This year the Australian Anthropological Society has instituted a distinguished public lecture in anthropology to be given by a prominent member of the discipline. Clearly this is an attempt by the society to give anthropology more of a public face in Australia, which I think is definitely a Good Thing.

The inaugural lecture will be given by Ghassan Hage, entitled “The open mind and its enemies: Anthropology and the passion of the political”. Scheduled for 8 December, the lecture will open the events surrounding the AAS annual conference 9-11 December, proudly hosted by us at Macquarie.

Details: (AAS lecture flyer)

Ghassan Hage is an internationally acclaimed thinker, both as an academic and an arresting public intellectual. He is the author of many works on nationalism, racism, multiculturalism and migration from a comparative perspective. The most well-known is White Nation (2000) examining White experiences of Australian Multiculturalism, and his latest is Waiting (2009). Prof. Hage taught Anthropology at the University of Sydney for fifteen years until 2007. He has held many prestigious visiting professorships including at Harvard University, L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the University of Copenhagen and the American University of Beirut. His provocative, insightful and sometimes moving press and radio discussions have been a valuable part of public life in Australia during the last decade.

Tuesday 8th December 2009
State Library of NSW
Macquarie Street, Sydney
Metcalfe Auditorium
FREE ADMISSION
Program:
6pm Refreshments will be served
6.30 – 7.15 Lecture
7.15 – 7.45 Questions from audience
8pm Finish

Please Visit www.aas.asn.au for further information

When I arrived at Macquarie in 2007, I had big plans for my students.  I was scheduled to teach a postgraduate methods class, and I decided that the students were going to learn research methods by undertaking their own research project from start to finish and trying to publish the results.

“Crazy!” one of my colleagues said.  “Do you really think that they can get published?”

“Of course!” I said. “Have you seen how many journals there are out there?  You can publish anything if you are persistent enough.”

Another colleague said, “What are you going to do about ethics clearance?”

Uh-oh.  I hadn’t thought about that.  But I wasn’t going to let it derail my plan, so my ad hoc solution was to make each of my students apply for ethics clearance.  Macquarie has 30+ page ethics application form for human research — not including appendices.

I tell you, the students LOVED that.  And so did the Ethics Secretariat, which had to process 20 ethics applications from one class and deal with weekly phone calls from me cheerfully asking when so-and-so’s project was going to get approved so s/he could start her research.  Some students didn’t get ethics approval to start their research until the last week of classes.  There were lots of extensions and late papers.

Despite the slow start and the frustrations, the work that my students did was really good.  In one semester, every student had to come up with their own original research projects, design an appropriate methodology, obtain ethics approval, execute the project, write up the results, and submit for publication. Every student came up with a completely unique research project, from researching the smoking practices of international students at Macquarie to investigating online lesbian networking in New South Wales to studying how Aboriginal artwork is marketed to tourists. Students gained a tremendous amount of hands-on research experience. At every seminar we discussed the progress of their research projects, and there were fascinating discussions about methods and ethics.  Even though they had largely seen the ethics application as an exercise in bureaucratic hoop-jumping, they were genuinely concerned with ethics, and we regularly discussed research ethics dilemmas.

So at the end of the year I decided that it was a good exercise and worth keeping the independent research projects the next time I taught the class. But the students were pretty clear in their feedback that they didn’t want to have to deal with the bureaucratic obstacles themselves.

Informal feedback from the Ethics Secretariat also suggested that they would be grateful if I found another solution (or at least stopped ringing them to ask about the status of students’ ethics applications).

Finding work-arounds for bureaucratic obstacles

So after the semester was over, I made an appointment to meet with the head of the Ethics Secretariat to try to find ways to simplify the ethics approval process for student research projects.  I’d gotten a fellowship from the Provost, Judyth Sachs, to work on this project, so I was empowered by significant institutional support.

We batted ideas around together. The Ethics Secretariat pointed out that Macquarie had a simpler process for evaluating student research projects that weren’t going to be published, but since helping students to publish was a major goal for me, I didn’t want to take that easy route.  They rejected the idea of a blanket template that would cover any sort of student research project.  I wanted to give my students some choice in what they could do.

The compromise that we worked out was this: I designed 4 basic research projects, all revolving around a different methodology and method of recruiting research participants. Students could then pick a project that already received ethics approval.  I tried to come up with projects that collectively would use every method that I could imagine a social science discipline using: online and street surveys; interviews, formal and informal; research in online communities; public observation; participant observation; even oral history, which has quite different conventions surrounding confidentiality and intellectual property than I was familiar with. The goal was to create a set of “templates” that colleagues could adapt to develop their own ethics applications for student research projects, so others could take advantage of my work and wouldn’t have to start from scratch.

The 4 projects

Here are the research projects I came up with, along with an extract from the project summary that I included in the ethics application. Each project title links to the full ethics application that I submitted. Of course, it is in the peculiar and particular format of Macquarie University’s ethics application form, but because MQ’s form is more elaborate than that of many other universities, you’re likely to find that I’ve dealt with most of the concerns that your own ethics committee or IRB might raise. All these ethics applications are Creative Commons licensed for non-profit use and adaptation, so feel free to borrow as much as you want. If you do decide to adapt one of these ideas for your own teaching, I’d love to hear about it! Send me an e-mail at lisa.wynn[at]mq.edu.au.

1) An ethnographic study of mobile phone use in Sydney

Anthropologists have always been interested in the relationship between technology and culture.  Contemporary anthropologists have recently been particularly interested in the spread of global communication technologies and how they are taken up in local social and cultural contexts (Axel 2006).  Mobile phones, in particular, have been revealed as devices which extend social networks in unique ways and which have been incorporated into local cultural norms about sharing, gift giving and exchange, and economic strategies (Smith 2007, Horst and Miller 2006, Wong 2007).  Corporate anthropologists have also researched the materiality of cell phones – where they are carried, how they are held, when they are turned off and on – to inform product design (Chipchase 2007).  Sociologists and psychologists have also examined the uptake of cell phone and messaging technologies amongst subcultural groups (e.g. Sylvia and Hady 2004).

Globally, some 3 billion people are expected to have cell phones by the end of this year, so it is clearly a technology that has a powerful global reach across cultures and socioeconomic class. How do new technologies such as cell phones extend or modify existing cultural norms and social networks?  What are the explicit and implicit cultural rules that shape how people use these technologies?

The methods for this study included street interviews and online questionnaires, as well as participant observation.

2) An ethnography of a virtual online social world

Tom Boellstorff (2008) poses this question: “How is everything from identity and community to property, place, and politics shaped the fact that human beings can now live parts of their lives in virtual worlds?”  Some of the potential research questions raised by cybersociality in online virtual worlds like Second Life include the following:

• How are social norms enforced and violated, and how does that contribute to a sense of community?
• What does identity mean in a massive multiplayer online role playing game when people can have alts (secondary accounts not linked to their primary avatar, or animated representative), or more than one person can control an avatar?
• What does embodiment mean in Second Life, where you can change your gender, body type, skin color, and even species at will, where other players can even *give* you a new body type to “wear,” and you can buy a penis to use for cybersex?  Do people change certain aspects of appearance (such as clothes or hair style ) more than others (such as body shape or gender)?  How often to people change their appearance?  To what extent does an avatar’s appearance influence how people interact with that avatar?
• What religious or cultural rituals do people engage in, in cyberspace?
• What are the social norms for gift-giving and reciprocity in cyberspace, and how does this contribute to community and sociability in cyber worlds?
• Are there coercive exchanges, and how are they handled or talked about?
• How does partnering occur in Second Life? Do virtual partners know each other in real life, and if not, how does it impinge on their real life worlds? What is the interface between Second Life and “real life”?

In this ethics application, I got a lot of help from Tom Boellstorff (whose ethnography on Second Life we read for the class). He generously shared with me his original ethics application for his research in Second Life, which I was able to draw on in figuring out how to answer the Ethics Committee’s concerns about privacy and the permissibility of research in Second Life.

