Discipline and publish

[rivkat]

I’ve been thinking a lot about this fan/sex survey thing going around. I found the kink_bingo mods’ response compelling, but I have a couple of concerns to add.

First, institutional review boards (IRBs) are bad. [ETA: I'm leaving this in for accuracy, but it really was an overstatement that I should have avoided.  I still believe IRBs are not generally fit for purpose, but that doesn't make every IRB bad, especially when discipline-specific standards are applied.] They’re bad for social science and they’re bad for ethical thought, too often substituting medical models for the best, most informed debate within a particular discipline. Not everyone is subject to an obligation to do no harm (think historians: should they care about the sensibilities of the Kennedy family?), and IRBs often don’t know what the relevant risks of harm from a particular course of research even are. I occasionally need reminding of this bit of trivia: the Stanford Prison Experiment—a core example of what IRBs are supposed to avoid—was IRB-approved. It was stopped because (one of) the experimenters recognized a violation of their own professional ethics.

One could persuasively argue that reporting the netporn survey authors to the IRB is a viable strategic move, attempting to enlist a more powerful entity against people who have more social/educational capital than pseudonymous fans are perceived to have. I still think this is a mistake, because IRBs use the very same totalizing, naturalizing models of personhood, risk, and harm that the original kink_bingo response so powerfully deconstructed. Fans can assert the entitlement to be disciplined only on their own terms, and I think we should, but the IRB move goes against that commitment.

Second, I think vidders’ recent debates about visibility are relevant here. Fanwork creators are visible: Hollywood knows, lawyers know, the Simpsons writers know, teachers know. This means that nonfannish (and non-antifannish) academics are going to follow their noses to us once in a while, no matter what. We can and probably should put greater trust in our homegrown academics (a set that overlaps with, but is not identical to, fan theorists) than in outsiders, and we can definitely decide not to help educate outsiders—or to do so. None of us individually has any obligation either way, nor do we have a community obligation to explain ourselves or to stay silent.

But beyond reaction to this survey, I suggest we should think about the benefits of visibility as well as the risks. Social scientists, like the proverbial drunk under the lamppost looking for his keys, like to go where the data are. If—and it’s a huge, difficult if—visibility dispels the stereotypes that fannish pleasures don’t exist/are somehow flawed/etc., then that’s a good result, and it won’t happen without some kind of visibility. Francesca Coppa has made the point that vidders do well in the art world and the legal advocacy community because vidders are organized, articulate, and show up to talk about their interests. When you become a prototype, social policy starts being made around you. (Or against you. This isn’t inevitable or riskless.)

Any subcultural group that asserts the entitlement to define its own worth, I suspect, ends up with its liberals (me) and its radicals (kink_bingo mods, I think, but that’s my characterization). Because I think it’s inevitable, I’m more interested in talking about strategic moves and self-understanding than in convincing anyone to do anything—other than, here, rethinking the deployment of the IRB.

Comments on LJ

Comments

[robin_arede]

Fair disclosure: I am a lit/creative writing person with recent self-training and experience in internet research and IRB issues.

I agree: IRBs can be bad (there are some good sites I read about the problems of what happens when models developed for one or two disciplines are applied to others). They're also often bad in that they're only justification is keeping lawsuits from happening: I actually hold myself to a higher ethical standard than my university IRB (and I am an IRB member).

NO IRB person I know about would claim that an historian cannot write things that might make a Kennedy upset (public figures, disciplinary values). Nobody is going to tell a current student of mine that she cannot analyze the public documents put out by the Barbara Bush foundation in her analysis of literacy rhetoric because Babs might feel bad. That's just bizarre, completely a straw man argument.

Each university sets up its own IRB because the federal government mandates it. IRBs can be horrific (we had an IRB chair years ago who refused to allow ANY qualitative research whatsoever--the qualitative people cheered when he was replaced). But that's true of any university entity (or ANY group of people). Just because some politicians do bad things is not grounds for claiming all politicians are bad (though these days...)

And not all IRBs are the same, do the same thing, or work the same way.
They can and do recognize the validity of other professional standards and models (the way oral historians have in fact created their own standards, ditto journalists, etc.). I know because my campus one does, and I doubt we're the only ones out there (odds are the bigger name the school, the more pressure to confirm there is).

I am not against scholarship on fandom: I DO scholarship on fandom. I am not the biggest fan of anonymous surveys, but I can live with them when they're well done. The issue is not "no scholarship," but the need for ethical, well informed, useful scholarship (and useful to more than just the academics involved).

And don't forget this group isn't doing scholarhip: they're doing a pop book on what "netporn" teaches "them" about the human brain.

[rivkat]

It is awesome to hear about people of good faith involved in the IRB process, especially non-medical people who recognize disciplinary variation. And yet historians and folklorists and others are routinely told that they can't do what their disciplines tell them to do. The question is whether the IRB is a good way to get researchers to adopt appropriate ethics, and in practice the answer is too often no; the IRBlog I linked to in the post is full of horror stories. The question is whether the costs of centralized review stemming from the medical model are worth the benefits, and with disciplines engaging in their own ethical debates I come down on the side of "no."

Incidentally, the federal government does not mandate IRB coverage of significant chunks of university research; that's mission creep.

And I should be clear that I think this is a bad book, but I don't think pop scholarship is necessarily not scholarship.