Abstract
This paper suggests that conducting research in conflict and disaster affected societies with student groups as part of higher education programmes can offer a valuable opportunity to enhance research ethics training in political sciences and international relations courses. Research visits allow students to critically reflect on their roles in knowledge production processes, their own positionality and to develop key skills such as reflective practice. Although research visits are inherently fraught with ethical dilemmas, engaging students with these dilemmas can be an initial step towards more ethical research practices in academia and beyond. This teaching note explores some of these ethical dilemmas of student research visits and concludes with practical suggestions for organising such trips to avoid common pitfalls. In addition, it outlines pedagogical strategies, particularly daily debriefs, to foreground ethical practice.
Introduction
In today’s Higher Education programmes students increasingly have the opportunity–or the obligation–to go on guided fieldwork or study trips as part of their Political Science and International Relation degree programmes. While these experiences have become a popular marketing tool for departments to attract potential students in an increasingly competitive market, research visits can provide valuable experiences and learning moments for students that teach them essential skills beyond academia (Ambrozy and Harris, 2016; Armakolas, 2001; Hirsch and Paczyńska, 2024) and offer a way to engage them with the work of international and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that is often only discussed theoretically in the class room. While it is important for students and researchers to understand issues such as political violence, human rights, development, social injustice and conflict resolution processes in context, most curricula offer little opportunity to learn about ethical practice in the field (Eck and Cohen, 2021) potentially leaving graduates without a key skill for their further careers.
At the same time, student fieldtrips have also rightfully been criticised for contributing to ‘conflict tourism’ (Mitchell, 2013), by offloading busloads of students to visit refugee camps, sites of previous mass violence, or engage with vulnerable populations without any pedagogical strategy. I argue, however, that fieldwork offer a unique space for teaching research ethics and reflective practice to students. A focus on research ethics and reflective practice should also help to mitigate some of the ethical pitfall of such trips. Whether or not students will be able to learn ethical practice and reflection will be highly dependent on the organisation, structure and boarder pedagogical design of the research visit. With reference to student research visits as part of courses that take part in fragile social and political environments, this article looks at the ethical considerations around conducting fieldwork with students, and how research visits can serve as a powerful way to teach the sometimes abstract subject of research ethics that is often absent from political science curricula, and to bridge the gap between paper and real-world ethics.
To begin, a clear critique arises with the terminology commonly applied to student research endeavours: field trips. By field trips, this article refers to short student visits (generally abroad or to otherwise marginalised communities) of 1 to 3 weeks, with a group of peers, and led and facilitated by faculty. Examining the semantics of terms such as ‘field trip’ or ‘fieldwork experience’ suggests a set of embedded assumptions that scholars have long challenged. Richmond et al. (2015), for instance, argue that the term fieldwork, as it is used within research, political, and policy contexts, implies an inherent ‘backwardness’ of the field, as well as a problematic perception of the ‘field’ as a space where researchers and policymakers may ‘experiment’ with new ideas. Similarly, the word ‘trip’ is associated with activities that are fun, recreational and organised with limited responsibility for the participants. In response, I started to use the term research visit in our programmes. This terminology seeks to move away from the notions of experimentation and the colonial framing of the ‘field, ’ instead foregrounding two central aspects of the educational endeavour. First, it underscores research and learning as the primary objective of the undertaking, stressing the expectation for active work during the time abroad. Second, in framing it as a ‘visit’ rather than a ‘trip’, the term can convey a more intentional and temporally bounded engagement, with a clear sense of the achievable within the timeframe. A visitor generally stays for a short period of time and seeks to respects the rules of the place they are visiting. The term ‘visit’ thus invokes an expectation of politeness and respect for local customs on the part of the visitor. Consequently, research visit serves as a more fitting term, better signalling to students the purpose of their journey abroad than ‘field trip’ does. In this way, the term suggests a revised power dynamic. However, this rephrasing alone is not sufficient. The remainder of this article aims to expand upon strategies for effectively transforming the field trip into a substantive research visit.
