A Form to Be Signed

This blog post is part of the symposium “The Rooms We Wanted: What a Year of Decolonisation Seminars Revealed about a Law School”, reflecting on the Decolonisation Seminar Series at the University of Edinburgh.

Decolonial theory, with its focus on power relations and rejection of established knowledge-producing structures and practices, can be highly useful when applied to research ethics in legal scholarship. Within this seminar series, research ethics was understood to include the institutional and research design aspects of empirical legal research, as conducted in universities in the UK. The ethics application procedure, along with the various institutions which underpin it (data privacy regulations, university-wide and departmental guidelines, best practice advice from professional associations, and ethics review committees), presents itself as open to all academics who seek to engage in “ethical” research. When the presumptions about what counts as ethical behaviour are explored in greater detail, they reveal that these essential elements of academic life also gatekeep particular ways of producing knowledge. This leads to the institutional preference of certain research methods over others. Following Walter D. Mignolo, in order to critique the coloniality of epistemic power, we must first capture and understand it and the axes along which it unfolds. One of those axes is deceptively neutral and technical: the ethics review process.

Institutional Preferences and Extractive Research

These systemic preferences, and the way they shape what kind of research takes place within a university, were the focus of the conversation between Dr Morshed Mannan (University of Edinburgh) and Dr Rebecca Tapscott (University of Glasgow). As both researchers and board members of their respective departments’ ethics committees, Morshed and Rebecca could speak to the ethics review process from the perspective of both researchers and committee members. With early career researchers and academic staff in attendance, the event explored the Eurocentric, scientific evolution of the ethics review process. Although developing into its modern form largely within the medical and natural sciences, ethics review has been imported into the social sciences largely without disciplinary modifications. This direct transposition is exacerbated by the lack of progress that medical research ethics has undergone, clinical trial procedures have remained largely the same since the 1960s. A framework that is rarely revised is one that does not confront its assumptions. Procedures built around a particular idea of the research subject –  contained, documented, and consenting on paper – do not reflect the different circumstances and vulnerabilities of the communities social researchers actually work with.

This Eurocentric, scientific evolution of the ethics review process has led to an institutional preference for certain forms of empirical scholarship over others, perpetuating the production of only select forms of knowledge deemed “rigorous enough” for the institution. Therefore, certain ways of doing legal research become not only preferred, but expected, creating epistemic inequalities. For example, the concept of informed consent, which requires prior written approval demonstrating the interviewee or participant’s full awareness of what kind of project she is taking part in, assumes that the research is taking place within certain spaces, such as “a classroom, a homeless shelter, or a hospital emergency room”. This baseline assumption that research takes place in spaces which are contained, where the participants’ social and professional roles (“patient”, “nurse”, “family member”) are clearly demarcated and susceptible to neutral external observation, understands concepts such as harm in very particular ways. For instance, some ethics review guidelines, consciously adapted to the social sciences, specifically changed what is understood as harm (or the risk of harm) to participants: in 2003, the American Psychological Association updated its ethics code. Previously, it had focussed on the risks of physical harm to participants. The updated ethics code now prohibits deceptive research (where participants are unaware of their observation) if it leads to physical pain or “severe emotional distress”, therefore, expanding its definition of harm. These adaptations, however, are not uniform across universities and disciplines which come under the umbrella term “social sciences”.

It is noted, furthermore, that none of these updated guidelines acknowledge the international institutional imbalances which are generated by national and international funding bodies. International research partnerships, which are increasingly common ways of funding long-term research projects, are usually structured around global north-south consortia led by universities located in the global north. This power, which leads to global north universities deciding much of the project’s trajectory, “from the research design and implementation phase to the interpretation and communication of the findings”, strongly influences the kind of research outputs that are ultimately generated. Decisions made by ethics committees in these universities therefore have global standard-setting effects. While research partners located in the global south are often the sites of fieldwork, much of the “thinking” and publication takes place in the global north: here, we see a familiar pattern of extraction (of knowledge, of institutional resources) from the south.

Whose form? Whose consent?

