The Securitization of Research Ethics: Navigating the Ethics of Engaging Criminalized Voices

• In Event: Prison Working Group: Doing prison research: Reflections on funding, ethics, knowledge production, and othering

Abstract

Prisoners are classified as additionally protected subjects in behavioral research in the United States with heightened protocols in an effort to eliminate risk for incarcerated participants. These regulations require the consent and oversight of the carceral system and can have the effect of drastically limiting the types of research conducted in carceral institutions. As members of the PrisonPandemic project, an archival project not governed by the Institutional Review Board, we had to borrow from and create our own ethical framework for collecting data from archival contributors. In this paper, we ask what ethical regulations govern work that is not “biomedical and behavioral research”—including oral history and archival projects, legal work and research, journalistic projects, big data, and multi-disciplinary projects—but nonetheless takes place inside the academy? We examine ethical frameworks for research in the social sciences, as well as participatory action, oral history, archival, and data use ethical frameworks, attending to how these academic ethical frameworks define risk and how these definitions shape resulting research, in intentional and unintentional ways. Through analysis of examples from each of these frameworks, we argue that efforts to eliminate risk often create other harms, while distracting from more fundamental ethical questions about the well-being of research subjects and data contributors.

Authors

• Alexis Rowland, University of California, Irvine

• Joanne DeCaro, University of California - Irvine

• Keramet Reiter, University of California - Irvine