Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This article considers the institutionalization of research ethics as a site of “colonial unknowing” in which the racial colonial entanglements of academic research and institutions are obscured. I examine the origin stories situating Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) as a response to cases of exceptional violence, most notably the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, within an otherwise neutral history of research. I then consider how the 2018 revisions to the Common Rule extend “colonial unknowing” by decontextualizing the forms of risk involved in social and behavioral research. I situate these complicities as necessary starting points toward anticolonial research ethics of “answerability.”

Keywords

ethics IRBs and academic freedoms decolonizing the academy pedagogy qualitative research and education qualitative research methodologies reforming the social sciences anticolonial research ethics

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Ahmed

(2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Alsan

Wanamaker

(2016, June). Tuskegee and the health of Black men (NBER Working Paper Series, No. 22323). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

Baloy

N. J. K.

(2016). Spectacles and spectres: Settler colonial spaces in Vancouver. Settler Colonial Studies, 6, 209-234. doi:10.1080/2201473X.2015.1018101

Bankert

E. A.

Amdur

R. J.

(Eds.). (2006). Institutional review board: Management and function. Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Battiste

(2013). Decolonizing education: Nourishing the learning spirit. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada: Purich Publishing.

Bell

(2014). Resisting commensurability: Against informed consent as an anthropological virtue. American Anthropologist, 116, 511-522. doi:10.1111/aman.12122

Benjamin

(2013). People’s science: Bodies and rights on the stem cell Frontier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bhattacharya

(2007). Consenting to the consent form: What are the fixed and fluid understandings between the researcher and the researched? Qualitative Inquiry, 13, 1095-1115. doi:10.1177/1077800407304421

Bledsoe

C. H.

Sherin

Galinsky

A. G.

Headley

N. M.

Heimer

C. A.

Kjeldgaard

. . . Uttal

D. H.

(2007). Regulating creativity: Research and survival in the IRB iron cage. Northwestern University Law Review, 101, 593-641.

10.

Bosk

(2004). The ethnographer and the IRB: Comment on Kevin D. Haggerty, “Ethics creep: Governing social science research in the name of ethics.” Qualitative Sociology, 27, 417-420. doi:10.1023/b:quas.0000049240.88037.51

11.

Brophy

A. L.

(2016). University, court, and slave: Pro-slavery thought in southern colleges and courts and the coming of civil war. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

12.

Byrd

J. A.

(2011). The transit of empire: Indigenous critiques of colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

13.

Chan

(2016, January 29). Historical figures, campus controversies. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/29/education/college-symbol-controversies.html

14.

Chiang

(2009). The cultural capital of Asian American studies: Autonomy and representation in the university. New York: New York University Press.

15.

Denzin

N. K.

Lincoln

Y. S.

Smith

L. T.

(Eds.). (2008). Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

16.

Dingwall

(2008). The ethical case against ethical regulation in humanities and social science research. Twenty-First Century Society, 3, 1-12. doi:10.1080/17450140701749189

17.

Dixon

Quirke

(2018). What’s the harm? The coverage of ethics and harm avoidance in research methods textbooks. Teaching Sociology, 46, 12-24. doi:10.1177/0092055X17711230

18.

Faden

R. R.

Beauchamp

T. L.

King

N. M. P.

(1986). A history and theory of informed consent. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

19.

Feeley

M. M.

(2007). Legality, social research, and the challenge of institutional review boards. Law & Society Review, 41, 757-776.

20.

Fitzgerald

M. H.

(2005). Punctuated equilibrium, moral panics and the ethics review process. Journal of Academic Ethics, 2, 315-338.

21.

Guta

Wilson

M. G.

Flicker

Travers

Mason

Wenyeve

O’Campo

(2010). Are we asking the right questions? A review of Canadian REB practices in relation to community-based participatory research. Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, 5, 35-46. doi:10.1525/jer.2010.5.2.35

22.

Hagan

F. E.

(2018). Research methods in criminal justice and criminology (10th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson.

23.

Haggerty

(2004). Ethics creep: Governing social science research in the name of ethics. Qualitative Sociology, 27, 391-414.

24.

Halse

Honey

(2005). Unraveling ethics: Illuminating the moral dilemmas of research ethics. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30, 2141-2162.

25.

Harney

Moten

(2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning & black study. Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions.

26.

Heimer

C. A.

Petty

(2010). Bureaucratic ethics: IRBs and the legal regulation of human subjects research. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 6, 601-626. doi:10.1146/annurev.lawsocsci.093008.131454

27.

Israel

(2015). Research ethics and integrity for social scientists. London, England: Sage.

28.

Jones

J. H.

(1981). Bad blood: The Tuskegee syphilis experiment. New York, NY: Free Press.

29.

Katz

(2007). Toward a natural history of ethical censorship. Law & Society Review, 41, 797-810.

30.

King

J. E.

(2017). 2015 AERA presidential address morally engaged research/ers dismantling epistemological nihilation in the age of impunity. Educational Researcher, 46, 211-222. doi:10.3102/0013189X17719291

31.

Kovach

(2009). Indigenous methodologies: Characteristics, conversations, and contexts. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

32.

Lederman

(2006). The perils of working at home: IRB “mission creep” as context and content for an ethnography of disciplinary knowledges. American Ethnologist, 33, 482-491. doi:10.1525/ae.2006.33.4.482

33.

