Rendering Each Other Capable: Doing Response-able Research Responsibly

• In Event: Writing Together-Apart: Navigating the Post-Qualitative, New Materialist, and Critical Posthumanist Research Across Disciplines

Abstract

How would it work to do post-qualitative or new empiricist research in ways which are both accountable (responsible) and responsive (response-able)? This presentation thinks with work of Barad (2007), Despret (2016), Haraway (2016), Tronto (2013), and Walker (2008), who have all written about responsibility (by which they mean accountability), and response-ability or the ability to respond, from a feminist relational ontological position.

Objectives & Perspectives
The presentation briefly outlines the background, rising importance and limitations of principle-based ethics approach which most research ethics committees in higher education refer to and require researchers to adhere to. As a way of thinking otherwise about research ethics, the presentation proposes a posthumanist political ethics of care which would call for changes to the way that research happens in terms of the ethical sensibilities which emanate from such a worldview. Examples of research practices in higher education institutional settings are referred to in the presentation.

Both, political care ethics and posthuman ethics are predicated on a relational ontology, which starts from the premise that entities do not pre-exist their relationships but come into being through relationships. A relational ontology, therefore, maintains that humans or entities do not exist before or outside of relationships. Thus the notion of individuality is problematic in the context of the four pandemics because from a relational ontological way of understanding the world, nothing can be considered outside of relationships.

Modes of Inquiry & Data
The presentation uses a diffractive methodology in reading political ethics of care theories (Tronto, 2013) and posthuman care theories (Barad, 2007; Despret, 2016; Haraway, 2016) through each other to generate alternative ways of thinking about research ethics. Diffracting a political ethic of care and feminist new material ethics entails a close and detailed reading of texts of these approaches, and an attempt to do justice to the ideas emanating from both approaches. Diffraction as a methodology does not entail juxtaposing one approach or theorist (the political ethics of care in this case) against another (feminist new materialist ethics) or contrasting them as pre-existing theories or approaches but rather a care-full, attentive, detailed, and responsive reading of one through the other without foregrounding one or the other, and coming to new or creative insights through the interference of diffractive patterns.

Insights & Scholarly Significance
The paper concludes that, in order for responsibility and response-ability to become possible, attentiveness (Tronto) or the arts of noticing (Tsing), as well as cultivating curiosity, ‘letting one’s imagination go for a walk’ (Haraway, 2016), rendering each other capable (Despret) need to be present. This kind of posthuman political ethics of care is different from normative principle ethics for research, with its concepts of respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice.

Reading political ethics of care theorists through posthuman and new materialist theorists allows researchers to gain new insights into the practices of research, opening up possibilities of doing research differently. More particularly, collective experimenting and collaborative risk-taking as entangled beings, with the sensibilities of response-ability and responsibility can be seen as alternative ethical practices in research.

Author

• Vivienne Grace Bozalek, University of the Western Cape