These imbalanced dynamics of knowledge production, both within universities and across inter-university research partnerships were the subject of much discussion during the event. Morshed relied upon his experience as head of the University of Edinburgh Law School’s research ethics committee to explain how the format of existing ethics application forms revealed an institutional presumption that written informed consent would be obtained prior to researchers entering the field. The onus was on the researcher to demonstrate that it would not be necessary. Attendees shared their experiences of conducting empirical research in societies where written communication is not the norm, and thus written consent would appear out of step with the community the researcher was exploring. Morshed agreed that this rigid approach to ethics review, which did not allow for sufficient cultural sensibility, created an expectation within the Law School that research projects which did not include prior written informed consent would encounter significant difficulty in getting approval by the committee. A committee that is familiar whith, or at least open to, decolonial thinking which accepts a multiplicity of ways of producing knowledge, would understand that written consent is one of the many ways in which research subjects can meaningfully participate. At the same time, a research ethics committee which is more open to critical research, such as autoethnographic research designs which do not present the researcher as neutral but rather as an embedded part of her environment and the research output she produces, would lead to a more collaborative relationship between the researcher and the committee, opening up new avenues for knowledge production.

This critical discussion of informed consent, and the limits it places upon researchers, should not be confused with a disregard for the agency of vulnerable communities. Indeed, some criticisms of informed consent can fall into the trap of further silencing participants, by forcing their contributions to fit predetermined doctrinal frameworks. This reduces interviewees to sources of data and reinforces their passivity in the research. It undermines what ethical research actually runs on – trust and respect between researcher and participant. Decolonising research ethics must involve, as was discussed during the event, a substantial appreciation for the lives and situations in which researchers find participants: the researcher must meet the participant where they are at, in ways which are genuine and specific to the research project (Leinius: 72).

The preference for certain ways of doing research privileges procedures and outputs modelled on the medical and natural sciences. By expecting reasons which are “strong enough” to justify not obtaining written consent, the knowledge produced by those whose methods and whose communities do not conform to that template is implicitly and institutionally understood as the exception to the norm. The ethics committee then appears less to be a neutral gatekeeper and rather to be one of the mechanisms through which institutions entrench whose practices for rigorous academic research can become “best practices” for the discipline in general.

A testimonial provided by third-year doctoral candidate, Chloe Young, sheds insight into the ways in which decolonising our understanding of ethics can meaningfully impact our research design and approach to interviews, particularly when conducted in sensitive settings, such as fieldwork with vulnerable participants. In her reflection, she explores how attending the session and learning about the institutional preference towards formal procedures governing research-participant interactions helped to explain the dissonance she felt between her experience gaining ethics approval and conducting the fieldwork.

Chloe Young:

The Decolonial Research and Methodologies Seminar series offered an insightful platform for applying decolonial theory to a range of different perspectives and types of research methods. The seminar’s centred collaboration and the exchange of ideas, making it a particularly inclusive and thought-provoking environment. As such, the seminars offered a means of engaging with decolonial theories in an intellectually stimulating setting of mutual exchange, where all voices felt not only welcome but valued. The different seminars constituting the series simultaneously affirmed and challenged the perspectives I arrived with, each inviting me to reflect and consider of how I could better apply the decolonial lens to my doctoral research into the gendered experience of the night time economy. In particular, the panel exploring institutional ethics led by Dr Rebecca Tapscott and Dr Morshed Mannan was especially thought provoking given its relationship and relevancy to my own research. The seminar led me to question how the ethical frameworks underpinning my research methodology, and empirical fieldwork, could be re-thought to enhance my doctoral project, which includes observations and interviews with women in vulnerable situations: at night, in petrol stations, bars, and clubs

During my fieldwork, I had the distinct feeling that my subjects and I were speaking past one another: I was approaching workers who often worked in informal, transient occupations to sign documents which informed them of their privacy rights under UK and EU regulations or assured them that interview notes would be safely stored in university data centres. Many appeared confused – what did the EU have to do with them? My ethics forms, which used a formal register and assumed a certain level of literacy and general education from the participant, did not align at all with the diverse and difficult lives that my interviewees led.

