Forwarded for Jenny Pickerill....
Special Issue: Ethics of Research on Activism
Social Movement Studies is seeking papers on the theme of ‘Ethics of Research on Activism’
for a special issue to be published in 2012.
Rationale
Every stage of the research process into social movements can introduce complex ethical
questions. The issues we choose to address are often highly politicised and often involve our
own moral judgements and sympathies. The groups and individuals with whom we engage,
whether directly or through documentary records, may be in positions of peculiar
vulnerability. They may be relatively powerless by virtue of their social situation, their
activities may be covert or illegal, they may face a high risk of repression. The data we
gather, then, has special risks associated with it, but ethical challenges do not stop once we
insert our own analyses. Rather, we must make choices about what we report, in what terms
we report it, and what we leave unsaid, judging the risks faced by research respondents and
deciding on the importance of giving voice to those who feel under-represented in their
societies. Moreover, we must choose which audiences we wish to address. Are we satisfied,
having elicited ‘rich data’ from our research respondents, to use these solely in pursuit of
intellectual plaudits in the academy? Or should we seek to speak for or against the
movements we study, risking the appearance of condescension to movement participants and
excessive political involvement to our scholarly peers? Attempts to engage in the coproduction
of knowledge with movements also pose difficult ethical and scholarly questions.
How much co-production should there be and how are mutual interests to be negotiated? To
what extent should academics serve activists and to what extent is their independence
compromised by doing so?
These issues and many more are likely to be familiar to anyone who has engaged in research
on social movements, whatever the particular methodological techniques they employ. While
some of these ethical challenges may seem unique to the study of social movements, we also
believe that the lessons available here may be much more broadly applicable to original
research in a number of cognate fields. We hope to use this special issue of Social Movement
Studies as a forum for open and honest debate on the problems and opportunities inherent in
our research activities. This issue will become both an essential point of reference for
researchers in our field and also a valuable set of reflections for all academics occupied with
research in sensitive or complex social environments.
We are seeking proposals for papers on any aspect of the ethics of research on activism.
Contributors should reflect on actual experiences of research on social movements and,
where possible, consider the reactions of relevant communities to their work, where that
might include movement participants, funders or other audiences. Proposals that include
activists' voices directly through co-authorship or a conversation format are also encouraged.
Submission details
Please send a title and abstract (maximum 500 words) to
[log in to unmask] no later than Wednesday 15 September 2010.
The SMS editorial team will then select a number of abstracts and invite submission of a full
article (maximum 8,000 words). The final date for the receipt of articles is Friday 14 January
2011. Submitted articles must be written in accordance with our general instructions for
authors, available at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/authors/csmsauth.asp
All full submissions will be subject to peer-review. Invitation for full submission does not
constitute a guarantee of publication.
Social Movement Studies is an international journal publishing research into social,
political and cultural protest. It has a broad, inter-disciplinary approach designed to
accommodate papers engaging with any theoretical school and which study the origins,
development, organisation, values, context and impact of historical and contemporary
movements active in all parts of the world. Social Movement Studies aims to publish
soundly researched analyses and to re-establish writing as intervention.
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