I'm fascinated by this post, because I just came back from talking with Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (http://www.ipia.utah.edu/faculty/affiliate_faculty/schwartz_shea.html) at a reception, and we chatted briefly about her new work on IRBs. (Some of it's been published --I have the cite lying around if you haven't seen it and would want to.) One of the arguments she uses that the IRB model assumes that subjects come to the researcher, which means that researchers who go find their subjects are in a totally different positions, and the set of ethical questions raised are different. Of course, that's the problem here--the bad!survey!folks went to find some subjects, and did so in a way that was utter and complete fail, and that an IRB might not have been able to prevent. (But the IRB might have been able to look at that survey and say WTMFF? Because, oy.)
I'm with you in the not-the-IRB-but-yes-ethical-overview category. I'm also guilty of being one of those interpretivist researchers who avoids the IRB via magic tricks with hands. After six months of working on my IRB application for ten minutes, and then yelling at it about how it's all wrong and stuffing it back in its metaphorical drawer until my dissertation advisor yelled at me about it again, I finally reread the section on "exempt research," and wrote a compelling, yet bullshit, paragraph on how ethnography was covered under the "observing subjects in their everyday environments" clause, and therefore I only needed permission to do interviews, which is the smallest possible subset of my research. And they approved it without question. But, you know what? I spent a ton of time working up ideas with myself and my advisor about the ethics of being an ethnographer, particularly a majority-community ethnographer working in a marginalized community. That was where the work happened. The IRB couldn't have helped me with that--but I would have loved to have sat down with a hypothetical mirror universe IRB that could have.
I also happen to think that a more complicated set of questions about research ethics provides a slightly different take on the "outsiders shouldn't study us" question. Because, yes, we can't help but be studied. But I turn that around, as I do in my own work, and reframe it as "outsiders who want to study Others, especially others who are marginalized or have a sense of marginalization, need to gain permission from the community they study in a complex way, which includes engaging with the actual categories that the community uses to think about the issue under study, and should have an eye to providing some sort of recursive benefit to the studied community." And this is not just the discourse-theorist ethnographer talking; I think this applies to research with human subjects across the board.
Anyway--fascinating, and sorry for going all tl;dr at you. Also, your title: best evar.
no subject
I'm fascinated by this post, because I just came back from talking with Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (http://www.ipia.utah.edu/faculty/affiliate_faculty/schwartz_shea.html) at a reception, and we chatted briefly about her new work on IRBs. (Some of it's been published --I have the cite lying around if you haven't seen it and would want to.) One of the arguments she uses that the IRB model assumes that subjects come to the researcher, which means that researchers who go find their subjects are in a totally different positions, and the set of ethical questions raised are different. Of course, that's the problem here--the bad!survey!folks went to find some subjects, and did so in a way that was utter and complete fail, and that an IRB might not have been able to prevent. (But the IRB might have been able to look at that survey and say WTMFF? Because, oy.)
I'm with you in the not-the-IRB-but-yes-ethical-overview category. I'm also guilty of being one of those interpretivist researchers who avoids the IRB via magic tricks with hands. After six months of working on my IRB application for ten minutes, and then yelling at it about how it's all wrong and stuffing it back in its metaphorical drawer until my dissertation advisor yelled at me about it again, I finally reread the section on "exempt research," and wrote a compelling, yet bullshit, paragraph on how ethnography was covered under the "observing subjects in their everyday environments" clause, and therefore I only needed permission to do interviews, which is the smallest possible subset of my research. And they approved it without question. But, you know what? I spent a ton of time working up ideas with myself and my advisor about the ethics of being an ethnographer, particularly a majority-community ethnographer working in a marginalized community. That was where the work happened. The IRB couldn't have helped me with that--but I would have loved to have sat down with a hypothetical mirror universe IRB that could have.
I also happen to think that a more complicated set of questions about research ethics provides a slightly different take on the "outsiders shouldn't study us" question. Because, yes, we can't help but be studied. But I turn that around, as I do in my own work, and reframe it as "outsiders who want to study Others, especially others who are marginalized or have a sense of marginalization, need to gain permission from the community they study in a complex way, which includes engaging with the actual categories that the community uses to think about the issue under study, and should have an eye to providing some sort of recursive benefit to the studied community." And this is not just the discourse-theorist ethnographer talking; I think this applies to research with human subjects across the board.
Anyway--fascinating, and sorry for going all tl;dr at you. Also, your title: best evar.