This difficulty was taken up by the session on institutional ethics, where we discussed the disjuncture between procedural ethics and ethics in practice, with the former inviting us to make binary choices that don’t always reflect the realities of social research, a product of their origins outside of the social sciences. Instead, the seminar leaders advocated for a movement towards an ethical paradigm that destabilises the traditional power imbalances of empirical work and recognises that academia’s current version of ethics divides research and “truth”. Separating the pursuit of objective truth from the ways in which truth is sought and embodied, they suggest, neglects the subjective realities and power dynamics wrapped up in how we understand ‘truth’. This aligned with my experience of doing the fieldwork: I felt uncomfortable, once I was in the field, with the ethics forms I had submitted, which assumed I would be extracting discrete and discernible soundbites from the environment which I could easily include in my predetermined theoretical framework. What I found, instead, was that each participant was experiencing, and sharing with me, their own, embodied type of “truth”: their life story and experiences were rich, real, and messy – something I, looking back on my ethics application, would have had difficulty putting into words before a committee.

This is a strand of thought I have carried forward in my own work, which now includes a greater engagement with autoethnographical methods. As a result of the seminar series, I felt encouraged to include more of my own experience navigating the night-time economy into my research, and to assert my own experience as an essential part of what it means to do fieldwork. Drawing from the seminar, I hope that this engagement disrupts traditional research methods’ divorce of “participant” and “researcher” and make the subjective self a primary subject of study. Ethics committees which are open to research that abandons notions of neutrality may lead to the approval of research which more comprehensively explores power dynamics within the field and which more accurately speaks to the difficult labour of creating relationships of respect and trust. As such, the seminar prompted me to ask myself what research is, how I came to this understanding, and how a decolonial lens can subvert the objectivity that has traditionally characterised academic research.

Reflections by the organisers:

As Chloe Young notes, the distance between participant and researcher is encouraged in institutional ethics. Given that her research interests play out within informal and often dangerous settings, such as the night time economy, this distance only reinforces the assumption that such places cannot be captured by legal theories and methods which rely upon a certain degree of formalised interpersonal relationships, where the line between researcher and participant is clearly marked (usually, by the participant signing consent and participation forms). Through her participation in the seminar, she was able to articulate the discomfort she had experienced during her research and, more importantly, include these reflections as part of her methodology in her thesis. This conscious inclusion of the researcher as part of the fieldwork creates an opportunity to reveal the power dynamics between researchers and participants – particularly where research involves at-risk communities, as was explored in Chloe Young’s reflection. Where the researcher also reflects upon the unconscious biases she may have brought into the field, and which perhaps had been surfaced and challenged during the fieldwork, there is real value in bringing these reflections to a wider academic audience. Research which assumes the researcher will remain neutral throughout the project, remaining unchanged throughout the fieldwork, only serves to mask those power differentials.

Instead, as shown by Chloe Young’s reflection, the ways in which the ethics review process shapes the kind of research which universities are willing to support can affect how the researcher enters the field. Beyond the immediate benefits of decolonising procedural ethics, which include more diverse research agendas and generating a greater sense of collaboration between the committee and the researcher, it leads to better research overall. By departing from a strict presumption in favour of a particular way of gaining consent from research subjects and moving towards a more case-by-case approach to ethical research design, law school ethics review committees can invite the researcher to make visible, and openly challenge, the hierarchy between herself and the research participants. These reflexive practices, when institutionalised, can help denaturalise the extractive nature of fieldwork research, particularly when conducted with vulnerable communities such as the ones Chloe Young was immersed in.

Recalling the centre-margin dynamics which decolonial thought seeks to capture and critique, and acknowledging the consequential role institutional ethics plays in determining what kind of research takes place within a law school, the importance of including institutional ethics in an initiative to decolonise legal academia becomes apparent. The emergence of scholars such as Dr Morshed Mannan and Dr Rebecca Tapscott, who sit on review committees whilst being cognizant of the limits and origins of these systems, as well as the open discussion of these limitations within the wider academic community, may encourage the proposal of innovative and previously undesirable research designs to committees who are more willing, and more conceptually equipped, to hear them.