Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Though ethics committees’ duty is to protect research subjects, they mediate research legitimacy, determine which projects can be undertaken and what must be left unsaid. This talk discusses (self-)silencing as structure and experience in human sciences scholars’ dealings with those gatekeepers.

Paper long abstract

Scholars in the human sciences have long examined tensions between ethical concerns and the demands of regulatory compliance emanating from institutional research ethics committees (EC). First formally established in the 1970s in the USA, ECs have become over the decades a basic feature of research worldwide, and a central element of the “audit culture” that permeates academic institutions. Critics have described their increasing punctiliousness and their expansion to all disciplines (a process amplified since the promulgation in 2016 of the EU “General Data Protection Regulation”), as well as the extent to which they reflect the epistemologies of the biomedical sciences, are dominated by specialists from experimental disciplines, and tend to reject or constrain types and sites of knowledge-production associated with the social and human sciences. ECs have the power to shape and block research projects; they delimit what counts as legitimate and thereby, the form of knowledge that is produced. In critics’ view, their main consequence beyond individual circumstances is a form of systemic loss for the world of knowledge.

However, straightforward coercive silencing is not usual. What cannot be proposed or undertaken is more often justified in terms of ethical restraint, or takes the form of anticipatory compliance on scholars’ part. Self-silencing can be understood negatively as self-censorship, or positively as ethical competence (valuable per se, but also necessary for professional survival). Either way, it has professional, institutional, and epistemic impact. This presentation will sketch such a situation and discuss several first-person documented cases.