Fredericton to Host Summit on Research-Ethics Review Alternatives

Will C. van den Hoonaard, author of The Seduction of Ethics, is organizing a conference to be held next month in Fredericton, New Brunswick, entitled "Ethics Rupture: An Invitational Summit about Alternatives to Research-Ethics Review."

The conference site explains:

Many scholars in the social sciences and humanities have noted the inadequacy of the current formal system of research-ethics review to fairly offer ethical consideration in light of their research needs. The formal system of ethics review has placed the social sciences (and some of the humanities research) in a precarious situation. The bio-medical conceptions of research on which the system relies is not up to the task to give discipline-appropriate advice to other fields.

The time has come to convene an international summit to find alternative means to underscore the ethical approaches in social-science and humanities research. Alternative means would also stem the tide of the homogenization of the social sciences and the humanities and the pauperization of their methodologies brought on today by research-ethics regimes.

The Ethics Rupture summit is a convocation of outstanding thinkers from a half-dozen countries who have substantially contributed to debates on these issues and who already have thought and written about viable alternatives. Because supporters of the prevailing formal research-ethics regimes are already given much air-time on official agendas, listservs, and policy conferences, the Summit aims at creating an environment that where thinkers can freely express new ideas without the distractions of having the presence of advocates of current formal ethics-review systems.

I plan to present a paper entitled, "Ethical Pluralism: Scholarly Societies and the Regulation of Research Ethics."

[18 September 2012: Edited to link to a more complete site.]