The Practice of Making Ethics : Methodological Entanglements and Speculative Governance

Abstract

Ethics in research is often treated as a procedural hurdle; a fixed, front-loaded checkpoint of compliance. I propose an alternative: an ethics that is intra-active, materially situated, and made with the unfolding of the research itself, making ethics. Drawing on feminist new materialist praxis, I explore how ethics emerges within embodied, co-creative, and affective research encounters, particularly in creative, practice-based, and post-qualitative methodologies. I examine not only the methodological implications of this remaking but also the institutional structures that constrain it. I call for iterative materially embedded ethics practices and a remaking of research governance that privileges responsiveness over risk-averse abstraction. With this paper, I offer making ethics, not a retrospective add-on or predictive mechanism but a generative, materially attuned, and institutionally consequential practice, one that demands structural transformation. What might research become if ethics were made with-in its world?

Introduction

What if ethics in research wasn’t something applied to the work, but something made with it? Making ethics.

Despite the proliferation of relational and context-sensitive approaches to research, institutional ethics frameworks continue to treat ethics as a static structure: a pre-project obligation, a compliance checkpoint, a set of documents detached from the rhythms of lived inquiry. This paradigm persists across disciplines and funding systems, reinforced by procedural governance that assumes ethical conditions can be anticipated, declared, and locked into place before research begins. Such assumptions are not neutral. They entrench extractive models of knowledge production, ignore emergent relationality, and constrain methodological innovation, particularly for researchers working with creative, sensory, practice-based, or more-than-human methods.

With ¹ this paper, I argue for a different ethics: one that is intra-active, situated, and materially entangled. Rooted in feminist new materialist praxis, I propose that ethics is not external to research but is continually enacted, negotiated, and remade with and through research encounters. This builds on my earlier work (Page, forthcoming) where I began remaking ethics, not as a regulatory checkpoint, but as a material-discursive practice of relation. Here, I extend that argument by foregrounding the tensions between ethics as procedure and ethics as praxis. ² Institutional models often stabilize ethics through abstraction and prediction. In contrast, I approach ethics as emergent, situated, and co-constituted, made with research, not prior to it. The tensions that unfold, between compliance and care, prediction and attunement, abstraction and accountability, are not resolved here. They are worked with, unsettled, and remade throughout. Here, I move from critique to methodological and institutional intervention. How can we make ethics within practice, and what structures are needed to support that making? This argument unfolds not only methodologically, but structurally, toward a remaking of governance itself, where institutional ethics frameworks must be remade as situated, iterative, and materially attuned.

I purposefully italicize making ethics and use lowercase to signal a political and methodological shift. Title case would risk suggesting a prescriptive model; lowercase retains its fluidity. Italics distinguish making ethics as a theoretical gesture aligned with new materialist, decolonial, and participatory practices. It names ethics as an intra-active, co-constitutive, and situating praxis. It is not a rejection of ethics but a transformation: making ethics a praxis of attunement, care, and co-becoming that resists static oversight and unfolds with the dynamic, material realities of research.

This intervention unfolds in three intra-woven dimensions:

1. Methodological. I share how research ethics emerges with embodied, affective, and materially situated practices, where methods are not neutral tools but participants in ethical becoming.

2. Pedagogical. I foreground how ethical research relations are cultivated with responsiveness, care, and co-creation, particularly in place-based and participatory methodologies.

3. Institutional. I call for a transformation of ethics governance frameworks, proposing iterative, responsive models that move beyond compliance and enable relational accountability.

This is not simply an argument for more flexible ethics. It is a call to remake how research governance itself understands knowledge, relation, and responsibility. Without institutional shifts, even the most relational methodologies remain constrained by systems that privilege prediction over emergence, abstraction over attunement.

The sections that follow build this argument with five interconnected inquiries. I begin by remaking research as a material-discursive event, where ethics arises not from policy but from encounter. I then explore how “data” is remade as a co-creative, agentic force, demanding a different kind of ethical engagement. In the third section, I examine ethical reflexivity as a lived, situated negotiation, shaped by power and positionality. I then turn to material and embodied methods, where ethics is enacted with gesture, texture, and shared sensory worlds. Finally, I expand these methodological provocations into a proposal for institutional reform, sharing models for iterative ethics review and governance that resist procedural logics and invite a co-creative ethics of becoming.

What follows is not a prescriptive ethics framework. It is an invitation: to make ethics with our methods, within our relations, and with the shifting forces that shape our research worlds.

Research Is a Material-Discursive Event

Research does not happen outside of relation. It is made with it. In this section, I begin with a claim that underpins the entire paper: ethics is methodological. Method is not a neutral tool. It participates with the ethical becoming of research. If research is a material-discursive event, then so too is ethics, shaped with encounter, uncertainty, and the affective, situated nature of inquiry.

Despite decades of critical engagement, institutional ethics frameworks continue to treat ethics as a static checkpoint. Often placed before research begins, these procedural models operate as regulatory thresholds, relying on documentation that presumes ethical conditions can be predicted and held stable. Sabati (2018) and Carozzi and Horner (2023) show how such logics do not just flatten complexity. They govern subjectivity, producing compliant researchers who perform ethics through documentation not relation. These structures are not neutral. They reflect colonial and institutional logics that privilege abstraction, risk aversion, and control.

