Dwelling Within Ethical Gray Zones and Unsettling Equity-Oriented Collaborative Community-Based Research

• In Event: Reimagining Collaborative Research Ethics: Epistemic Authority, African Wisdom, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and Gray Zones

Abstract

Drawing on Primo Levi’s (1989) conception of ethics as a “gray zone” that reveals the inability of normative philosophic conceptions of ethics to capture the complexities of living within unethical contexts and social structures, our paper raises critical questions around the contradictions of doing justice-oriented research within institutional and disciplinary contexts that help produce and maintain these very injustices. Collaborative, community-based approaches to social science research (CCBR) have themselves been understood as an ethical correction to traditional orientations to research within the social sciences and across disciplinary domains (Strand et al, 2003). As a methodological praxis that integrates ethical, epistemic, and political commitments into the structure and enactment of research, CCBR attempts to be in relation with and responsible to specific non-academic communities, contexts, spaces, and peoples. However, such framings of CCBR as an ethical corrective stand dangerously close to claiming ethical exceptionalism. In fact, engaging in collaborative work committed to justice illuminates deep, complicated dilemmas at the core of knowledge production practices that cannot be eliminated by having ethical intentions and politically progressive aims (Glass & Newman, 2015; Newman & Glass, 2014). These dilemmas are particularly heightened when knowledge production practices are connected to institutional contexts of higher education that legitimate hierarchies of sanctioned knowledge.

Following Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) methodology of ‘unsettling’ to disrupt traditional conceptions of research ethics in order to re-theorize ethics as praxis, we situate CCBR as a mode of dwelling within a web of relations. This conceptualization stands in critique of the transactional practices and constructions of persons underlying standard research ethics pursuant to the Belmont Report and the establishment of the Federal Common Rule, which are based on deontological and consequentialist frameworks. We explore the implications for social science research when ethicality is understood in-relation or in-situ, in the praxis of staying within the space of the un-ethical, rather than seeking exemption or distance from it. This requires a commitment to be responsible to the violence enacted in the very processes of representation and truth making embedded in the knowledge production of the social sciences. It also requires a morality without righteousness, a position of humility that nonetheless stands resolute against the dominant orders that marginalize and dehumanize some while others reap the rewards of histories of theft of land, labor, and ideas.

References Paper #4:
Glass, R.D. & Newman, A. (2015). Ethical and epistemic dilemmas in knowledge production: Addressing their intersection in collaborative, community-based research. Theory and Research in Education. 13(1) 23-37.

Levi, P. (1989). The Gray Zone. In The Drowned and the Saved (pp. 36-69). New York: Vintage.

Newman, A. & Glass, R.D. (2014). Ethical and epistemic dilemmas in empirically-engaged philosophy of education. Studies in Philosophy and Education. 34(2): 217-228.

Strand, K., Marullo, S., Cutforth, N., Stoecker, R., Donohue, P. (2003). Community-Based Research and Higher Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Wiley.

Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review. 3(3): 257–337.

Authors

• Ronald David Glass, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Sheeva Sabati, University of California - Santa Cruz