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- Convenor:
-
Sangeeta Chattoo
(University of York)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 19 January, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will explore the conceptual and ethical challenges of working across disciplinary boundaries, and negotiating relations with non-academic research partners, whilst engaging critically with public health policies/interventions in low/middle-income settings.
Long Abstract:
Medical anthropologists have long since worked across disciplinary boundaries. National and international funding bodies now expect us to have established relationships with academic and non-academic collaborators. Whilst this process assumes a notion of equity and co-authorship in research, it also poses significant conceptual and ethical tensions in both how we design fieldwork and conceive our relationship with our interlocutors. Researching in low and middle-income settings, where forms of governance of health and research might be different from ours, working with non-academic partners can be both insightful and challenging. These tensions are likely to be heightened due to the impact of the current pandemic, exposing the fault-lines of weak and poorly resourced health infrastructures and underlying structural inequalities in health.
This panel invites papers that reflect on the pragmatic, methodological and theoretical factors influencing our choice of research partners/collaborators. Hence, how do we conceive of and balance our own academic interests and expectations with those of funding bodies and research protocols with a pre-determined ‘impact plan’? To what extent might such funding constraints actually help translate the research findings into benefits for our interlocutors in the field? Importantly, how do we draw moral boundaries around normative silence and ethical interventions, in working closely with state and community collaborators responsible for implementing ‘controversial’ health policies (for instance, genetic screening of children in schools)?
Submissions are particularly welcome from colleagues and doctoral students facing increasingly restrictive state regulations of research across national boundaries (as in China and India).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 19 January, 2022, -Luciann Blake (LSE) Aleena Numaan (The London School of Economics)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the 'insight' as a site of tension between anthropologists and their non-academic partners in a hospital redesign project in SW England. Epistemological differences on research outcomes and ethical differences around data sharing demonstrate the specific difficulties of such work
Paper long abstract:
Various epistemological and ethical conflicts between anthropologists and their non-academic partners can be brought together through an excavation of the term ‘insight’, increasingly used in public policy discourses to refer to the ostensibly discrete and replicable products of qualitative research. Beyond its colloquial meaning of a deep and accurate understanding of crucial information, the term often denotes legibility, applicability and discreteness. To explore this idiom, this paper draws on the authors’ experience in the South West of England contributing to a hospital redesign strategy that emphasises community-based co-production of new service design. The distinctive needs of the local area – marked by relative deprivation and a low-wage economy, both exacerbated by 18 months’ impact of Covid-19 – speak to medical anthropological concerns with the fundamentally social and structural dimensions of health and wellbeing. Our project established a novel advisory role that encompassed both research and consultation to inform future efforts in community outreach. In practice, our work as researchers was broadly better received than our initial advisory suggestions. In this paper we attribute this to epistemological differences regarding the outcomes and immediacy of research; and ethical differences regarding the sharing of said results across professional boundaries. Negotiated through references to insights, these differences became a site of productive but continual tension in our approach to applied research. This reflection on the demands of interdisciplinary partnership may contribute to the development of more appropriate translatory devices for medical anthropology.
Kazimuddin Ahmed (University of Helsinki) Andrea Butcher (University of Helsinki) Salla Sariola (University of Helsinki) Lara Bezzina (Independent Scholar)
Paper short abstract:
This paper narrates how researchers and practitioners in West Africa and Europe adapted a participatory video process for long distance online training for research. It discusses how this adaptation challenged some of the fundamental aspects of participatory visual methods in research and practice.
Paper long abstract:
Our paper narrates experiences from a multi-local online participatory visual methods (PVM) collaboration between researchers in Benin, Burkina Faso, Finland and Malta. Conducted between April and June 202, the initiative was a collective effort to generate information on antibiotic use and antimicrobial resistance in West Africa. The broader vision of the project was for the collaborators to facilitate science communication among their communities as well as to convey community concerns to policymakers for long term change.
While the pandemic closed the doors to the original plan of an on-location programme, it opened other avenues of exploring processes of PVM. More importantly, it led to a new horizon where existing technical and methodological norms with regard to PVM were radically challenged and negotiated, creating new debates and possibilities that those involved with the project never thought of. Three key learnings emerged from this process.
a) Lack of resources led to extensive bricolage/ DIY/ jugaad that demystified technological challenges. This enhanced ownership and autonomy of the process and rearranged the relationships between the bricoleur (Levi-Straus 1962) and conventional PVM.
b) Redesigning an on-location training module to an online format made some fundamental changes to a participatory process, posing new questions for the idea of participation.
c) An observation of the facilitator-participant relationship revealed factors that could be effectively viewed as facilitating a form of decolonisation of visual methods.
Using narratives and visuals, we aim to present our story of adapting to the challenges posed by the pandemic for continued engagement with PVM.
Maria Berghs (De Montfort University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, three research sites (Sierra Leone, United Kingdom and the online space) are examined to illustrate how collaborations can be unethical despite ethics of care frameworks, how ethics can confound research methods and theory, and how ethics can develop as critique.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I discuss several research sites noting limitations of collaboration, confounders and ethical misgivings. In co-produced and participatory research conducted with the voluntary sector in Sierra Leone, research was openly welcomed on the neglected public health issue of sickle cell. The research aims and objectives were also ethically set by the female voluntary sector partners but there were limitations of ethics of care when research data involves how partners, policy-makers and practice deal with violence socially. In a second site. in the Midlands, during the COVID-19 pandemic with longest lockdown and highest rates of deaths, we were asked to respond to urgent issue facing sickle cell patients in NHS care but our experiences with funders, unethical recruitment and results confounded - in that it was illustrative of a much wider systemic issue to do with racism, lack of care in NHS and limitations of the very theory and methods we were using. Lastly, I turn to the online space as ethnographic site to highlight ethical abandonment and loss. There ethical misgivings about ableism and how the disability community have been articulating those concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrate critique and how a new empirical-ethics is developing independently.
Sangeeta Chattoo (University of York)
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on some of the ethical challenges posed by working across disciplinary boundaries, especially with non-academic partners, in field settings where health and research governance might be very different from our own. The main questions I raise here is, how do we draw moral boundaries around our relationship with partners in the field, beyond the formal contractual norms? In particular, often our inadvertent observations of their work or a particular aspect of their practice itself is a focus of a difficult ethical engagement. How do we decide whether and when to intervene and when to maintain normative silence? The paper draws on field notes and dilemmas raised in working closely with a community organisation (AD) in India, whilst trying to understand and engage with their commitment and support for a state sponsored community genetics programme for sickle cell disease. Some of these dilemmas are more easily resolved by refocusing on the context or the social milieu within which such public health interventions and the work of non-governmental organisations (mediating between the state, healthcare system and the local communities) are located. Some practices, however, not only seem incomprehensible but also unsafe. I conclude with some thoughts on the possible modes of intervention, when faced with such practices, and the limits of what might be considered normative silence as an ethical choice on local part of fieldwork confronted with unsafe practice or a controversial policy intervention, what is a normative silence and interventions in our relationship with partners that one considers ethical? The paper whilst negotiating and working closely with community/non-governmental organisations responsible for implementing what are arguably quite controversial health policies implemented by the state (for instance, genetic screening of children in schools)?