This article draws on the literature around student experimental learning outside the classroom (Short and Lloyd, 2017; Hirsch and Paczyńska, 2024), the ethics of conducting research in fragile environments (Wood, 2006; Cronin-Furman and Lake, 2018; Mac Ginty et al., 2021) and my own experience of leading student research visits for more than 10 years, to various locations, including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus, India and Northern Ireland. This piece first engages with the gap in the curriculum of teaching research ethics to students and makes a case for why students in our field should engage more carefully with the subjects. It then looks at the ethical issues of research visits, and how they, maybe because of their flawed nature, can serve as a starting point for ethical reflection. The recommendations at the end should not be read as a ‘how to’ guide but a reflection on mechanisms that can address some of the ethical challenges outlined in preceding section, and, at the same time, suggests ways to maximise the learning around research ethics. However, designing ethnically sound research visits depends on the research context, the course objectives, positionalities of the students and instructors, and not at last the destination of the research visit itself. As such, the suggestions are no blueprints but food for thought.
Teaching ethics and student research visits
Universities’ curricula are increasingly turning to enquiry based pedagogical approaches, which encourage student research and engagement with ‘real-world’ problems. While most (graduate) programmes teach research methods, they lack substantial engagement with research ethics training, and rarely provide the opportunity to reflect on ethical practice beyond institutional regulations, nor do they offer insights into the practicalities of conducting research in crisis-affected or insecure environments (Mac Ginty et al., 2021; Schwartz and Cronin-Furman, 2023). This is not only a problem for future PhD students, and by extension faculty, who seem to be expected to pick up these skills on the go. Instead, teaching future graduates conflict and context sensitive-research skills, and a sound ethical understanding of research practice should be a corner-stone of supporting socially responsible and well equipped graduates for their future careers. As Eck and Cohen (2021: 863) argue,
Ethics training is a critical aspect of educating students. Training students to develop an ethical compass and to self-correct away from potentially harmful research practices is an important lesson because many students will not have access to formalised ethics review processes in their future jobs.
This is particularly important for degree programmes where a large portion of graduates strives to be employed in the third sector or aid agencies responding to political violence, humanitarian emergencies, disasters or complex development issues. In these fields, future careers likely involve working with vulnerable populations and collecting data on them, even if this might not always be labelled ‘research’. While most organisations conduct research on or evaluations of their programmes, the majority does not have the capacity to provide training in research methods, let alone research ethics. Depending on their size, organisations may not have ethics boards or formal clearance processes to advise or oversee data collection processes. However, data collection remains a critical component for informing future interventions and responses, and ethical engagement with research participants and local communities more broadly is essential, whether graduates later serve as programme officers, frontline responders or (academic) researchers. Fieldtrips can serve a dual purpose here and teach students inter-cultural skills and provide an insight into how cultural norms matter in the research process and engagement with populations.
Furthermore, research visits can help students understand that research ethics in practice can differ from formal ethics (Dhungana et al., 2024: 3). Only focussing on formal ethics processes and guidelines can leave graduates unprepared for what they encounter in the ‘read world’ after graduation. Cronin-Furman and Lake (2018) describe how ethical practice and structures are often notably different in conflict-affected spaces to politically stable, well-regulated environments. Researchers, trained and untrained, can easily access and use highly sensitive material, that, if not used carefully, can quickly endanger or harm research participants. As such it is important that research ethics are understood more broadly, of course respecting institutional and procedural ethics, but also thinking about what ethical conduct means beyond ethics board regulations. This includes reflections on their own positionality, for example, if they are they right people to conduct this research in the first place, if a certain piece of work should be conducted at all and if there are other costs and burdens for researched communities that are typically not considered (such as environmental impacts for instance or the burden of being over-researched). Such discussions often seem theoretical and somewhat unimportant to students in the classroom but are filled with meaning once in the field often changing their attitudes and perceptions of self and others. The way in which future generations of researchers and potential policy makers might think about gathering data, knowledge production and the inclusion of local stakeholders into this process seems particularly important when considering the power dynamics between the ‘researchers’ and ‘researched’– something close to the heart of many scholars in the discipline (Vogel et al., 2024). If our graduates aspire to and end up in careers that require research skills, and collaboration and engagement with vulnerable communities and individuals, who trains them in ethical research practice, if not us?
