Warren,
I believe Dwight Conquergood wrote a foundational article on the issues of
ethics and performative research. Sorry I can't place the title and
journal at this moment, but it can be easily found. Others may know of
this as well...
However, if you are specifically looking at what many universities call
"Institutional Review Board"-type applications, the article is not
applicable at that level of specificity.
I just went through that process this past Fall here at Rutgers while in
the process of working with students on a performative research project.
I can briefly say that my particular IRB required several shifts to the
interview-based data collection process. These shifts constrained our
ability to speak to certain individuals (elders who may be "vulnerable"
and anyone who is pregnant!). These constraints were based on the
University's litigious perspective that feared that our narratrs would
suffer emotional distress. Also, student interviewers were required to
apply a short cognitive abilities test to anyone who answered yes to any
one of a series of questions, therefore indicating low cognitive ability
(i.e., confusion, etc.).
In general, I feel that these constraints caused 1) a major delay in the
process of working with students in a time-limited semester-based schedule
(including loss of 2 weeks work our of 14 total in order to review a 6
hour film on Human Subjects Review), and 2) dampened their enthusiasm for
an open-ended interview process by tightening the protocol of questions to
a limited set. Note: All of this process was required by the IRB in
order to EXEMPT our project.
Anyone working with oral history-based methodology will probably deal with
these issues in some form, in spite of efforts by the American Historical
Association's deliberate statement that oral history is not a methodology
that applies to the university's definition of data collection methods
that contribute to generalizable research.
I'm curious to hear how others are handling this...
Jeff Friedman
Rutgers University
> Can anyone point me to analytical articles on the issue of risk and
> ethical review as applied to performative inquiry, performative social
> science, arts based research, research creation?
>
> I am particularly interested in analytical material that looks at risk
> as often 'necessary' in performative research, etc. and how that
> conflicts with the general notion of ethical review of avoiding risk as
> much as possible.
>
> Thanks
> Warren Linds
>
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