Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the assumptions about power and ethics associated with the collaborative turn in anthropology and other social sciences. It argues that assumptions of a subject’s lack of power, and her /his willingness to be heard, risk to reinforce – rather than minimize - inequalities.

Paper long abstract:

Collaboration is often seen, by the anthropological literature on collaborative ethnography, as an ethical way to minimize issues of power and representation. Similarly, many scholars from other disciplines (e.g. sociology, psychology) have emphasized the importance of participatory approaches, in order to overcome the inequalities between researchers and research subjects. But what does it mean, in contexts of inequalities, to be ethical? What are the definitions and the underlying assumptions about power and ethics? By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and different experiences of collaborative research, this paper critically considers the assumptions about power and ethics associated with the collaborative turn. I argue that the unilateral assessment of a subject's supposed lack of power, and her /his willingness to collaborate and to be heard, risk to reinforce inequalities and the researcher vs. research subject dichotomy. Such assumptions obfuscate the complex positionality of research subjects, and pre-empty the ways people are willing, if so, to collaborate and to claim their voices. I argue that adopting a mode of "collaborative research uncertainty" can help us to examine and reconfigure ethical ways of knowledge production and collaborations.