3) Oral Histories of International Students in Australia

Education is a $12.5 billion “export industry” for Australia, bringing in more income than tourism (Rout 2008).  Yet little is known about the social experience of international students in Australia, despite the fact that they face unique pressures.  Rout (2008) summarized recent research that points out that, “Contrary to their image as cashed-up BMW drivers, many overseas students cannot afford to eat, are paid well below the minimum wage and are among those most vulnerable to exploitation in this country.”

For this project, students in ANTH 801 will conduct oral life histories of international students at Macquarie, focusing on their educational trajectory leading to, and including, their student experience at Macquarie.  How did they end up at Macquarie?  What are the personal, social, financial, and familial obligations that shape students’ experiences at university in Australia?  What are the cultural factors that influence their integration into, or alienation from, the Macquarie student body?

Very little qualitative research has been done on the higher education experience of international students in general, and yet they comprise a large minority of students at Macquarie.  Letting them speak in their own words about their experiences is an opportunity to learn about the pressures and problems that international students face, their goals and aspirations, and the social and learning strategies that they use to cope with a culturally new educational experience, which Macquarie University may be able to use to improve the experience of international students on campus.  It also has the potential to inform our understanding of the informal, affective, and social aspects of learning and intellectual development for international students.

I grounded this project in the principles of oral history methods, which specify that (1) the interview or transcript must be placed in a repository, and (2) those interviewed retain copyright and control over the use of their interviews.  It was therefore a complicated application, and probably the most closely scrutinised of all the projects I submitted, but it eventually received approval.

4) An applied anthropological study of the social use of space on campus and its relationship with ‘intellectual climate’

Macquarie University is looking for ways to improve its rankings in graduate student evaluations of “intellectual climate” on campus.  U@MQ is eager to think about new ways that the food and social facilities on campus could be restructured to be more appealing and better utilized.  Might these be linked?  Do students’ most formative moments at university happen inside or outside of the classroom?  How is social time in or outside of the classroom related to intellectual interaction?  To what extent is intellectual climate shaped by space and facilities?  What other factors shape the perception of intellectual climate on campus?  The aim of this project is to study use of space and evaluate whether there are any inexpensive or cost-effective interventions that you can recommend to improve the intellectual climate for students at Macquarie.

Here are some angles that you may consider:

1) In the library, how do students mark off spaces for individual and group work?  The library is the most formal learning space on campus.  How do students claim it to be more informal?

2) How much does home life influence use of public spaces on campus? Do students who use the campus do so to escape from home life for whatever reason?

3) Using the language of de Certeau, what are the tactics that students use to claim space and how does it differ from the ostensible ways that the space was designed to be used?

This particular project was set up as an applied anthropology project for a “client,” Macquarie University, and one organisation in particular, U@MQ, was very interested in the results and sponsored a competition and prize for the best student project.  (U@MQ is the company that provides non-academic services on campus — they run the coffee carts, the food court, the gym, etc.)  At the end of the semester, the students who did this research project presented their research results and policy recommendations to a panel from U@MQ, the Learning and Teaching Centre, and Facilities Management.

Protocols and scripts

In the ethics application for each project I had to set out the general research question and draft protocols – scripts actually – for students to follow in recruiting participants.  This was the only way that the ethics committee could feel satisfied that students wouldn’t put undue pressure on friends and family to participate in their research projects.  I also had to draft protocols for taking pictures, and several variations on informed consent forms and recruitment advertisements.  Students put their own spins on the research project and came up with their own lists of interview questions.  They submitted a short description of their own approach at the beginning of the semester and this received expedited review by the Ethics Secretariat.

So students in that same methods class the following year were able to either do their own research project (and go through the whole ethics approval process), OR they could take one of these 4 research projects and interpret it in their own way, while following the basic protocols and methodologies that I’d already gotten clearance for them to use.  Two did their own projects (one on roller derby leagues in Sydney and another on the Miss India-Australia beauty pageant); the rest of the class slotted into the projects I’d gotten pre-approval for.  With ethics approval mostly taken care of in advance, the students in 2008 were able to start their research right away.  We still had extensive discussions about research ethics, facilitated by the online ethics training module (see section 2 above), but this time students didn’t see research ethics as a tedious bureaucratic requirement, but rather as an area of intense current debate in anthropology.

They all did great work.  Most of them have submitted their papers to journals.  Several are under review, and so far one has been published (Elisabeth McLeod’s study of mobile phone use amongst Baby Boomers in Sydney in the International Journal of Emerging Technologies) and another was just accepted for publication (Vanessa Gamboa Gonzalez’s thought piece on conceptions of the body and health in Second Life for the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research). I’m over the moon about this. (I wish that I’d thought about my essays for class in graduate school as articles to submit for publication.  Then maybe I would have had more than 2 obscure publications when I finished my PhD.) These are the exciting possibilities when students are doing their own research instead of writing about the research of others.

–L.L. Wynn

I just received my March 08 copy of American Anthropologist (and it’s only May!! — that’s what you get when you live in Australia) and was reading Matti Bunzl’s article, “The Quest for Anthropological Relevance.” Bunzl’s article is a call for greater public engagement by anthropologists, and an attempt to explain “the persistent failure of contemporary anthropologists…to play a more prominent role in the public sphere.”  His key argument is that the lack of public intellectuals amongst this generation of anthropologists boils down to the dominant epistemology of our discipline. In short, he argues that anthropologists from the 1990s on are so busy complexifying the world that they can’t take enough of a powerful stand on any position to have any traction in popular culture.

Just as I was furrowing my brow and thinking, “Yes indeed, where are today’s Margaret Meads?,” my dad sent me a link to a Der Spiegel interview with Lila Abu-Lughod on the occasion of Israel’s founding and Palestine’s nakba. “Ah,” I thought to myself, relieved, “here we go! An anthropologist in the public sphere!”

It was particularly timely given that Bunzl credits Abu-Lughod’s 1991 article, “Writing Against Culture,” with the most persuasive argument for the epistemology that he criticizes.  Now, mind you, Abu-Lughod is no pundit, and this is an interview, rather than a regular magazine column, but it’s always exciting to see an anthropologist in the mainstream news, and a quick read of the interview will convince anyone that
Abu-Lughod is hardly suffering from an inability to speak to the public because she’s too busy complexifying the world. (As my dad put it in his e-mail to me, “no wasted words, she goes straight to the real point. I admire her, both for her clarity, and for her guts.”)

Bunzl’s article is well written and his point well argued, but I’m not convinced it’s our dominant epistemological paradigm that keeps anthropologists out of the public sphere. I suspect that there are a few other factors that are more influential. For one, I know that many anthropologists are skeptical of writing for the popular press, because all too often their arguments get distorted by editorial processes over which they have little control.

For another, the incentive structures at many of our universities do not favor anthropologists who write for the popular press. I don’t know how this is factored at other institutions, but at Macquarie University, at least, an article written for the popular press is formally valued at 1/10th (one TENTH!) the value given to an article published in a peer reviewed journal. The weighting of our publications affects not only our performance reviews as academics, but even the funding that our department receives.

In other words, I could write ONE article for American Anthropologist (Category C1, Article in Scholarly Refereed Journal, weight: 1.0) or TEN for the Sydney Morning Herald (Category L, Other Public Output
Substantial scholarly contribution to newspaper or magazine that must be in area of expertise of author, weight: 0.1) and Macquarie would see it as the same amount of work, in spite of the fact that the latter might have a significant impact on public opinion, while the former is virtually guaranteed to have no impact whatsoever.  And I don’t think I get ANY credit for contributing to Culture Matters, even though the world is far more likely to read my blog postings than my book (Category A1, Major work of research: substantial innovative contribution published by recognised publisher or University Press, weight: 5.0).