Lederman

(2013). Ethics: Practices, principles, and comparative perspectives. In Carrier

J. G.

Gewertz

D. B.

(Eds.), The handbook of sociocultural anthropology (pp. 588-611). London, England: Bloomsbury Academic. Retrieved from url: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-handbook-of-sociocultural-anthropology-9781847883841/

34.

Loue

(2002). Textbook of research ethics: Theory and practice. New York, NY: Kluwer Academic.

35.

Martin

Montagne

(2017, December 7). Black mothers keep dying after giving birth: Shalon Irving’s story explains why. NPR. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2017/12/07/568948782/black-mothers-keep-dying-after-giving-birth-shalon-irvings-story-explains-why

36.

McKittrick

(2006). Demonic grounds Black women and the cartographies of struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved from http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=310740

37.

National Research Council. (2014). Proposed Revisions to the Common Rule for the Protection of Human Subjects in the Behavioral and Social Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi:10.17226/18614

38.

Nelson

(2016). The social life of DNA: Race, reparations, and reconciliation after the genome. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

39.

Newman

Glass

(2014). Comparing ethical and epistemic standards for investigative journalists and equity-oriented collaborative community-based researchers: Why working for a university matters. The Journal of Higher Education, 85, 283-311.

40.

Office for Human Research Protections. (2010, January 28). The Belmont report [Text]. Retrieved from https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/index.html

41.

Office for Human Research Protections. (2011, July 11). ANPRM for revision to common rule [Text]. Retrieved from https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/regulations/anprm-for-revision-to-common-rule/index.html

42.

Office for Human Research Protections. (2016, February 16). Regulations [Text]. Retrieved from https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/regulations/index.html

43.

Office for Human Research Protections. (2018, January 17). Interim final rule on common rule [Text]. Retrieved from https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/interim-final-rule-common-rule.html

44.

Paris

Winn

M. T.

(Eds.). (2014). Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

45.

Patel

(2016). Decolonizing educational research: From ownership to answerability. New York, NY: Routledge.

46.

Peart

(2017, February 11). Yale changes Calhoun college’s name to honor Grace Murray Hopper. YaleNews. Retrieved from https://news.yale.edu/2017/02/11/yale-change-calhoun-college-s-name-honor-grace-murray-hopper-0

47.

Povinelli

E. A.

(2011). Economies of abandonment: Social belonging and endurance in late liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

48.

Quijano

(2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21, 168-178. doi:10.1080/09502380601164353

49.

Reardon

TallBear

(2012). “Your DNA is our history”: Genomics, anthropology, and the construction of whiteness as property. Current Anthropology, 53(S5), S233-S245. doi:10.1086/662629

50.

Ribeiro

G. L.

(2006). IRBs are the tip of the iceberg: State regulation, academic freedom, and methodological issues. American Ethnologist, 33, 529-531. doi:10.1525/ae.2006.33.4.529

51.

Schrag

Z. M.

(2010). Ethical imperialism: Institutional review boards and the social sciences, 1965-2009. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

52.

Shah

(2011). Contagious divides: Epidemics and race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press.

53.

Shotwell

(2016). Against purity: Living ethically in compromised times. University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1hch845

54.

Stein

(2017). A colonial history of the higher education present: Rethinking land-grant institutions through processes of accumulation and relations of conquest. Critical Studies in Education. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/17508487.2017.1409646

55.

Stein

Andrieotti

V. D. O.

(2016). Decolonization and higher education. In Peters

(Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational philosophy and theory (pp. 1–6). Singapore: Springer.

56.

Sullivan

G. M.

(2011). Education research and human subject protection: Crossing the IRB quagmire. Journal of Graduate Medical Education, 3(1), 1-4. doi:10.4300/JGME-D-11-00004.1

57.

TallBear

(2013). Native American DNA: Tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. Retrieved from http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=1362022

58.

Tuck

(2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79, 409-428.

59.

Tuck

Guishard

(2013). Uncollapsing ethics: Racialized sciencism, settler coloniality, and an ethical framework of decolonial participatory action research. In Kress

T. M.

Malott

Porfilio

B. J.

(Eds.), Challenging status quo retrenchment: New directions in critical research (pp. 3-27). Greenwich, CT: Information Age.

60.

Tuck

Yang

K. W.

(2014). R-words: Refusing research. In Paris

Winn

M. T.

(Eds.), Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 1-40). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

61.

Tuhiwai Smith

. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London, England: Zed Books.

62.

University of South Carolina Library. (2011). Slavery at South Carolina College, 1801–1865: The foundations of the university of South Carolina [Text]. Retrieved from http://library.sc.edu/digital/slaveryscc/campus-slaves–slavery.html

63.

Valencia

R. R.

(2010). Dismantling contemporary deficit thinking: Educational thought and practice. New York, NY: Routledge.

64.

Van den Hoonaard

W. C

. (2002). Walking the tightrope: Ethical issues for qualitative researchers. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

65.

van den Hoonaard

W. C

. (2011). The seduction of ethics: Transforming the social sciences. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

66.

Veysey

L. R.

(1965). The emergence of the American university. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

67.

Vimalassery

Pegues

J. H.

Goldstein

(2016). Introduction: On colonial unknowing. Theory & Event, 19(4). Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633283

68.

Washington

H. A.

(2006). Medical apartheid: The dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from colonial times to the present. New York, NY: Doubleday.

69.

Wilder

C. S.

(2013). Ebony & ivy: Race, slavery, and the troubled history of America’s universities. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press.

70.

Wynter

(2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3, 257-337.