault, this exposure of the limit of the epistemological field is linked with the practice of virtue, “as if virtue is counter to regulation and order, as if virtue itself is to be found in the risking of established order.” [18]  According to Foucault, the “signature mark” of the critical attitude and its particular virtue is governance, “how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them.” “I would therefore propose,” says Foucault, “as a very first definition of critique, this general characterization: the art of not being governed quite so much.”[19]

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] This entry was compiled from the entry on “Virtue Ethics,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/virtue/, accessed 21 December 2021; and the entry on “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/, accessed 21 Decem er 2021.

[2] “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[3] “Virtue Ethics,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[4] “Virtue Ethics,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[5] “Virtue Ethics,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[6] “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[7] “Virtue Ethics,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[8] “Virtue Ethics,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[9] “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[10] “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[11] “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[12] “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[13] “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[14] “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[15] “Virtue Ethics,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[16] Judith Butler, “What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,”  D. Ingram (ed) The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy, (London: Blackwell, 2002), 212.

[17] Butler, “What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,” 212.

[18] Butler, “What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,” 212.

[19] Foucault Michel, What Is Critique?” The Politics of Truth, (New York:  Semiotext(e), 2007), 41–82.

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Vulnerability

...the characteristics[1] of a person or group and their situation that influence their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of [danger or harm].[2]

The term vulnerability often evokes a normative sense of fragility, weakness or precarity to the subject of its use. However the understanding and determination of vulnerability involves a combination of factors or variables which may mean that vulnerability is neither static, absolute nor simplistic.[3] These variables and determinants include race, ethnicity, class, wealth status, employment status, disability and health status, immigration status, language skills, age, gender, nature of social networks and support systems, and even place or area of abode.[4]  

There is therefore a strong “people-environment” dynamic that needs to be reflected upon concurrently when speaking about vulnerability as it can be either positional, situational or both. A position of vulnerability embodied by individuals or groups, or a situation of vulnerability expressed by the environment, context or exogenous factors that create (new forms), exacerbate (increase an existing form) or compound (aggregate different forms) of harm. Harm is this context can be equated to causing suffering and injury,[5] but also to the varying degrees of intangible losses that can be suffered. In real terms vulnerability can be considered in varying degrees and magnitudes, with some people experiencing higher levels than others, even within a distinct or identifiable group or geography.

Thinking of vulnerabilities also brings to mind the socio-economic, political and power dynamics that may be at play in the determination, conferment and acknowledgement of vulnerability on a people, group or situation. This is important because vulnerabilities exist despite the lack of knowledge or its recognition by power brokers to prevent, mitigate, minimise or facilitate the recovery from harm. These underlying dynamics are often considered to be “drivers” of vulnerabilities.[6]

There are also other relational dynamics of vulnerability that depend on exposure and temporality. Especially considering how some people or groups are more prone to harm by virtue of their exposure to the source of harm. The latency of vulnerabilities that are only triggered by exposure have put a focus on the minimisation of exposure as a critical mitigation of vulnerability. And the temporality of vulnerabilities highlights the how the expression or experience of vulnerabilities may change over time (eg. specific health risks in the under-5 age group), or appear only as a function of time (eg. localised flooding in rainy seasons).

The language of “harm,” albeit helpful, may not fully capture the need to simply consider the effects or impacts of activities or engagements with vulnerable people and groups especially when impacts are not immediately deemed or manifested as harmful. This limitation on the understanding of vulnerabilities and impacts calls for a sense of caution and reflexivity in the progressive use of the term particularly for researchers. This includes a potential shift in the attempts and methods to understand vulnerabilities, in favour of approaches that are more co-produced, and centred on the knowledge and lived experiences of vulnerable groups and people themselves. Co-produced understandings of vulnerability also open up conversations about people’s “capacity” to protect themselves rather than just the “vulnerability” that limits them.[7]

 Written by Emmanuel Osuteye.

[1] B. Wisner, P. Blaikie, T. Cannon, and I. Davis, At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability and Disasters, 2nd edition, (London: Routledge, 2003), 11.

[2] The conceptualisation and use of the term is primarily drawn from the disaster risk management  literature. However the term “harm” has in this context been used more broadly to refer to “hazards.”

[3] B. Phillips and M. Fordham, “Introduction,” in Social Vulnerability to Disasters, eds. Brenda D. Phillips et al. (New York: CRC Press, 2010), 1–23.; and C. Burton, S. Rufat, and E. Tate, “Social Vulnerability,” in Vulnerability and Resilience to Natural Hazards, eds. S. Fuchs and T. Thaler (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 53–81.

[4] See for instance a discussion on indicators of vulnerability and approaches for “assessing” it by N. W. Brooks, N. Adger and P. M. Kelly, “The Determinants of Vulnerability and Adaptive Capacity at the National Level and the Implications for Adaptation,” Global Environmental Change 15, no. 2 (2005): 151–63.

