Ethics Regulation and Colonial Knowledges: A Critical Reading of Institutionalized Research Ethics Review

• In Event: Unsettling Ethics in the Curriculum: Research Praxis and Pedagogies

Abstract

The current model of institutional research ethics review in the United States is often described within a context of particular origin stories. Events like the Nuremberg trials or the Stanley Milgram experiment are understood as lapses among otherwise ethical scientific practices, with the Tuskegee Syphilis study marking the federal government’s impetus to regulate research involving human subjects (Bledsoe et al., 2007; Fitzgerald 2005; Heimer & Petty, 2010). While IRBs are meant to regulate federally funded research, universities have broadened the scope of these regulations to review most forms of research with human subjects. This expansion of the IRB’s reach has raised a broad range of critiques by scholars from various disciplinary orientations, highlighting the contradictions when biomedical standards are applied to other methodologies (e.g. Dingwall, 2008; Lederman, 2006; Schrag, 2010; Van den Hoonaard, 2011).

Yet these critiques largely fail to ask what such conceptions of research ethics tell us about conceptions of knowledge production. As such, this paper examines what kinds of ethics emerge from discourses that privilege scientific modes of knowledge production. What does ethics come to signify within knowledge frameworks that take as given what Wynter (2003) describes as the “bio-economic subject” (p. 318)? I consider institutionalized research ethics as a discourse in order to ask, what are its implicit logics? Who are its implicit subjects? What is elided from this discourse or by definition, excluded from consideration? To build on the work of Tuck & Guishard (2013), how do normative conceptions of research ethics and their common critiques flatten the theoretical and methodological complicity of social science research in both creating and maintaining settler colonialism?

My analysis is guided by these questions, and is structured in three sections. I begin with an overview of some of the key historical moments that are often narrated as ethical ruptures in an otherwise innocent history of science, looking to the biomedical literature and the emergence of institutional review boards (IRBs) within the United States. I then review some of the commonly cited critiques of institutional ethics review processes, focusing on the expansion of human subjects review into the social sciences and humanities, or what Haggerty (2004) has dubbed as “ethics creep”. I contend that what is often missing in such normative critiques is an engagement with the intersections of the ethical and the epistemic domains, particularly from de- or anti-colonial perspectives.

Taking as an axiom that knowledge production practices are shaped by logics of coloniality, I move to consider the ethical dimensions of research that are often missed in either the origin stories of research ethics or by the normative critiques of research ethics review. My paper thus sets up a framework for understanding the limitations of research ethics through its institutionally-sanctioned discourses, in order to call for more critical engagements with questions of ethics throughout research training and praxis. I seek to elicit critical dialogue within the field of education that unsettles traditional conceptions of research ethics and its place within research training and curriculum.

Author

• Sheeva Sabati, University of California - Santa Cruz