–L.L. Wynn (cross-posted at Khaldoun)

At Macquarie University, where the popular perception amongst the older generation is that student activism is at an all-time low, there was a bit of excitement when we heard that a student publication would be launched. We all fancied it would be the start of a new era of student extracurricular activity.

Well, today I saw the first issue. Jovan showed me his copy. It’s a glossy magazine. “It’s called Speculum,” Jovan told me. My jaw dropped. Jovan said, “Isn’t that…?”

I finished his sentence: “…A tool used in vaginal and anal examinations?”

The psychology guy next door said, “Does that mean that we are a bodily cavity to examine?”

Much hilarity and bad punning ensued.

Now, what, you might ask, does that have to do with applied anthropology? Umm… Well, there is a fine academic tradition of deconstructing the gynecological exam. Consider “Dramaturgical Desexualization: The Sociology of the Vaginal Examination” (1971) by James M. Henslin and Mae A. Biggs, which analyzed the ritual steps taken and role playing involved as a woman prepares for a gynecological exam, in which, as they argued, she was turned from person into pelvis in order to deal with “the problematics of genital exposure” in a nonsexual context. See also “Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum,” by Terri Kapsalis.

No, really, I’m just grasping at straws here. I just wanted to have an excuse to share with all of you the funny name of the new student publication at Macquarie. But hey, David, Cassie, Ben, Ben, and Emiko, bravo for getting it off the ground, even if I have no idea how you chose the name.

PS Let me preempt clever commentators by saying that yes I know that speculum means “mirror” in Latin, thanks.

With a proposed new Islamic school facing strong community opposition in the Sydney suburb of Camden, it is timely that the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie is screening a new documentary called Temple of dreams. The film portrays similar challenges faced by a group of young Australian Muslims attempting to set up a youth centre in Sydney. Details about the film and the screening are below:

*Free screening*

Introduced by the director, Tom Zubrycki

(Molly and Mobarak, The Diplomat, Billal),

and followed by a post-screening Q&A discussion.

Temple of Dreams follows a group of Lebanese Australians who set up an Islamic youth centre in Western Sydney. The documentary – by one of Australia’s leading documentary film makers – follows the group’s battle against the local council to keep the centre open, and their struggle to fit into the wider community.

When: Wednesday 14 November

Time: 4-6pm

Place: Building C5C Room 498 (Enter via Research Hub EAST), Macquarie University

RSVP: By 12 November 2007 to crsi@scmp.mq.edu.au or on 02 9850 9171

**FREE**

Please spread the word to your colleagues and friends – download event flyer here.

For more information about the film, click here, or visit

http://australianscreen.com.au/titles/temple-dreams

Part of my continuing series on Ethnography and Ethics Review at Macquarie University (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

At Macquarie University all applications to the Ethics Review Committee (Human Research) go through a vetting process that can send them along several tracks for consideration. For the moment, two tracks for consideration exist, but there is the possibility that a third is arising (a couple of applications have been recommended for a new trajectory in the past month as the Committee responds to language in the National Statement on Research Ethics that allows us to shorten review of applications with no perceptible risk).

In this posting, I want to help clarify for students what the two review trajectories are, how long they take, and what are the factors that will likely lead an application to be sent along one or the other. As our own records show in the Ethics Committe (and is on the diagram) over three-quarters of all applications are now handled through the Expedited online review, which seems to be speeding up the process (in addition to getting rid of the previous system of monthly deadlines so that applications are rolling).

Applications without significant issues (see below) can be handled online through the Expedited process. There is no need to apply specially for this; all applications are examined and then allocated either to the Expedited or the Normal process. The Expedited process can take up to 20 working days (four work weeks) although it generally takes less time in the off-peak months (the Committee tends to get swamped at the start of the year as an influx of MA and Honours projects comes into the office).

The Normal process can take longer or shorter because it depends upon the next time that the Committee will have a physical meeting (see the schedule here). If you have an application with certain complicating factors (again, see below), you actually WANT it to go to a meeting so that it can be evaluated, discussed, voted upon, and reported upon at this meeting. You do NOT want to hide the complications and hope that it will slide through on an electronic review. The longest application turnarounds happen when an applicant tries to conceal things to get an electronic review, and then part way through the electronic review, after days have already been wasted, someone points out this fact, and the application gets remanded over to the Normal process. This can happen, for example, if an applicant indicates that he or she is not investigating illegal activity—i.e., answering ‘no’ to Item 3.8—when it becomes clear this is a possibility, as it often is with open-ended interviews.

If you have a complicated application with some serious issues, you definitely need to be aware of the meeting schedule, and you want your application to go to the meeting. You can actually get very quick turnaround on this if you time it correctly. Please note, however, that you are only guaranteed to get into a meeting if you get your application in two weeks before the meeting—the day before will mean that you can’t be considered until the following meeting, so you’ll have to wait at least a month.

So I can already hear you asking, what are the key issues that demand a Normal review process rather than an Expedited one?

1) Investigating illegal behaviour: If you’re directly investigating illegal activity, then the Committee needs to carefully consider the risks (including to you), the reporting requirements, the applicable law, and the risks to the university.

The question of whether or not information about illegal activity may come to light during the research is a lot more ambiguous. I am personally concerned that an overly high bar currently applies to open-ended interviews with populations that might have been engaged in illegal behaviour (that is, just about any population). Anthropologists get questioned about this by the Committee a lot, especially when they want to work in areas where illegal activity is pretty common (e.g., borders, communities with drug abuse, at-risk families). Personally, I think that the Committee is overly sensitive on this one, and I’m strongly encouraging that we give out advice for researchers, helping to clarify what their reporting responsibilities are under the law (most don’t know this) and what we consider important ethical considerations to be. Currently, we ask every researcher to come up with his or her own process for contingencies. I’m not happy about this, and I’m working to fix it.

2) Working with vulnerable populations: This condition does frequently apply to anthropological research, although Macquarie is most concerned about disabled people, refugees, asylum-seekers, Aboriginal communities, prisoners, hospital patients, and anyone else covered in 4.2. You’ll notice that all minorities and children are not on this list, so applications that include them are not automatically put through the Normal process but may still be directed along the Expedited path.

3) Deception of subjects (unless it is terribly minor): This issue tends not to apply to ethnographic projects as they seldom involve systematic deception (except, perhaps, self-deception). But this goes to the issue of informed consent; how can a person truly agree to participate in research if he or she does not know what that entails? Deception does not mean that a project will be rejected, but it usually requires a discussion of the Committee to approve it.

4) A conflict of interest: The whole Committee will have to review a proposal when there is a conflict of interest, but only the types of conflict of interest described in Section 8 of the application. Most participant observation does not involve these sorts of conflict of interest, as they primarily concentrate on asymmetries of power or role conflict in which unintentional coercion might occur with subjects. For example, if you are an employer and want to study your employees, you may have a conflict of interest.

5) Institutional information sought: If you answer ‘yes’ to Item 6.1 and need to fill out Appendix D, then you will go to a full Committee discussion. This involves seeking personal records about people from the government, police, hospital, school, or similar organization. That is, it involves examining personal and typically confidential files. Note: this doesn’t apply if you ask for those files from your subjects, only when you go to them from the organization holding them. From the description, it is clear that this does not generally apply to ethnographic work, although I can imagine some projects where it might.

6) Passive consent sought: In some very limited settings (see the Ethics Committee’s Guidelines), researchers may seek for an ‘opt out’ form of consent. This only really applies to school-based research, where it’s often very hard to get kids to take consent forms home to their parents or guardians and then get them back. So many forms get lost or never shown to parents that, in some circumstances, researchers ask to have a ‘passive consent’ process. It’s only really possible if the students will be doing tasks for the research that are very similar to what they would normally do in the classroom (that is, you couldn’t do a survey on sexual behaviour or run medical tests on kids, and hope to have it get approval for passive consent).

If one of these conditions does apply to your research, you will want your application to go to the Committee meeting, so you may even want to mention it in the email when you submit your application electronically (you’ll also need to submit a hard copy for archiving and photocopy). Remember: It’s not necessarily a longer process if you make it in prior to the two-week cut-off before a meeting (and the administrators have been known to bend even this deadline to try to get applications through).

