Regulatory Power: Can a Feminist Poststructuralist Engage in Research Oversight?

Abstract

This personal narrative focuses on a specific experience with the regulation and potential discrediting of diverse forms of research—service as the chairperson of an institutional review board. An attempt to adjust to contemporary legislative expectations for the protection of human participants in research in one institutional setting is described. Because of the complex, ambiguous, multivocal, and political nature of research and research regulation, the author has come to believe that qualitative researchers who become informed critical activists regarding research ethics and regulation are immediately needed as voices in the construction of appropriate practices that would protect all those involved—subjects/participants, researchers, volunteer academic reviewers, individual informants, the general public—while at the same tiome facilitating respect for research diversity. Valued qualitative research constructs—emergence, reflexivity, and the recognition of power and political agendas that place ethical practice and research diversity at the forefront of public discourses—are discussed as essential to the critical regulation of research.

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