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- Convenors:
-
Bregje de Kok
(University of Amsterdam)
Sreeparna Chattopadhyay (FLAME University)
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- Discussants:
-
Maya Unnithan
(University of Sussex)
Bregje de Kok (University of Amsterdam)
Sreeparna Chattopadhyay (FLAME University)
Annelieke Driessen (University of Amsterdam)
Nadine Beckmann (University of Roehampton)
- Format:
- Roundtable
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 19 January, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This roundtable will wrestle with tensions engendered by collaborations between anthropology and public health/biomedicine. Drawing from our lived experiences, we will problematize ethics, data, and accountability in interdisciplinary research to make such engagements equitable and constructive.
Long Abstract:
‘Like Greek tragedy, the search for ethical purity is a search doomed to failure’ (Harper, 2007, p. 2236)
Anthropology, and public health and medical sciences conceptualize ethics, methods, and data (how to collect, who collects, what is evidence) very differently, resulting in epistemological and ethical discomforts for researchers in interdisciplinary projects. These are exacerbated by legal and insitutional demands, in HICs and also increasingly in LMICs, to limit institutional liability. Demands to comply with rigidly defined ethics and data-management frameworks derived from other disciplines can affect the quality and indeed the ethics of ethnography. Ethics and data-management are entwined with disciplinary notions about accountability (How? To whom? What for?), which may create further tensions and distrust in interdisciplinary teams, especially given the rise of ‘audit culture’ in academia and global health projects. Biomedicine’s and anthropology’s colonial heritage, adds further complexity to dialogues about justice, beneficence and autonomy.
This panel will explore how to navigate these challenges, guided by the following questions:
1. How do we engage, on equal terms, with different disciplinary expectations of ‘ethical’ research and data- management?
2. How do we resolve dilemmas emerging from a clash of ethical principles? Can disciplinary ethical tensions co-exist?
3. How can we best ‘ translate’ and apply medical anthropological concerns around ethics and data to public health and medical science?
Avoiding the creation of reductive dichotomies between ‘good anthropological ethics’ and ‘bad public health ethics’, we use concrete research experiences to jointly work and live through these epistemological tensions.