A New Anthropology Curriculum, Designed for the Future
2 - Doing 'Ethical' Anthropology?
This week we will be exploring how university ethics committees shape the ways we practice anthropology. As you begin your anthropology studies, it is important to pay attention to whose voices you hear often, as well as those that remain absent. This week we will be thinking critically about the role that university ethics committees have in determining what and importantly who Anthropologists may research, as well as how this research is conducted. This influence ultimately shapes the anthropology and ethnographic material we study and learn from. The required reading for this week will explore this by drawing on two case studies of researcher’s experiences with the ethics committee at the University of Melbourne.
In preparation for this week’s tutorial in addition to the required reading, please brainstorm an idea for a hypothetical research project you might want to undertake in the future. Use the tutorial questions to guide your thinking.
Tutorial Questions
What makes an interesting and appropriate research topic for an anthropologist?Â
Whose perspectives do we hear often within our discipline, and whose are absent?Â
How can we study people and communities in an ‘ethical’ way?Â
What makes some research more ‘ethical’ than others?Â
How do ethics committees assist researchers to conduct ethical research?Â
How do categories of ‘low risk’ and ‘high risk’ research determine whose perspectives and experience we are able to research and study? Â
What ideological and epistemological assumptions are being reproduced within the current framework of ethics committees?
Recommended
Bell, K & Wynn, LL 2020, 'Research ethics committees, ethnographers, and imaginations of risk', Ethnography, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 1-20.
Kohn, T & Shore, C 2017, 'The ethics of university ethics committees', in S Wright & C Shore (eds), Death of the public university? Uncertain futures for higher education in the knowledge economy, Berghahn Books, Oxford.
Simpson, B 2011, 'Ethical moments: Future directions for ethical review and ethnography', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 377-393.
Elizabeth Fewster
My research is interested in how people understand and make sense of experiences related to their bodies and health. My thesis seeks to understand parents’ experiences of making a decision about vaccinating their child. With this research, I seek to demonstrate the nuance, diversity, and complexity of the experience of making these decisions. I acknowledge the Wurundjeri people as the traditional custodians of this land, on which I live and conduct my research.