Oral Historians as Ethical Proofreaders

Kevin Bradley and Anisa Puri of the Australian Generations Oral History Project explain that the ethical challenges they faced came after they had conducted the interviews.

[Kevin Bradley and Anisa Puri, “Creating an Oral History Archive: Digital Opportunities and Ethical Issues,” Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2016): 75–91, doi:10.1080/1031461X.2015.1122072.]

Chilling Effects

Leon Neyfakh’s essay on Alice Goffman’s methods illustrates the dangers of researchers’ anticipating, rather than documenting, IRB restrictions on their work.

[Leon Neyfakh, “The Ethics of Ethnography,” Slate, June 18, 2015.]

Goffman's Tightrope

Two new articles add useful context to the debate about Alice Goffman’s On the Run. Together, they show just how narrow a path Goffman was walking between privacy and verifiability, and between scholarship and good writing. I will address the IRB issues in a separate post.

[Jesse Singal, “The Internet Accused Alice Goffman of Faking Details In Her Study of a Black Neighborhood. I Went to Philadelphia to Check,” Science of Us, June 18, 2015.; Leon Neyfakh, “The Ethics of Ethnography,” Slate, June 18, 2015.]

Boston College Oral History Roundup

I rely on the exceptionally thorough Boston College Subpoena News for updates on the efforts of the United Kingdom and United States governments to get access to oral history interviews of participants in Northern Ireland's Troubles, but I feel I should flag three items of special interest to readers of this blog.

Sociologists Call for IRB Moratorium

To close out the year, I briefly note a piece that appeared online at the start of 2011, but which I came across only recently. Three sociologists call for a "moratorium on IRB review for social scientific audit research involving non-institutionalized, mentally competent adult subjects," but their reasons are unclear.

[Hessler, Richard M., D. J. Donnell-Watson, and John F. Galliher. "A Case for Limiting the Reach of Institutional Review Boards." American Sociologist 42, no. 1 (January 29, 2011): 145–152. doi:10.1007/s12108-011-9122-5.]

IRBs Impeded Harvard Dissertation on Addiction and Incarceration

Kimberly Sue, a medical anthropologist in Harvard's MD/PhD program, reports that IRB review can seem "a hassle, a nuisance or a stumbling block, as we seek to enact a more relevant and engaged era of anthropology."

[Kimberly Sue "Are IRBs a Stumbling Block for an Engaged Anthropology?" Somatosphere, 9 August 2012, http://somatosphere.net/2012/08/are-irbs-a-stumbling-block-for-an-engaged-anthropology.html . h/t Michelle Meyer]

Common Rule Is "Out of Place" on the Streets of Bogotá

In the second article in the Professional Geographer special issue, Amy Ritterbusch argues that "when lives are at risk, socially and politically responsible action in the field becomes the driving force of human subjects protection," but that "standard human subjects protection procedures often pull initial field relations in the opposite direction, establishing distance and difference between the researcher and research population through a temporally and spatially restrictive web of institutional categorizations and paperwork that predefine participants’ identities and role in the research project."

She finds that "Although well intentioned, 45 CFR 46 is a bureaucratic discourse that positions youth in problematic ways and is out of place in the world of Bogotana street girls."

[Amy Ritterbusch, “Bridging Guidelines and Practice: Toward a Grounded Care Ethics in Youth Participatory Action Research,” Professional Geographer 64, no. 1 (2012): 16–24, DOI: 10.1080/00330124.2011.596783.]

First, Do Some Harm, Part III: Loosies in San Francisco

The third recent document illustrating the problem of applying the Hippocratic maxim to non-medical research is Leslie E. Wolf, "The Research Ethics Committee Is Not the Enemy: Oversight of Community-Based Participatory Research," Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics 5, no. 4 (December 2010): 77–86. It offers a clear example of the kind of valuable research that is impeded by simplistic medical ethics.
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