Ethical issues of going on research visits
One could argue that our discipline is uniquely placed to do so: Research in and on conflict-affected spaces and political violence
raises particularly thorny issues that include access and trust, positionality and power, ensuring the physical safety of respondents, the possibility of re-traumatisation, the need to protect data, the degree to which data can be shared, and the safety and wellbeing of the researcher and the research team. (Eck and Cohen, 2021: 855)
The academic literature reflecting on research ethics and the practicalities of conducting research in fragile environments is now well established and has been growing rapidly in the last 5 years, acknowledging the flawed methodologies and specific ethical dilemmas conflict and development researchers encounter beyond what ethics boards are interested in (e.g. Cronin-Furman and Lake, 2018; de Guevara and Bøås, 2020; Kušić and Záhora, 2020; Mac Ginty et al., 2021; Nordstrom and Robben, 1995). This literature also shows an intrinsic link between research methods, research ethics and knowledge production.
Student research with human participants can add and extravagate some of these issues due to a lack of qualitative research methods and ethics training, missing mechanisms of formal of ethical oversight, short time horizons of student research projects, and the altered risk–benefit calculus (Eck and Cohen, 2021). 1 The ‘benefits gap’ (Mitchell, 2013) on research visits is particularly noticeable, as visits leave almost all the immediate benefits of the process with the researchers and almost none with the researched, since students rarely will be able to collect data and disseminate findings that will make an impact on the populations they researched and encountered during their short research visit. The question is what, if anything, students can ‘give back’ to the communities. While the answer to this question is not easy, students and staff should creatively think about what could work in their context. 2 Further down the line, there should be a benefit for communities to engage with better trained professionals in the field of conflict resolution and international development.
The biggest dilemma is how research visits can feed into global structure of inequality. Depending on the research destination and the student group this can quickly have a colonial undertone where conflict-affected people become learning resources for students from global Northern institutions and their students (Mitchell, 2013). It connects to the understanding that the field is a ‘discursive and geographical space different from their own’ (Richmond et al., 2015: 2), and that fieldwork can create us/ them binaries (Hirsch and Paczyńska, 2024). In addition, research visits can contribute to the issue of over-researching places and populations (Kappler, 2013; Kelly, 2021) which puts an additional burden on societies already dealing with trauma and political instability. Research destinations for students are often chosen because they are fairly safe and accessible. Yet this means that the same locale is usually already highly frequented by other researchers, including PhD researchers, post-docs and professors. It also means that (I)NGO staff spends hours by briefing streams of students, usually interested in fairly similar issues.
Students themselves increasingly raise concerns about the environmental impact of research visits in class and integrate questions of climate justice into their ethical reflections about the course. Students understand their research largely as a self-development experience with little benefits for the cities visited. In recent years, students are, possibly more so than institutions, aware about the potential long term negative effects from the greenhouse gas emissions from long-haul flight on local populations in already fragile ecological, social and political settings, and how their activities can contribute to the double burden of climate and conflict in some locales.
Last, there should be some financial considerations: what about students who cannot pay the additional costs of research visits? If we deem the skills students can gain on research visits essential for producing socially responsible graduates, is there an institutional need to find more inclusive ways of teaching them?
Some of this discussion goes far beyond the remit of the question on teaching research ethics. Yet, it connects to a broader political economy of research (visits) and the global power dynamic they are situated it. This article would be incomplete without acknowledging this, and any ethics education of students from global Northern institutions need to reflect on these power dynamics as they are an inherent part of knowledge production hierarchies which academic and non-academic researchers are part of (Dhungana et al., 2024; Vogel et al., 2024). These are realities students are likely to encounter in their future employments. It also means that faculty should carefully evaluate if the same learning objectives could not also be achieved by doing a research visit much closer to home, or even in the home country. Discussing and confronting the above questions with students before embarking on research visits can start a process of ethical reflection even before travelling.
