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Paper short abstract:

The main aim is to gain insights into principles that guide research practice in migration and development research in Czechia and to critically discuss ways forward including drawbacks associated with simple imitation of procedures taken from different disciplinary and/or geographical contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Research in migration & development often includes sensitive topics and different cultural, political, or socioeconomic settings, resulting in a plethora of ethical dilemmas. However, the role of ethical research committees and guidelines varies in different geographical contexts and across experimental and non-experimental science disciplines. In some cases, this leads to underdevelopment of research ethics awareness on both the systemic and individual level. Consequently, ethical aspects of research tend to be reduced to the issue of informed consent or publishing ethics. To our knowledge, there is surprisingly little debate about ethical regulation and practice in the context of non-experimental social sciences dealing with migration and development research in Czechia, including research that involves fieldwork in the Global South. On the bright side, this potentially leaves space for the establishment of an alternative way of approaching research ethics to create a more reflexive and just research culture that addresses broader power imbalances and responsibilities in research. We adopt a qualitative case-study approach to gain insights into principles that guide research practice in this sociocultural context (including wider regional and global trends). Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is used to analyse both the existing ethical protocols and semi-structured in-depth interviews with researchers having experience from various contexts of the Global South. The main aim of this paper is to critically discuss ways forward including drawbacks associated with simple imitation of procedures taken from different disciplinary and/or geographical contexts.