You may not believe it if you give credence to the gossip you might hear around campus, but many of us on the committee really want to expedite research. But we need good applications to do this. Vague, unclear, self-contradictory applications that seek to cover over or conceal ethical concerns are the slowest, most difficult applications to get through, and the applicant can actually work against the efforts of the Committee to get it approved. Challenging but well argued cases, even for work with ethical concerns, often go through very quickly. I’ve frequently heard Committee members say things to the effect of, ‘I might be concerned about the [fill in the blank: deception, oral consent, questions about illegal activity, work with vulnerable people…], but the application is really well put together and makes a great case for [same thing in the blank], so I think we should approve it conditionally so that the researcher can get to work.’ For example, we on the Committee know that research about vulnerable populations is some of the most valuable work that we in academe can do for the good of society, so we want it to happen.

Alright, so the first two blog entries on ethics weren’t very fun (here and here). I’ll admit that. And it’s a danger when dealing with a topic like university human research ethics review that we may contribute to the sense students (and others) have that it’s a dry or dreadful subject. I worry that we tell our horror stories to our students and prepare them for the worst from the ethics process, forgetting that this can set up self-fulfilling expectations. I didn’t help that with the last couple of posts.

So, in the interest of punching up the entertainment value (after all, I have to compete with some brilliant posts on the new Creationist museum in Missouri, my home state, by Lisa Wynn and ongoing cultural observations from Nursel and Jovan), I’m going to take a little different strategy and write in a more conversational tone.

Although the institutional dynamics of something like the Ethics Review Committee (Human Research) at Macquarie might be fascinating to a few (mostly to me), the majority of our readers at Culture Matters are likely to be more interested in practical questions. So I’ll try to highlight the most important, recurring issues for ethnographic projects from my perspective as researcher, ethics advisor, and application reviewer on the committee. Although all of the examples I discuss below are fictional, some resemblance to individuals living or deceased is inevitable. But please know, if it sounds like I’m talking about you, and you’re a Macquarie student or faculty member, you’re probably part of fictional synthesis because none of these issues is rare or unusual.

The over-arching issue for anthropologists proposing ethnographic fieldwork (IMHO) is probably that we don’t spend enough time nutting out the pragmatics of fieldwork before we go. We often just assume that students will figure it out on their own. While this may have been an effective strategy at one point and at some places, the short time horizon for research degrees (our MAA and PhD) makes this strategy less likely to succeed. The contemporary realities of ethics review also mean that now, perhaps more than in some earlier periods, we need to think about research methods before we enter the field.

Ten biggest issues in no particular order:

#1: Applications contradict themselves internally in several places. This is not just a problem for anthropologists; for example, an applicant says she’s going to get permission to record or photograph her subjects, but fails to include any mention of this in the information and consent procedure. Or a student says he’s working in one place, but has letters of support from another. (I know, you were saying to yourself, ‘maybe they won’t notice…’, but you forget, committee members get really good at reading these forms…)

Admittedly, some committee members, even at Macquarie, can get overly finicky about these sorts of inconsistencies, but one of the concerns is that such inconsistencies are a sign that the researcher hasn’t really thought about things. Best advice: read quickly through the form before setting off to work and check yourself as you go to make sure that you’re being consistent. One of the places on the Macquarie form that frequently causes trouble is item 6.6 on giving subjects feedback. Frequently, the answer here has nothing to do with the actual information given to participants; in Macquarie’s Department of Anthropology, we’re setting up on on-line clearing house where students can circulate for their subjects ‘research reports,’ short, non-jargon-filled accounts of their findings. It’s a great way to publicize the kinds of research done in the department (without foreclosing other forms of publication) and, at the same time, create an easy channel to give something back to the subjects generous enough to work with us.

#2: No interview questions. I say this baldly even though I know that interview questions are a controversial demand. My approach is that, in most projects, some sort of non-binding, sample interview questions can and should be provided. Some projects — like life histories — make these sorts of provisions less appropriate, and I’ll typically argue against such demands in committee meetings if other members bring them up.

HOWEVER, many ethnographers say that they are going to do ‘in depth’ interviews on very specific topics, as much of contemporary anthropological inquiry is topic-based rather than holistic research in small-scale communities. In this case, some sense of the kinds of questions you might ask helps the committee to understand the invasiveness, sensitivity, or extensiveness of the interview process that the applicant proposes. This is especially important if your research topic is controversial or sensitive, less critical if it’s innocuous (not an insult; my research probably falls under the latter category). But I want to emphasize this: the questions are not binding IF the applicant makes it clear that the interview format is open, non-invasive, and not overly personal. At least at Macquarie, the ethics reviewers know what this means.

What seems to me to be the most common situation is that ethnographers haven’t really thought that much about the pragmatics of interviewing or they’ve become so convinced that they are self-reflexive, auto-deconstructing, and co-creational in their research that they are ‘politically opposed’ to asking questions. Then how the hell are you going to conduct interviews? If you’re really not doing interviews — that is, you’re just going to do participant observation — then don’t say you’re doing interviews on the application. Interviews imply questions, at least some sense of what you will ask about.

What I tend to ask students is, if you get off the plane, catch a bus into town or to your site, introduce yourself to an important member of the community, explain your project, and the person says, unexpectedly, ‘Great, I want to help. Turn on your recorder. What do you want to know?’ what are you going to ask? Are you really going to have no questions? According to one of my former professors at the University of Chicago, the late David Schneider used to ask students a similar question in the proposal defenses for doctoral research: ‘What are you going to do when you get off the plane (or boat or bus or train…)?’ The question would frequently stop pre-field students in their tracks. I’ve had similar halting conversations with pre-field students. So one thing that I suspect is that the ethics application may be the first time that novice researchers have ever even thought this practically and concretely about field methods in ethnography (note: I know other fields, probably even other anthropology departments, prepare their students differently. This applies to a limited number of places and types of projects. We’re trying to prepare students here better for things like interviewing).

#3: Changes in research: One of the issues raised by Katz’s article on ethics review is the possibility — nay, inevitability — that research agendas change over the course of an ethnographic project. How can you ask for prior approval if the research agenda and methods are themselves emergent? The easy answer to that (and I’m not sure that the whole committee here at Macquarie would agree with me) is that you do the best you can and then remember that ethics review has a dialogic and ongoing quality in ethnography, especially long-term fieldwork. Some changes seem to warrant serious consultation: for example, if a hot-button of risk, working with children, learning of illegal activity, etc. (see below) comes up in research where it was not anticipated.

If the subject matter changes and crosses into areas where significant NEW ethical issues are raised, then I recommend contacting the ethics administrators. We have excellent ones at Macquarie: Kokila de Silva (a former student in our department), Fran Thorpe, and Nicola Meyton among them (research office staff here but you can also use their general email, ethics.secretariat@vc.mq.edu.au. Other advisors are available in every division of the university (the list is here). Whoever you contact is most likely to run any changes by the chair of the committee and some members that are particularly well versed in the area you’re working on. You’re likely to be given some advice and feedback but virtually never told ‘you can’t follow this research.’ If the change is very significant, we’ll probably just ask you to submit an ‘amendment’ to the ethics form (that is, a new version of whichever items of the application have changed). For example, if your research starts to uncover a lot of illegal activity, and you’ve decided to directly investigate it, we’d ask you to submit a new version of item 3.8.

You won’t be ‘in trouble,’ but the Ethics Review Committee will want to make sure that you’ve thought about how to handle it and put some safeguards in place; we might be able to offer some advice (you’d be surprised — we read some really clever ways of dealing with issues like this), and we’ll be able to back you up later if there are questions about this. For example, in Australia, you are legally bound to report to police certain sorts of crimes (for example, abuse of children). Many researchers may not realize this; although you’re unlikely to get prosecuted, you may find yourself in a very uncomfortable position.

