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- Convenors:
-
Abdul-Gafar Oshodi
(Lagos State University)
Susann Baller (Centre Marc Bloch Berlin)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Politics and International Relations (x) Decoloniality & Knowledge Production (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S76
- Sessions:
- Saturday 3 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the politics and practices of research ethics in African contexts. It inquires past and present experiences, norms and institutional settings, and it raises the question of how research ethics may impact future research and research collaboration in and on Africa.
Long Abstract:
African futures depend on trusted, reliable and accessible knowledge production in and on Africa. This explains a renewed interest in research ethics. Not only has research ethics been institutionalised in many educational institutions in Africa, but an Africa-centred ethics is gaining momentum. Moreover, ethical issues in research collaborations between Global South and North partners, and decolonization of ethics among other issues are to be considered. Stakeholders are becoming more aware of the need to accommodate African-centred ethics protocols for researches on the continent while ethical responses to the so-called “mosquito” science, or “helicopter research” are gaining traction. In this context, however, researchers, participants, communities, and funders are becoming aware of the need for, and challenges in existing African approaches. Yet, there is little documentation of what has worked – or haven’t – in most of these cases. This panel welcomes researchers who share experiences and lessons of how they have engaged in research ethics in their work in Africa. The panel asks how norms of what is “ethical” have been established, and it raises questions on how institutional contexts, and issues of funding impact ethical research. In addition, the panel will also welcome interventions that seeks to (re)imagine newer or alternative approaches to conducting ethical research in Africa. Thus, the panel invites papers that not only share useful experiences of how, for instance, institutionalised ethics application work(ed)s, but the panel also discusses how some of its challenges can be – or have been – meaningfully addressed in the African context.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 3 June, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
This study assessed the operational characteristics of 50% RECs in Ghana. Bioethicists were underrepresented on the RECs aside limited funding and absence of a national ethics commission as the major challenges of the RECs. The RECs assessed could be described as being theoretically functional.
Paper long abstract:
Introduction:
Eighteen Research Ethics Committees (RECs) were operational in Ghana as at 2020. This study was conducted to assess the operational characteristics of the RECs to determine their preparedness to advance the conduct of ethical research.
Methods:
The census approach was adopted where all the Chairpersons or Administrators of the 18 RECs were contacted out of which nine (9) declined to participate. The quantitative data was analysed using descriptive statistics while the qualitative data was analyzed based on the principle of grounded theory.
Results:
Two-thirds of the RECs were universities or research-based institutions. The majority of the RECs (87.5%) had been operational for more than 5 years with half of them indicating that the strategic focus of their institutions led to their establishment. The RECs were composed of members with varied backgrounds but bioethicists were generally underrepresented on the RECs. Six (75.0%) of the RECs indicated that they have organised capacity-building activities for their members but fewer of these focused on researchers and community members. Limited access to adequate funding, absence of a national research ethics commission were some predominant challenges reported by the RECs.
Discussion:
In line with the mandate of RECs and other indicators for assessing the efficiency of RECs, those in Ghana assessed could be described as being theoretically functional. They have been receiving, reviewing and approving research protocols in addition to organising capacity-building activities for their members. The absence of a national ethics authority in Ghana leaves the RECs largely unregulated at the national level.
Paper short abstract:
Some institutions and funders commonly recommend that social researchers use written consent forms to acquire informed consent. This paper will detail the emergence of this trend before arguing, with examples from Zambia, that consent forms are inappropriate for certain types of social research.
Paper long abstract:
It has become common for some institutions, funders, and national bodies to routinely recommend or insist that qualitative researchers conducting fieldwork in African countries use written consent forms to acquire informed consent. This paper details the emergence of this trend within institutions in the ‘Global North’ before detailing how it has begun to affect research in African countries, including North-South collaborative projects. It will then consider the reasons why signed consent forms are not appropriate for certain types of social research in some contexts. Drawing upon the author’s recent research experiences in Zambia, it argues that written consent procedures are not always good at ensuring respondents are genuinely informed, that they are often insensitive, and that they can be detrimental to the quality of research. It concludes that, to meaningfully address these issues, both funders and ethics committees should be flexible enough to give serious consideration to a range of methods for obtaining consent, rather than promoting a narrow orthodoxy.
Paper short abstract:
Based on failed ethnographic research in Democratic Republic of the Congo, this paper discusses how the realities of complex research terrains in politically unstable contexts outweigh well intended ethical considerations, presenting unique considerations on how to conduct ethical research.
