Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
Accepted Paper:
“Nothing about us without us”: the politics of representation and (in)justice during fieldwork encounters
Keira Pratt-Boyden
(University of Kent)
This paper reflects on ethical dilemmas during fieldwork with mental health service survivor/ evader activists. Activists argue that researchers and professionals change and determine their realities. I examine debates of an ontological nature where the production of knowledge is deeply contested.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on ethical dilemmas during fieldwork with mental health service survivor/ evader activists. According to activists, they struggle to be believed, both by mental health professionals and more broadly (including by friends and family). Many report that their beliefs about the world are often pathologized; their experiences denied by health professionals. Some activists try to publish about injustices and iatrogenic harm experienced during mental health treatment, but these are often designated to grey literature. The bias to pathologise the experiences of people with severe and enduring mental health struggles has been described as epistemic and hermeneutic injustice – the key concern being that researchers and professionals change, predict and determine service user’s realities.
This paper examines the ethical dilemmas of doing fieldwork in conditions where the production of knowledge is deeply contested and with people for whom the politics of representation is of critical importance. Debates about the denial of experience are of an ontological nature. I also reflect on the ‘responsibility’ of the ethnographer; can ethnographers respond to patient reports of misconduct, malpractice and clinical negligence further than examining them as ethnographic evidence?