(I understand that other IRBs and ethics review committees may not handle this ongoing interaction well, and our committee does not always handle precedent-setting cases in the best possible way. But we do very much try to learn from experience and help other researchers to share the hard-won wisdom that faculty around campus are gaining. As I’ve said in an earlier blog post, we are in the business of supporting good research, not making it impossible. As Dr. Schrag and others have pointed out, some — many? — other IRBs may lose the plot on this part of the agenda.)

#4: A related recurring problem in anthropology applications is to misinterpret how to deal with the question of ‘risk.’ I take others’ comments, such as Dr. Schrag’s discussion of the ‘canard of interview trauma,’ to heart, but there is a problem with the way that we, anthropologists, tend to discuss risk in our proposals.

Some parts of our field like to play up the drama, the controversy, the conflict, the Sturm und Drang of our projects. Some anthropologists truly do amazing, harrowing research, in fieldsites and social situations where the intensity of human drama cannot be questioned. Nevertheless, an ethics application is not the place for the most hyperbolic, emotional, or explosive description of the conflict in your research; both the researcher and the committee need a pretty sober assessment of the risks involved to subjects and researcher.

If you write a research description (10.1 in the Macquarie form) that plays up the conflict in your website, the marginal legality of your subject, the possible dramatic dangers, the ‘frontline’ quality of the research, and similar traits, — or better yet, cut and paste it from another document — and then you check the box in 3.1 that says ‘no’ risks to anyone participating (this includes you), then you are asking the committee to send your application back to explain the discrepancy. Save the adrenaline-drenched prose about ethnographic research for other forums; it’s a bad idea to play this up in the ethics application.

The point is not that there are no risks in good research. Good research may include serious risks. But the way to approach those is to think about them, minimize or mitigate them, plan for foreseeable problems, or even describe why risks are worth running. For example, ethnographers are surprisingly reluctant on the Macquarie form to talk soberly about the public interest dimension of our research, the indirect effects that better knowledge might have for the good of society as a whole, on item 3.7. We have researchers at the university who go to war zones, who conduct experimental medical procedures, who ask about trauma and human rights violations and genocide and crime, who regularly work with children or the mentally disabled. Our committee does not have a problem with research that has risks; we do have a problem when the answers to questions about risk are answered in a way that suggests the researcher hasn’t thought about them.

Short suggestion: Simply checking the box to indicate that there are ‘no risks’ is not the ‘easy way’ to get through review. And the ethics application is not the place to play up the drama and danger inherent in your project; save it for your undergrad students in lecture.

(In passing, and with no expectation that this will lesson the likelihood of students doing a particular project, subjects wherein the researcher is in danger do seem to exercise a disproportionate fascination among our students. I frequently ask them if the intellectual issues that they’re interested in couldn’t be studied elsewhere, and they give me a look of disgust that would usually be reserved for someone with an indecent proposal. Alas, I’ll keep trying. But if the risks of a project are very great and the potential public good to come of it low, is it really a good project? I know, you’re getting that look even reading this…)

#5: Another way to make the ethics clearance process go off the rails is to turn the proposal in at the last minute. A really stunning number of the problem cases we confront are simply researchers who want to ram through proposals that are, at best, half cooked; our committee is actually very accommodating, and our turnaround, especially in the ‘off peak’ season, can be quite good (I think we promise 20 days, but see the committee’s website for certain). The proposals that come in at the last minute, however, invariably are the ones with missing information, no information & consent form, suggestions that an ad will be used to recruit participants but no ad provided, serious gaps in the discussion of methods, no letters of support from organizations that are said to be cooperating, etc. There’s some weird inverse law that, the less time applicants have to get approval, the more likely they are to fail to fill out the form comprehensively.

Give yourself a couple of months, especially if you have a topic that’s likely to raise any red flags (working with children, investigating illegal activity, going into conflict zones, asking very personal questions such as about medical histories, working in a place under authoritarian regime, studying human rights struggles where activists are disappearing, seeking permission to work with Aboriginal Australians…). Bottom line is that your failure to plan is not an emergency for the committee.

If you’re waiting on a research visa or a letter of support, but everything else is in order, SUBMIT immediately. The committee is likely to give you conditional approval pending the forwarding of this letter to our office; even if you have to go to the field first to get, as is often the case with ethnographic projects, we will give you approval and ask you to forward on this material once you get it. The same goes for other details, such as the specific organizations you’ll be working with, the translations of information and consent forms, and the like; if one or a couple of details is holding up the process, please submit and explain in a cover letter. You’re quite likely to get conditional approval if the rest of the application is done well. Better to submit with a missing element than to submit with no time before the start of the project.

#6. Informed consent. This is a major issue with ethnographic researchers, as postings by Rena Lederman and Alex Golub, personal discussions with other researchers have really highlighted for me, and ongoing observations as an ethics advisor make abundantly apparent. Informed consent, however, is one of the pillars of research ethics; since the Nuremberg Code in 1948, voluntary, informed consent of research subjects has been a cornerstone of human research. Although some commentators might argue that this code should apply primarily to medical research and laboratory research (such as psychology), and should not apply to non-invasive observation in a naturalistic setting, I’m not one of those.

Informed consent, however, comes in many forms; in many anthropological settings, oral consent is more appropriate, so answering ‘yes’ to item 7.1 is not compulsory (at least a quarter to a third of all projects at Macquarie check ‘no’ here, I’d estimate with no systematic review). Although the Macquarie ethics application provides a lengthy and involved template for a consent form (item 7.4. a), there’s many reasons why one might depart from this. In my experience, a substantial minority of ethnographic projects do depart from it in some way; the ones that correspond are with highly literate, Western populations who will understand consent or release forms.

My advice to students, however, is to think seriously about how you want to go about informing people and describe your ideal process to the committee. If you need to be very careful about protecting anonymity, for example, even a signed form might prove more dangerous than not getting one. If you are dealing with an illiterate or semi-literate population, or even one that would be suspicious about signing documents, then it’s probably best not to use a written consent form.

That said, read the template, think about what the committee is asking you to accomplish, and prepare a consent ‘script’ that you will use or work from. The biggest problem for many novice ethnographers is that it can be hard to communicate clearly to our collaborators what we’re trying to do in a non-technical language. Hell, I had problems communicating with my grandmother about what I was trying to do in my research!

For me, the key issues are: who are you and what are you doing? What you hope to accomplish with your research (although sometimes it’s hard to even explain a degree)? What are you asking people to do and are there any risks (if not, no need to write about it)? Do you want to record them and do you have their permission? How are you going to protect them if there’s any danger? What are they going to get from you? That, in a nutshell, is the key set of issues. If you’re dealing with a really superficial investigation or short observation or if you’re interviewing people for whom this process is going to be really alien, what I sometimes suggest is that the researcher get collaborators in the field who are better educated, who will be given more substantial information, and after the oral consent process, the researcher tell the subjects that, if they have any questions or problems, talk to the collaborator. The whole oral consent process should really be quite brief, probably less verbiage than I’m spending talking about informed consent. Too long and complicated, and it actually defeats the purpose of informing (as any lecturer knows, one way to make sure someone doesn’t understand a set of concepts is to give them more and more concepts).

For several projects, I’ve suggested a ‘tiered’ approach to information and consent; first, under no circumstances (except to avoid serious risk to the researcher temporarily) does the researcher conceal what he or she is doing. If you have to hide that your doing research, it’s a dangerous situation to be in, and I suspect one that an experienced ethnographer only should be doing. Second, if you are working with a group where its reasonable to inform people what you’re doing, try to use local channels to do so. Third, if you are actually taking person information from someone, you need to do a real oral consent process. If you’re sitting at a bus stop talking to someone about the building across the street, you don’t have to get them to sign a form. In our committee, at least, a tiered approach that differentiates public behaviour where a person has no reasonable expectation of anonymity from private behaviour or personal information through direct questioning has been upheld.

