ABSTRACT
Choosing to do fieldwork overseas, particularly in the Global South, is a challenge in itself. The researcher faces logistical complications, health and safety issues, cultural differences, language barriers, and much more. But permeating the entire fieldwork experience are a range of intermediating ethical issues. While many researchers seek to follow institutional and disciplinary guidelines on ethical research practice, the reality is that each situation is unique and the individual researcher must negotiate their own path through a variety of ethical challenges and dilemmas. This book was created to share such experiences, to serve not as a manual for ethical practice but rather as a place for reflection and mutual learning.
Since ethical issues face the researcher at every turn and cannot be compartmentalized into one part of the research process, this book puts them at the very center of the discussion and uses them as the lens with which to view different stages of fieldwork. The book covers four thematic areas: ethical challenges in the field; ethical dimensions of researcher identity; ethical issues relating to research methods; and ethical dilemmas of engagement with a variety of actors. This volume also provides fresh insights by drawing on the experiences of research students rather than those of established academics. The contributors describe research conducted for their master’s degrees and doctorates, offering honest and self-critical reflections on how they negotiated ethical challenges and dilemmas.
The chapters cover fieldwork carried out in countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America on a broad sweep of development-related topics. This book should have wide appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates, and early-career researchers working under the broad umbrella of development studies. Although focused on fieldwork in the Global South, the discussions and reflections are relevant to field research in many other countries and contexts.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|71 pages
Ethical challenges in the field
chapter 2|12 pages
When does ‘fieldwork' begin? Negotiating pre-field ethical challenges
chapter 3|9 pages
‘I always carried a machete when travelling on the bus': ethical considerations when conducting fieldwork in dangerous places
chapter 4|15 pages
Controversial, corrupt and illegal: ethical implications of investigating difficult topics
chapter 5|10 pages
Finding fluency in the field: ethical challenges of conducting research in another language
chapter 6|10 pages
Whose voice? Ethics and dynamics of working with interpreters and research assistants
chapter 7|13 pages
Doing it together: ethical dimensions of accompanied fieldwork
part II|47 pages
Ethical dimensions of researcher identity
chapter 8|11 pages
Revealing and concealing: ethical dilemmas of maneuvering identity in the field
chapter 9|13 pages
First impressions count: the ethics of choosing to be a ‘native' or a ‘foreign' researcher
chapter 10|11 pages
Flirting with boundaries: ethical dilemmas of performing gender and sexuality in the field
chapter 11|10 pages
Family connections: ethical implications of involving relatives in field research
part III|50 pages
Ethical issues relating to research methods
chapter 12|12 pages
Fellow traveller or viper in the nest? Negotiating ethics in ethnographic research
chapter 13|13 pages
Unsettling the ethical interviewer: emotions, personality, and the interview
chapter 14|12 pages
Whose knowledge, whose benefit? Ethical challenges of participatory mapping
chapter 15|11 pages
Seeing both sides: ethical dilemmas of conducting gender-sensitive fieldwork
part IV|89 pages
Ethical dilemmas of engagement