[5] See further the elaboration on the ethical principle of “harm” by Y. Padan in this Lexicon.

[6] G. Frerks, J. Warner, J. and B. Weijs, “The Politics of Vulnerability and Resilience,” Ambient. Soc. 14, no. 2 (2011): 105–22.

[7] A. Allen, E. Osuteye, B. Koroma, and R. Lambert, “Unlocking Urban Risk Trajectories: Participatory Approaches to Uncover Risk Accumulation in Freetown’s Informal Settlements,” in Breaking Cycles of Risk Accumulation in African Cities, ed. M. Pelling (Nairobi: UN-Habitat, 2020).

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Wellbeing

I want to lay down this work, this burden, and let it be picked up or falter…to forge something new.[1]

Wellbeing is the degree to which you feel safe and supported enough in your body, mind, and spirit to undertake ethical and rigorous research. Ensuring your wellbeing requires multiple and overlapping support structures, often including supervisors, mentors, programme directors, administrative staff, colleagues, partners, family, and friends. Perhaps most critical, however, is your own practice of “reflexive openness.”[2]

One aspect of reflexive openness is identifying and communicating your boundaries: knowing what and who nurtures you and seeking out those activities and people, understanding what upsets you and why, and resting. Boundary-making can be more difficult than it sounds, especially if you feel anxious, exhausted, overwhelmed, or in danger, but repeatedly exceeding your limits can have serious consequences.[3] You may feel less energised or motivated, more volatile, or short-tempered. You may struggle to perceive emotional cues, be empathetic, or show care and compassion, including to the people closest to you and to your research participants. You may also be unkind to yourself. Adrenaline may enable you to push through for a time, but it is a temporary fix that carries risks of doing harm to yourself and others and producing work that falls short of your usual standards.[4]

Different people identify and communicate their limits differently. Western paradigms tend to medicalise boundary-making and pathologise people, presuming that distress or trauma are symptoms of an individual disorder that can and should be cured.[5] Finding support within this system usually requires people to narrate the harm they have experienced. This requirement fails to recognise that remaining silent or expressing yourself in other ways are forms of agency and, in some cases, survival strategies.[6] Protecting wellbeing – as a researcher, a supervisor, and as an institution – demands creating space for and normalising alternative forms of communication and understanding that distress and trauma are normal responses to challenging circumstances.

It is worth noting that while wellbeing and wellness may overlap, they are not the same. Social media is full of wellness entrepreneurs – often wealthy white women from the global North – who maintain that certain foods, types of exercise, and environments or experiences will promote health, radiance, and youthfulness.[7] Such practices may be part of how researchers care for themselves and their communities as they protect their boundaries, but the wellness industry often promotes them in neoliberal terms that restrict access to people who lack economic and other types of advantages. At best, wellness is a supplement, not a substitution, for the wellbeing that springs from the work of reflexive openness.

Feeling secure in your wellbeing does not mean avoiding negative emotions or experiences, which are valuable parts of the research process.[8] Even after you identify and communicate your limits, you may still go past them. This could be because you made a misjudgement, that you tried to stretch your limits to new extents, or because something happened that was outside of your control, whether in your research or in another part of your life. There is no shame in this; indeed, this is why it is so vital to build and maintain systems of support. The relationships, tools, and structures that comprise your systems sustain you and allow you to take risks, reflect, learn, and heal. [9]

Written by Ariana Markowitz.

[1] Araby Smyth, Jess Linz, and Lauren Hudson, “A Feminist Coven in the University,” Gender, Place and Culture 27, no. 6 (June 2020): 868

[2] Kai Thaler, “Reflexivity and Temporality in Researching Violent Settings: Problems with the Replicability and Transparency Regime,” Geopolitics 26, no. 1 (2021): 18-44.

[3] Elaine Batty, “The Emotional Turmoil of Contract Research,” Emotion, Space and Society 28 (August 2018): 18_23.

[4] Emma Williamson, Alison Gregory, Hilary Abrahams, Nadia Aghtaiem et al., “Secondary Trauma: Emotional Safety in Sensitive Research,” Journal of Academic Ethics 18, no. 1 (March 2020): 55-70.

[5] Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, translated by Rachel Gomme (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

[6] Mo Hume and Polly Wilding, “Beyond Agency and Passivity: Situating a Gendered Articulation of Urban Violence in Brazil and El Salvador,” Urban Studies 57, no 2 (February 2020): 249–66.

[7] Rachel O'Neill, “ ‘Glow from the Inside Out:’ Deliciously Ella and the Politics of ‘Healthy Eating,” European Journal of Cultural Studies (June 2020): 1–22.

[8] Ariana Markowitz, “The Better to Break and Bleed With: Research, Violence, and Trauma,” Geopolitics 26, no. 1 (2021): 94-117.

[9] Ariana Markowitz, "Researching, Risk and Wellbeing,” Practising Ethics, https://practisingethics.org/practice.

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