Designing research visits that centre (research) ethics
The subsequent recommendations are drawn from my experience of leading student research visits for over a decade, as well as student evaluations and course feedback. The below focusses on way to integrate the teaching of research ethics in a course unit, albeit the course unit has multiple other key objectives such as grounding theoretical concepts in real-world contexts, and understanding knowledge production processes more broadly. The course design has gone through various iterations, and was taught both at postgraduate and undergraduate level, where it found its current home with final year students. Students currently take a semester-long course on practical approaches to conducting research in fragile environments that include both sessions on research ethics, the research context, and practical skills of reflective practice, interviewing and note taking before embarking on a 2-week research. Students are tasked to develop small research projects in groups of 3 to 4 students throughout the semester that explores a theoretical concept they learned about during their degree in practice. They first work on these projects from a distance and then complete them during their time abroad, currently India. During the research visit students receive a range of briefing by experts (academics and NGOs) as well as self-organise a limited number of interviews. The students always work in their small groups so that no student wanders off by themselves during the research visit, adding an additional layer of security. The course is pitched to be about the research process not the outcome, and thus intensive ‘data harvesting’ is not needed nor encouraged to obtain a good grade at the end. A short research visit will not be an occasion to gather huge amounts of data that is robust and comparable. By their nature, student fieldtrips are time restricted, and students have limited background knowledge of the context and processes in the country, despite preparing well. It is a working research visit, which starts by setting out clear objectives associated with the fieldwork linked to an assignment. This helps to turn the travel into a working trip rather than a tourist adventure. The following suggestions also try to mitigate some of the above suggested ethical dilemmas.
Embedding the research visit into a course unit that features research ethics
Research visits can take different forms, from stand-alone elements, trips with a couple of briefing sessions beforehand, to being part of a full course unit. But to seriously engage students with ethical research practice, ethics cannot be a pre-departure workshop. To make students aware of the potential pitfalls of conducting research in difficult contexts, it makes sense to integrate ethics training into a semester-long course before the research visits, and cover themes such as formal research ethics reviews and research ethics governance processes, but also contextual ethics, reflective practice, and connected issues such as positionality and power. The pre-travel class time can also be a space to reflect on the ethical issues of research visits more generally as discussed in the preceding section.
Set (thematic) boundaries
Students tend to gravitate towards challenging, high-profile topics such as terrorism, gender-based violence, and human rights violations. Marsha Henry (2013) provides a compelling list of reasons why students should avoid selecting gender-based violence in conflict zones as a dissertation topic. This resource can serve as a basis for discussing why other sensitive topics may present similar challenges. It is essential to establish boundaries around research topics and the potential participants in students’ research projects. Teaching students why it might be ethical to stay away from some research topics or participants is an important point to carry into future employments, and relates back to Eck and Cohen’s (2021) point that successful ethics training can make students self-correct away from harmful and unethical research practices.
In this course, we exclude interactions with minors or individuals unable to self-consent, restrict the collection of audio-visual data, and limit student-organised interviews to professionals (e.g. government officials, NGO workers, and artists) to keep in line with low-risk ethics requirement. More structured interactions with local populations occur during group activities, facilitated by a local partner. These interactions offer ample opportunity for students to engage in and reflect on research ethics. Adjusting research questions require the course convenor to provide guidance and creativity in helping students design projects that engage their interests while reducing risks and minimising the burden on research participants
For example, one student group proposed researching the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, with an initial focus on evolving surveillance practices and police response strategies for future attacks. Not only was this topic impractical, but it was also unlikely that students would have access to relevant data, and any investigation into terrorism-related activities would instantly categorise the project as high-risk according to the university regulations. Through discussion, their research question was reframed to explore the politics of memorialization. This means, students eventually researched how the terror attacks are memorialised in public spaces. This approach allowed students to engage with their preferred topic in a manner that was feasible and low-risk. Instead of investigating government practices, the students focused on memorials and museums, NGOs representing victims, and business leaders (Harper, 2019), thus minimising ethical issues that might otherwise arise. While currently not part of the assessment of this course, reflecting on the exercise of boundary setting and defining the research question could be part of a formal assessment or reflection piece so students have a structured space to understand how and why their research question developed over the course of the module. 3
Working with local partner organisations
Working with a local partners help navigating some cultural and contextual issues and exposes students to different academic teaching styles, perspectives and knowledges on the topics taught at their home institutions. For example, academics from the partner institution can deliver guest lectures ahead of the research visit (online). This might both offer a different take on a topic and helps them understand how a certain issue is viewed in their future research context. Second, it can be a better way of engaging and integrating with local communities. In India, we partner with a university in Mumbai which acts as a gatekeeper to communities. This arrangement has various advantages. Students are housed on campus and thus integrate fast with the local student population. This also brings some benefits to the host students who are usually very curious in learning from the visiting students about their academic journeys and countries, since many will not have the opportunity to go on a research visit abroad themselves. In that way, students on research visits can contribute to the learning of others and closing the benefits gap a little.
