Caught in translation
Ethics in practice through research evaluation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37062/sf.63.28217Nyckelord:
Research ethics, Research funding, Artistic research, Ethnography, Research evaluationAbstract
What constitutes ethical research, and which instruments are best suited to ensuring that research is conducted in accordance with existing rules and norms? In this article, we take a pragmatist approach to research ethics and investigate the ways that ethicality is constructed, negotiated, and affirmed in practice. To understand the ways that ethics are made in practice, we look to high-stakes discussions among expert practitioners: review panel discussions at a national research funder. We focus on review panels for artistic research, a relatively young and multidisciplinary research field, and analyze interactions around research ethics that we observed over the course of two annual funding cycles. By centering the creative and interpersonal process of asserting and negotiating what is and what is not ethical research, this study provides a bottom-up perspective on research ethics and seeks to contribute to ongoing discussions about the tensions and paradoxes that face qualitative research in the social sciences and the humanities under existing systems of ethics regulation and oversight in Sweden and beyond.
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