Paper long abstract:
Conducting ethical research in politically unstable African contexts presents unique challenges for researchers as they navigate protection of participants, safety considerations, power imbalances and extreme unpredictability. While researchers may have good intentions in research design, ethical considerations can also hinder research, calling for context specific ethics in research. This paper is based on reflections, case studies and comparison of two periods of ethnographic research conducted in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2019 and 2022, over six months, with female artisanal miners. Placing these two periods of fieldwork, one which was relatively successful and the other which largely failed, in dialogue, I seek to explore the following questions: What does it mean to conduct ethical research in African states that exist in contexts of governance without government? Who decides what constitutes ethical research? How can ethical research be reconciled with the practical dimensions of conducting research in contexts of political instability? How does the researcher’s gender affect these processes?
In response, this paper explores how well-intended measures to gain research permissions from relevant local authorities crippled the research projects to varying degrees, primarily due to bureaucratic processes. In addition, a widespread emphasis on ‘protecting’ the female researcher blocked access to field sites, revealing additional gendered dimensions to research ethics and practice. This paper considers how research may fail in complex terrains where the realities of logistical challenges outweigh well intended ethical considerations to research, presenting unique considerations and lessons on what it means to conduct ethical research.
Paper short abstract:
Based on a research project that studied non-state actors and Chinese environmental footprints in Ghana, this paper sheds some light on the challenges confronting research ethics in Africa. This intervention is hinged on the 4Ps (Place, People, Precedent, and Principles) that guided the project.
Paper long abstract:
There appears to be institutional support for promoting ethics in Africa but local researchers are still confronted with fundamental challenges and difficulties that may upend gains. Yet, these challenges and difficulties go beyond the institutional and can extend to the researchers’ worldview and positionality, funders’ commitments, participants’ expectations, timing, and legacy questions among others. The situation can be further complicated when researchers have little ethical precedence, as the case of Africa-China studies appear to suggest. It is against this background that this paper offers a discussion of ethical conundrums confronting researchers in Africa in general and specifically discusses ethics and Africa-China scholarship from an experiential perspective. With a focus on ethics, I will share my experience of researching how/why non-state actors engage Chinese environmental footprints in Ghana. Adopting autoethnography, my experience will be discussed within the context of the 4Ps (which stands for Place, People, Principle and Precedent) – i.e. four reflective and integral elements of the Global Ethics Toolkit co-developed by researchers and other stakeholders across several countries. Grounded in experiential learning, the paper will conclude by inviting a conversation on the workability (or otherwise) of three pathways to address the identified ethical conundrums.
Paper short abstract:
Mathare residents are tired of the research buzz and disillusioned by unmet promises of research impact. Following an actionresearch with Mathare CBOs we unpack regressive research practices, offer a robust methodology for community research collectives and debate what ethical research may look like
Paper long abstract:
The past two decades have seen a significant increase in the quantity of research within informal urban settlements. Mathare, an informal settlement of 206,564 residents in Nairobi, Kenya is no exception. Residents have for 2 years vocalized their disapproval of research duplication, extractive practices, and unfulfilled promises of scientific research. CBOs have set up a network, Mathare Special Planning Area Research Collective (MSPARC), to cocreate a more ethical and collective research strategy, one that not only includes residents more centrally in the research process, but also connects scientific and community researchers, opening up the knowledge network.
Conventional ethical protocols treat research as an individual enterprise. An alternative ethical perspective situates research as part of a collective enterprise and recenters the margins of knowledge production. Scientific researchers are situated as part of a larger research collective and their projects are embedded into local research histories. Critically, the knowledge produced remains at the community-level as a tool for civic action.
This paper explores the vision of such a research collective and the iterative steps necessary to build one that is inclusive and impactful. We base this on a pilot in Mathare, where researchers from Delft, Erasmus, and Leiden University in the Netherlands partner with local CBOs and MSPARC, to clean-up the research waste in Mathare, make it accessible for the community and researchers and design a methodology for building and running a research collective. This aims at offering a new approach to ethical research that can be useful and replicable across contexts.
Paper short abstract:
This paper uses David Graeber’s work on the moral grounds of economic relations as a vantage point from which to reflect on the ethics of giving back in field research, drawing on my own fieldwork experiences in Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka as well as examples from existing literature.
Paper long abstract:
This paper uses David Graeber’s work on the moral grounds of economic relations as a vantage point from which to reflect on the ethics of giving back in field research, drawing on my own fieldwork experiences in Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka as well as examples from existing literature. I argue that Graeber’s exposition of different moral logics for economic relations – hierarchy, exchange and communism – provides a valuable set of conceptual distinctions for thinking through what is owed by, and to, researchers in different research interactions. Engaging with these multiple moral logics highlights the diversity of ethical interactions researchers might have during fieldwork. It also raises important questions about which moral logics come to frame research relationships and the freedom of participants and others to choose the relative position they occupy in relationships with researchers. My approach, therefore, responds to the danger of researchers setting the terms of ethical interaction, through distant institutional processes and practices built on logics of exchange, in ways that might constrain the ability of interlocutors to meaningfully articulate their own positions in fieldwork relations.
Note: This conference paper is based on a journal article published in Qualitative Research in 2022 (https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941221129802)