Most importantly, our partner university is active in working with local populations through various long-term research projects that benefit the communities. We thus visit their projects as their guest, learning both about the academic work and its community implications. This mitigates some of the tourist or voyeuristic tendencies visits to underprivilege communities can have. The partner university also sets out clear boundaries for these visits and provides briefings on appropriate behaviour, dress codes and security in the areas. Yet these partnerships should be considered with care: Cronin-Furman and Lake (2018) caution about the power-dynamics in interactions between (wealthy) global Northern institutions and their often significantly under-resourced counterparts, which includes the outsourcing of burdens and responsibilities to partners. These dynamics offer plenty of opportunity to reflect on both before and after the research visit.
Integrating a daily debriefs
The literature on research visits, and experiential learning more broadly, emphasises reflective practice as the critical component of successful learning (Hirsch and Paczyńska, 2024; Kolb, 2014). Reflective practice allows students (and practitioners) to systematically learn from their observations and experiences, which is an important skill to take away from university education. Various pedagogical tools support reflective practice, such as journaling, art projects, or voice notes (Hirsch and Paczyńska, 2024). While many of these are solitary activities and also might not be done by students on busy days when participants are exhausted from the day, I suggest incorporating a daily ‘debrief’ as a structured group reflection session. These debriefs provide a safe space for students to engage in collective reflective practice, and thus learn from their own and their peers’ experiences.
In each debrief session, students are divided into small groups of ideally no more than 5 to 7 participants, with each group meeting with a faculty member for approximately 45 minutes to discuss the day’s experiences. This includes both planned activities and unplanned encounters, as well as moments of ‘accidental ethnography’ (Fujii, 2015). Debriefing sessions can be structured to focus on research methods, ethics, and the emotional demands of fieldwork, rather than solely on the content learned or data gathered each day. While connecting observations to broader concepts and themes from the literature is undeniably important and should remain a key element of the course, the debrief also offers an opportunity for consistent engagement with research ethics. For instance, on days when students conduct independent research and face ethical dilemmas, the debrief helps them collectively examine these experiences. Key questions might include: What was the ethical challenge? How was it addressed? What would you do differently next time? This process encourages discussion on alternative approaches to similar situations, enabling proactive learning and peer support. It might also mean that students decide they would act in the same way again, but are able to articulate a rational for their actions.
Debriefs also play an important role in managing risks and mitigating harm to student researchers. They offer a space where students can openly discuss emotional distress or discomfort, which most participants experience at some point during fieldwork. There might be a multitude of reasons for that ranging from the intensity of the programme, engagement with emotionally distressing material, homesickness, or general exhaustion from the lack of private space and downtime research visits entail. They present an opportunity for faculty to spot if someone is struggling and needs additional support. Ambrozy and Harris (2016) note that this supportive role places multiple demands on faculty accompanying the trip:
Consequently, the role of the organisers of these visits often becomes blurred and rarely stays within the rigid lines of ‘academic tutor’ or ‘visit facilitator’. In essence, the main role of the organisers of these visits is to effectively synthesise knowledge from any planned or unplanned activity into experiential learning. This means that the role undertaken by the organisers varies from being an academic instructor, role model, mentor, counsellor, outdoor educator and facilitator to at times a guide or a friend. This unique combination of roles requires developing a trust between organiser and learners, on both an individual and a group level, and so makes the former another crucial stakeholder.
While some students might initially be sceptical or even reluctant to have yet another meeting at the end of a long day, the debrief quickly becomes participants most treasured part of the day, and the discussion in these sessions is frequently what students remember most after returning home.
Conclusion
Research ethics training can provide students with essential, transferable skills. It encourages reflexivity, or the ability to critically examine one’s actions. While research visits are full of ethical pitfalls, integrating more rigorous discussions around research ethics can mitigate those and also offers a space in the curriculum for meaningful research ethics training. It exposes students to both the idea of research governance and ethics processes while also showing the reality of ethics on the ground. This can close the gap between ethics in practice and ethics on the ground and provides students with frameworks and tool to engage with vulnerable populations and examine the power dynamics with local partners after graduation.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