Public officials speaking in their roles and public behaviour, in which there is neither an expectation of anonymity, nor an attempt to identify subjects individually, really needs no consent, as far as I’m concerned. Although the researcher shouldn’t conceal what he or she is doing, nor try to exploit the subjects, there are many public events where informed consent is practically impossible and ethically unnecessary. In many of the capoeira events that I attended in Brazil, for example, a half-dozen people might be videotaping at any one time, and people making public speeches knew that they might be quoted by local media or anthropologists (sometimes I was not the only ethnographer present).
With long relationships, once a collaborator is clear about the researcher’s project and agenda, and has gone through the consent process, I think it’s not incumbent to keep going through the process again, but I do think that there are ways that a researcher can remind the subject of the nature of the relationship. Openly taking notes or asking if you can record something for your research, although not mandated, is one way to remind your subjects that what they say is being taken down. I find that, if I conduct myself responsibly, most collaborators have no problem with this. But I intentionally make it clear that I’m doing research, and, if they ask me to, I don’t record what I’m hearing or take notes, allowing people to talk ‘off the record.’ Of course, what they say will influence me, even if unconsciously, so it’s likely to enter the research surreptitiously; but that’s often what my subjects intended (at least in my work in Brazil).

This is probably more confusing than it needs to be, but the point is just that the ethics committee does not believe that a one-size-fits-all form will apply to all research projects. A substantial portion of the projects that we review are approved without using the ideal template, but all applicants need to think seriously about how they will fulfill the principles of seeking informed consent rather than just getting forms filled out. As always, protecting our subjects is our first priority, protecting our researchers, second, and assuring that good research with integrity is carried out is third (but still up there).

#7. Many ethnographers seem to get confused about the relationship between confidentiality and anonymity. Most ethnographic research is not strictly anonymous because the researcher typically knows the subject. However, ethnographic writing tends to protect anonymity. In a project where anonymity of subjects is a serious concern, either for safety or protection from social stigma, then the researcher should really think about how to build safeguards for confidentiality. This goes without saying.

Different countries (and probably even different states) have different laws about confidentiality for doctors, lawyers, journalists, and other professions, but none that I know of protects anthropologists and their subjects. So, if you’re taking notes on something that the government might want to know about, you won’t be able to protect those notes if they’re subpoenaed, at least not in any jurisdiction I know. The only thing worse than refusing to turn over your information in those settings, however, is to try to destroy the records, so you need to think about this ahead of time.

This said, however, I think that anthropologists’ concerns about their data falling into the wrong hands seem to me, except in certain exceptional cases, to be overblown. When I was applying for language study grants in the 1990s, some of us were worried about accepting area studies money that was clearly allocated by the government for strategic purposes; now that a lot of these funds have dried up, I’m sure I’d feel a lot less morally suspect intercepting some money from the government that might otherwise be spent on corrupt subcontracting, various pork boondoggles, or yet another tax cut. If you’re collecting this sort of information, however, it’s in your interest to learn what the rules are. Since you won’t be able to protect your notes, think of some way to make sure that they won’t be compromised (I, for example, have handwriting that I even find illegible after a very short period of time.).

But it’s also possible that, in some projects, subjects will not want to be anonymous. I think a good case can be made that public recognition is one of the things that we hope to give to our collaborators (item 3.7 in the Macquarie form, again). If you’re not sure, make it part of the consent process; a check box that allows subjects to choose. In my work on capoeira, recognition was one of the motives for people to work with me at all. Nevertheless, I still protected people if they were saying things that might reflect poorly on them or cause conflict in their home communities.

#8. Remember that your thesis IS a public document. So saying that you are not publishing the research results is not an option in most cases (item 6.3). In general, especially honours and masters students here seem to undersell the likelihood that their research will reach a public. The committee is committed to getting research out, so we’ll generally encourage people to say that they would like to publish their results.

#9. Recruitment, conflict of interest, and other power-related issues. In many anthropological projects, researchers are embedded in their communities in multiple ways; sometimes we conduct research among ‘our own people,’ sometimes we have other roles in the community while conducting research, sometimes we enter under the umbrellas of other groups already working in the field.

So the sections on conflicts of interest (section 4) and recruitment (section 5) are meant to sort out the possibility of coercion. Some populations (section 4) are likely to raise concerns for the ethics review board, especially students (if you’re their teacher) or employees (if you or the person recruiting them is their boss). In addition, the committee will be more careful with any of the populations indicated in 4.2: Aboriginal groups or Torres Strait Islanders, foreign populations, prisoners, asylum seekers, soldiers, the mentally ill or disabled. Although the committee WANTS responsible researchers to do work with these groups, we also want to make sure that they have the same protections as other participants, which may mean that the researcher has to go to a fair bit more trouble; for example, getting real informed consent from a population that is not free or does not feel free to refuse to participate is tricky.

The committee tends to worry about coercion, either implicit or explicit. Some members of the committee may even be overly concerned about coercion; my own experience in fieldwork is that people find MANY ways of refusing to participate in our research, not all of which are immediately obvious.

But the most chronic problem about coercion actually tends to come up with recruitment, especially when recruiting is being done through an organization or group representative. The committee doesn’t want people to think that getting access to resources (including therapy, treatment, or legal support) is contingent upon participating in research, so we tend to prefer a bit of an arm’s length relationship between contact people in organizations and the researcher. That is, we’d prefer that contact people give out information, but not actually sign up participants. We’d prefer that participants be asked to do something active in order to participate rather than force them to be active to opt out.

In general, in ethnography, if we explain our situation to the ethics committee, it’s not a problem. Approaching people directly, in most places, is not a problem, as long as you can explain to the committee that the participants have a relatively straightforward path to exercise in a right of refusal. For example, in an ethics application that I’m currently writing (and should be finishing instead of doing this), I’m proposing to interview a stonemason who I have contracted to work on the farm my wife and I have. Although he’s an ‘employee,’ and thus might be considered liable to coercion, in reality, our relative social positions in the community, the shortage of stonemasons, and the fact that he has a backhoe (infinitely valuable if you have a rural property) actually means that there’s no way I cold possible coerce him into participating if he didn’t want to. If I describe the social situation, it should be clear to the committee that this gentleman is virtually immune to any attempt to compel him to participate in research.

#10. Finally, the committee is committed to protecting the researcher and the integrity of research done under the auspices of Macquarie University, not just the subjects. Sometimes I think students (and even senior researchers) can lose track of this.

Applicants sometimes promise things that are unnecessarily onerous, especially those who are most dedicated to ethical behaviour. We sometimes suggest that a procedure for transcript review or a promise to give all of the subjects a copy of the resulting thesis is simply too difficult and disproportionate for the researcher. This may be hard for observers from outside our university to believe, but we think that sometimes the conditions imposed on research – even conditions imposed by the researcher – can be too burdensome. It is always better to deliver more than one promises than to make assurances in the field that cannot be followed up on. I know that, for any researcher who does believe strongly in ethical conduct, unfulfilled promises can weigh heavy on the mind and heart after ethnographic work. We learn so much from so many and amass so many debts, both personal and moral, that it can be very difficult to discharge even a fraction of them.

So although I would be the first to advocate for reciprocity and cooperation, I also will argue in committee meetings that some processes — for example, letting informants edit transcripts of notes and thus giving them veto power over research data or promising too many copies of any resulting work — might be either detrimental to the integrity of the research or aspirational targets rather than conditions of fieldwork.

Note: I’m going to post this as is because it threatens to grow longer and longer. I suspect that, if I get feedback, it may be critical, but I write this quickly in order to share some suggestions with students and colleagues here at Macquarie (and perhaps, by extension, elsewhere). With some time and greater thought, and perhaps with feedback from other observers, I may revisit these topics or even alter my suggestions.

