Paper short abstract:

If ethical committees focussed on the ethics of the researcher, rather than the research and the researched, what would this mean for future anthropological research in terms of training and ethical review?

Paper long abstract:

Ethics committees exist at many levels in institutions, and are variously nearer or more distant from departments of anthropology and anthropological understandings. As part of an explicit endeavour to make the process of ethical review 'objective' and 'rigorous', committees often have a variety of people from many disciplines to review research, based on the premise that 'research' should be presented so that 'anyone' could make a judgement of ethical standards rather than a specialist in the discipline/ field. Other mechanisms of objectivity include the forms devised by ethical committees, as while they include many required fields to detail the research design, participants and methods, there are minimal fields for the inclusion of information about the researcher. Indeed the researcher is not only largely absent on paper, but some committees do not invite researchers to their deliberations or consult them at any point in the process of ethical review. In this paper, I argue that rather than ensuring objectivity these mechanisms introduce multiple and often conflicting subjectivities, and the failure to adequately include the researcher in ethical judgements introduces the assumption that 'research' in itself can be ethical, regardless of the person who carries it out. Drawing on the ASA Ethical Guidelines (2011) I consider what ethical review might look like if the researcher is placed more explicitly at the heart of the judgements made within the ethical review process, and what this would mean for the teaching of research ethics, research practice and the future of ethical review.