The bottom line for me, however, is that the ethics review process can be a positive learning experience, one that allows applicants a chance to articulate their ideas, explain their plans, and receive feedback that helps to improve their projects. For review to work in this way requires good faith efforts on everyone’s part: applicants and reviewers alike. Whether or not we have achieved this in the past — and I’m sure that even our committee here has made decisions with which present committee members might take issue — we need to continue to work to make the process better.

I stand by my initial posting; that the answer to the problems of ethics review for ethnographers is not to avoid review, but to improve it, to educate committees, to educate applicants, to create a pool of shared knowledge about fieldwork techniques and ethics. My hope is that the process becomes steadily more sane, less intimidating, more educational, and better able to protect subjects, researchers, and the integrity of the research that we do as an academic community.

Greg Downey
23 August 2007

Asst. Prof. Zachary Schrag, a historian at George Mason University, and I have been engaging in a sort of blog-versation about IRBs or Ethics Review Committees on Human Research (depending upon your continent). If I ever write anything on the subject formally, I’ll probably owe Dr. Schrag a co-author credit, but if you’re interested in human research ethics much more broadly, including policy developments and recent research on the subject, you should check out his blog, Institutional Review Blog (http://institutionalreviewblog.blogspot.com). I started to try to work my way through it but realized that, until I get through the two new courses I’m teaching this semester, there was just too much there, but I’ll keep trying to chisel away at parts. If you’re interested in research ethics review, I’d bookmark his blog.

I promised that I would put up a sort of list of ‘most common problems’ with ethics applications from anthropologists (in my limited experience as review board member and advisor). I’ll still do that, maybe even later today, but not before I respond to Dr. Schrag’s last post. I’ll do this as a blog entry rather than response so that more people are likely to see it. (If you’re interested, here’s the original post and a couple of our notes to each other).

Dr. Schrag suggests that, since prior ethics review is the primary vehicle through which human research ethics are enforced, it might be useful to show the utility of this rather than other strategies. He then lists a number of other strategies, many of which are, and would be, extremely helpful: better training (excellent), researcher’s affidavit (I’m not sure what that would entail), or departmental review (also excellent). For Katz’s original piece in American Ethnologist, this is the key point. I’ll come back to this issue in my ‘errors frequently committed by anthropologists’ post because, from my experience, the ‘prior approval’ part is less a problem than certain other dogged issues.

I hope that most departments are putting other devices, like those suggested by Schrag, in place so that the IRB process is less isolate, less traumatic, and less difficult, but I’m not convinced that all of them are. Alone and isolated, with no training or orientation, review by an IRB may seem especially arbitrary, intimidating, and enigmatic. A LONG time ago when I was doing my PhD at the University of Chicago, we didn’t really discuss research methods at all, let alone ethics in the field or ethics review. Admittedly, I did my PhD in the last century, but back then, the primary discussion of ‘ethics’ revolved around whose ‘voice’ the anthropologist could use and the politics of representation. Ethics review, and field ethics, have grown a lot more complicated since then – and for many of my peers, I suspect that they were already a lot more complicated than our instruction was suggesting. (For example, I remember hearing stories of one colleague’s attempts to negotiate with a Native American community for research permission and ethics approval over a few beers, and the process seemed extraordinarily difficult.)

But, to specifically address Dr. Schrag’s suggestions, I think that, first, better training is absolutely essential. He’s right. Certainly, we try to provide that at Macquarie University. But I also find that students pay very close attention to what I say in training sessions because the review process looms over them. Admittedly, the form that they have to fill out at MU may not be ideal for ethnography — as Dr. Kalpana Ram has strenuously pointed out to me, it doesn’t even list ‘participant-observation’ as a research method in its list of them — but the ethics committee is reviewing this form to try to streamline it. If you know what you’re doing, it should only take about four or five hours to do the whole thing for an ethnographic project, including appendices and supporting materials if you have already thought about methods and methodology. Long, true, but certainly not unreasonable. So, I agree with Dr. Schrag: better training is essential. Would the students take to it so vigorously without the review process? I don’t know. I suspect some would, some wouldn’t.

Departmental review is another interesting idea, but I think that it’s unlikely to work in a place like Macquarie, in part because our department may not be large enough. (Note: This is NOT to say that our department is too small for other things — like providing a very good anthropology degree.) Presumably, any sort of departmental review would likely involve a number of people, even a number as small as two, so that advisors wouldn’t be reviewing their own students. With our faculty spread all over university committees (learning and teaching, research, IT, space…), it might prove onerous, especially because the academic calendar of applications tends to bunch together students from the same programs. Spread out over the university, the rhythm evens out, although we still do get crushed in February, April and May with the intake in psychology.

A kind of departmental review does take place within the university-wide committee at Macquarie, as members of the committee are clustered so that color-coded sub-groups do the preliminary and most serious review of applications for which they have special expertise. If an application has to go to the whole committee (for example, research with children, medical procedures, Aboriginal Australian groups, or ethically challenging research tends to), we usually turn to the members of our committee who are best versed in the area of study. If we have a particularly difficult ones, we’ll consult with a faculty member outside the committee who has special experience.

Also, we find that advisors sign off on applications without really reading them at all, which leads me to think that departmental review might work well in some departments, terribly in others. We’ve had applications come from departments, signed off by advisors, that are not merely unethical, but also unreadable, illogical, and incomplete. Sometimes its clear that the amount of time that reviewers are putting in to trying to sort out what’s actually being proposed in the research is much greater than the time that was spent on preparing the application. If departments were good at reviewing, then departmental review would work; but I suspect that, as long as the universities are potentially liable for their decisions, the oversight on departmental committees might make the departments wish that a divisional- or university-wide body would take over the task.

So while departmental review might work in some places, I suspect in others that it would not work as well as university-wide review. But this requires that the committee not impose inappropriate ethical standards, procedures, or expectations on some disciplines, something that I think anthropologists suffer from severely elsewhere, in universities other than ours.

In addition, departmental review might be part of a devolution process wherein more and more of the onerous administrative tasks once performed by divisional or university offices are made the responsibility of departmental staff (without necessarily increasing the departments’ resources). The ebb and flow of management theory seems to be leading some universities to do this, making life for departmental chairs, administrators, and faculty in key admin posts very difficult. This sort of dynamic would make university or divisional level ethical oversight less onerous on the departments simply because too many responsibilities are being thrust on understaffed departments. Your university may not be experiencing administrative devolution, however.

The suggestion of departmental review seems to me especially worth considering if the current environment at your university leaves the IRB or ethics review committee hostile or obdurate on ethnographic research methods. I’m more worried at the moment about freeing academic faculty from burdensome administrative tasks better done by administrative professionals so that they can teach, advise, write, and do research. But the consideration might be very different here at Macquarie if we could not successfully influence our university’s review process. It’s not merely that I’m on the committee; one of the key administrators of the committee is a former student in our department, so we may have a more congenial and open atmosphere for ethnography than at an institution where all the staff and representatives, for example, come out of bench and laboratory sciences.

I’ve been promising for a while now that I would start blogging on ethical issues in ethnography, especially relating to the concrete practical issues brought up by human research ethics review (referred to in the US as ‘IRBs’, ‘Institutional Review Boards’). My background is both as a practicing ethnographer, academic advisor, and teacher of research methodology, and as a sitting member of Macquarie University’s review board for human research (for one semester, the ‘Acting Deputy Chair’).

I am continually frustrated by anthropologists’ relationship to the review process; for a field that seems very comfortable with moral language and advocacy, we are surprisingly tense and defensive at the prospect of institutional oversight of research ethics. Granted, review boards everywhere are different, and a fair number of them have probably handed down some real stinkers when their decisions have involved ethnographic projects, but the widespread antipathy toward the process seems to me out of proportion to what goes on at our institution (at least), and detrimental to both our discipline’s health and teaching objectives.

So, for my first blog post on ethics, I’d like to reflect on what the review board here is like, which might (or might not) shed light on IRBs elsewhere. My first post, then, is ‘an inside-outsider’s view of human research ethics review.’

For example, a recent article by Jack Katz suggests that review boards have ‘forced participant-observation field researchers underground’ because the demands of these boards are impossible for ethnographers to fulfil (especially because they require prior approval for what is an emergent, unfolding social relationship in the field). He attributes the unwillingness of IRBs to make allowance for ethnography to the fact that ethnographers do not ‘bring in sufficient research funding to induce administrators to be more consistently responsive’ (Katz 2006:499).

Katz makes some remarkably astute points, but, from my own experience, his reading of boards, their motivations and composition, and the likelihood that any IRB will respond to our discipline’s concerns appears unnecessarily pessimistic. His desire to seek exemption from the review process—although understandable if it is as onerous at his home institutions as he describes—is dangerous in the long term to our discipline, in my opinion. But to understand that we have less to fear from IRBs than we might expect, we need to better understand their composition and conduct.

The first, and most obvious, strategy to deal with the failure of fit between IRBs and ethnography is to get anthropologists on the review boards. Katz may think that grant money talks loudest, making an anthropologist’s acceptance on these boards unlikely, but this is hardly my experience. Here, the review board is typically treated as one of the most difficult, time-consuming, and onerous administrative duties a faculty member can assume. Within a large institution like Macquarie, the review board has to deal with hundreds of applications for approval every year (at some august institutions in the states, I can only imagine the flow of applications through the research office).

Far from hogging spots on the review committee then, many prestigious faculty members have no interest in subjecting themselves to the workload involved in being on the review board (and many days I share their aversion). Departments that place especially severe burdens on the committee (such as a thriving psychology department with many graduate students) are often expected to provide several representatives to help deal with the load of paperwork. Competent, hard-working faculty reviewers quickly find that the process depends heavily upon them, even if they feel that they are stretched by the demands of the position. In this environment, where need for review is a constant heavy burden on the research office, our ethics review committee was happy to accept a permanent representative from our anthropology department (in addition to a divisional representative).

The second thing that views like Katz’s seems to miss is that university research offices—especially at state institutions like ours—are typically held accountable for the quality and quantity of research the university produces, not just the total number of research dollars. It is in the interest of the research office to approve applications and to get researchers into the field, to get PhD projects approved so that the university can produce PhDs. Far from being uninteresting because they don’t get big grants, the social sciences are extremely important because they are cost effective; that is, we generate much ‘bang for the research buck’, with research-based degrees and publications produced with relatively low overhead. So mercenary motivations exist to facilitate field research.

Third, and I think Katz is very perceptive on this point (2006:504), without public reporting of results, an enormous gap exists between the knowledge of ethically-sanctioned procedures among members of the board compared to other faculty. Faculty not on the committee do not know what is going on with ethics review, even among members of their own departments. For example, I have had to point out on several occasions to fellow faculty in our department that not a single application has been rejected outright in the past year; past trauma remains more vivid in memory than present outcomes of the procedure. In addition, students often don’t know how to read letters from the review board. Because they are led to believe that approval is a kind of all-or-nothing gamble, they think a request for more information or slight amendment is ‘rejection’. They may be preconditioned to perceive ‘failure’ by the fears of their elders.

Katz’s suggestion that decisions be made public—for many reasons—seems to me an excellent one, but that can happen on the departmental level even without university boards being involved. That is, each student need not invent the application anew every time. The goal is not vacuous or self-righteous ‘boilerplate language’ for ethics applications, as one recent anthropology blogger suggested, but a legitimate attempt by the anthropology community to think about effective techniques for recurring issues such as oral informed consent, naturalistic observation in heavily trafficked settings, the use of photographs, the protection of populations under dangerous regimes, and the ethical requirements on those learning of illegal activity.

The ethics review process should not be avoided, escaped, or ‘exempted’ away. Rather, ethics review boards can be educated about ethnographic research methods and encouraged to produce clear standards for our research. I worry that too many anthropologists inadvertently suggest that ‘ethics’ is a bureaucratic hoop, that the ‘politics of representation’ is a far more worthy consideration than the nuts and bolts of evaluating risk, minimizing dangers to participants (including researchers), balancing public interest against risks that can’t be eliminated, and thinking hard about our relationships to our subjects, our collaborators, the field, the public at large, our home institutions, and those who support our work. If we speak from a moral high horse about evading or exempting ourselves from review (presumably because we are above such pedestrian concerns), we teach evasion and a sense of ethical exceptionalism, that the rules don’t apply to us. In addition, we commit some of the crimes of bad faith misunderstanding towards the review board that we accuse these boards of perpetrating on ethnographic applications.

As I will suggest in later posts, I believe that many parties contribute to the current loggerheads at which anthropologists and IRBs find themselves. As a discipline, we must accept a fair portion of the blame and work toward making IRBs better instruments for oversight. In Australia, we labor under a substantial National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research; although there are certainly differences with the situation in European and North American (and other) review bodies, I suspect that there are more similarities.

References:
Katz, Jack. 2006. Ethical Escape Routes for Underground Ethnographers. American Ethnologist 33(4):499-506.

Macquarie University has some initiatives for indigenous people, which I believe are the kind of things the Australian government and society should be talking about in relation to the indigenous people rather than sensationalising ‘sexual child abuse’ and sending troops to Northern Territory.  

Macquarie University has an Indigenous Traineeship Program. According to the http://www.pers.mq.edu.au/ies/traineeshipprogram.html,          

 The Indigenous Traineeship Program recruits six Indigenous people with low-level or no qualifications annually and provides them with twelve months work experience and training to obtain a AQTF Certificate III in a field of interest to the University. Key features include:

• Trainees spend four days per week gaining practical experience in the Office or Division, and
• Trainees undertake a further one-day per week in study with a registered training organisation (eg. TAFE) either on-site or off-site
• Trainees have the option to take one week planned annual leave every 12-13 weeks
• Traineeships will operate for one year from January 2007 to January 2008
• On successful completion of their qualification, the trainee will have preference for interviews for continuing or fixed-term position with the University.
• Offices and Divisions gain an employee with current knowledge, skills and experience of the work in their Office/Division

Also Macquarie recently organised a two-day science experience with Indigenous student demonstrators in order to encourage young indigenous students to study and have careers in science. Below are the details: http://www.pr.mq.edu.au/events/index.asp?ItemID=2999  

Young Indigenous scientists lead by example

July 17, 2007

A lack of education within Indigenous communities can lead to other social problems such as unemployment, poverty and low self esteem. But this week a group of young Indigenous students will attempt to inspire hundreds of their peers to finish high school and build careers in science.

Only 29 per cent of Indigenous students currently complete Year 12, compared to 65 per cent of the broader Australian community. Even more disconcerting, of the 9004 university science graduates in 2005, only 25 were Indigenous.

To help counter these trends, Macquarie University and the Western Sydney Office of the NSW Department of Education and Training will be conducting a two-day science experience with Indigenous student demonstrators at the Dunheved Campus of Chifley College on Wednesday July 18 and Thursday July 19.

Around 450 high school students are expected to attend the event, which will involve activities ranging from hands-on chemistry, microbiology activities and entomological exhibits, to careers, scholarships and further education information. Local Aboriginal elders will also demonstrate wood carving and painting, and tell stories.

“The event is intended to stimulate interest in the sciences and promote further education opportunities amongst Indigenous students,” says one of the organisers, Associate Professor Joanne Jamie of Macquarie University. “It’s part of a much larger program initiated in response to Aboriginal community concerns about poor school retention rates in their young people.”

Macquarie University Vice-Chancellor Professor Steven Schwartz says that the science shows are just one way that the University is demonstrating its commitment to social equity.

 “A student who attends a well-resourced private school and who receives after-school coaching currently has a major head-start when it comes to accessing a university education in Australia,” Professor Schwartz says. “However by providing opportunities to disadvantaged communities through events like these, by offering educational scholarships and by instituting an admissions system which considers a student’s background, Macquarie University is hoping to address this situation.”