Drawing on feminist new materialist thought, particularly Barad’s (2007) theory of intra-action and Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) speculative ethics of care, I explore ethics as something made with research. Not before it. Not above it. Ethics emerges with relational, affective, and socio-material conditions. It is not a supplement. It is already there, if we stay with it. Intra-action, as Barad (2007) defines it, challenges the assumption that entities pre-exist their relations. In research, this means the boundaries between researcher, participant, data, and method are not fixed. They are produced with entangled encounters. This remaking displaces extractive logics of data collection, where knowledge is assumed to exist independently of the process. It also disrupts the figure of the detached researcher. An intra-active ethics demands responsibility with, not distance from.

Critiques of new materialism are important here. Rekret (2018) and Taylor (2023) warn against floating above power or history. I hold this tension deliberately. Intra-action must remain situated. The practice of ethics I am calling for cannot displace questions of governance, coloniality, or epistemic authority. Sabati’s (2018) notion of “colonial unknowing” and Carozzi and Horner’s (2023) call for a reckoning with institutional research ethics remind us that emergence is not inherently ethical. It must be situated, accountable, and relationally held.

If ethics is made with encounter, then method becomes an ethical place. Coleman et al. (2019) argue that feminist new materialist methodologies disrupt the view of method as a tool. Method, in this framing, is performative. It shapes what becomes knowable, and how. MacLure’s (2013b) “data glow” asks us to stay with the affective charge of data, its unpredictability, its refusal to settle. To follow the glow is to enter a space where ethics is not predefined. It must be noticed. Felt. Practiced.

This is not theoretical alone. In a study with a rural and remote community, (Page, 2020) I found myself continually repositioned. I was not an insider. Nor was I fully outside. My presence was shaped by voice, rhythm, shared pedagogical histories, and material proximities. I expected guardedness. Instead, people shared openly, intimately. One person said, “I can tell you this because you don’t know them.” That moment taught me something I couldn’t have planned for. Ethics arrived not through form but with trust. Not through anonymity but with relation.

What made that encounter ethical was not my adherence to institutional protocols. It was the attention I gave to what emerged, and my response to it. Disclosure was not data. It was a gesture. An act of mutual vulnerability. In that moment, ethics became a situated practice of care. Not soft care, but the kind Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) speaks of. The kind that holds discomfort. That stays.

This making ethics calls for:

• Data as co-created. Not found, not extracted, but formed with and through research relations.

• Researchers as co-constituted. Not neutral, but shaped with entanglement and accountable to it.

• Participants as agentic. Not static subjects, but collaborators in shaping the ethical architecture of the work.

• Materials as ethical participants. Objects, tools, and environments do not merely record. They participate.

This ethical remaking remakes the very architecture of research design. Methods are not passive instruments, but active ethical agents, shaping not only what becomes knowable but also how researchers and participants come to matter within the inquiry. This is not about layering ethics onto practice but about remaking practice itself as an ethics-in-motion (Coleman et al., 2019). Practice research offers a space for this. Bolt (2013) reminds us that matter matters. Materials and bodies are not passive. In creative, embodied, and sensory work, ethics is already happening in the making. Not after it. Not in the paperwork. In the pause, the texture, the breath.

This has can have implications beyond the creative fields. In Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) research, it troubles the boundaries between human and non-human and calls for more than bioethical compliance. In policy research, it unsettles data as neutral and insists on attunement. Across contexts, making ethics is not a technique. It is a way of moving with research. Slowly. Responsively. With care.

To position research as a material-discursive event is to say that ethics cannot be secured in advance. It is lived. It is uncertain. It moves. It must be made and remade again and again, with those who are present, with what emerges, and with the world it helps bring into being.

The Role of Data: From Collection to Co-Creation

If ethics is not external to research but emerges with its unfolding, then what we call “data” is not neutral. It is not something collected, stored, and later interpreted. It is an affective, material, and relational event. In this section, I position data not as object, nor even as trace, but as a place of ethical becoming, something that glows, not metaphorically but materially, demanding attunement, pause, and situated responsibility.

Critiques of data are not new. St. Pierre (2013) dismantled the notion that data can ever be raw, untouched by theoretical framing or methodological desire. Koro-Ljungberg et al. (2017) write of data’s undecidability, insisting that “data” itself is a construct shaped by neoliberal research logics and epistemic constraint. Springgay and Truman (2018a, 2018b) extend this by troubling the idea of data as stable or extractable, arguing instead for data-as-rhythmic and data-as-affect. Each of these critiques destabilizes the authority of data-as-thing. They unsettle its edges.

But they do not necessarily return to the question of what data demands of us, ethically, relationally, and materially, when it emerges. My concern here is not only epistemological but ethical. If we take seriously MacLure’s (2013b) “data glow,” we must follow its charge, not as a metaphor, but as an ethical signal. A flicker. An interruption. A call to notice, but not to capture. But this requires more than noticing. It requires an ethical remaking.

In my own research, I have encountered this glow not in data points, but in unplanned resonances, when a story is half-told and then withdrawn, when a photograph is shared and later recanted, when silence does not signal lack but care. These are not data artifacts. They are ethical events. They exceed the project design and ask something else of the researcher: not analysis, but listening; not interpretation, but presence. I followed the data glow: those moments that felt alive, resistant, charged with a kind of affective friction. This was not a glow of clarity or insight, but of discomfort, entanglement, and the pull to stay with. I borrow the term from MacLure’s (2013b) articulation of the “wonder” and “glow” of data, those moments that resist representation and hold us in their excess.

But where MacLure (2013a) names a methodological affective pull, I work with data glow as an ethical-material trace: what hums with potential consequence, what unsettles the edges of what I think I know, and what calls for an attuned, intra-active response. Following data’s glow means recognising that data is not waiting to be revealed. It becomes, with and through the encounter. And that becoming is not neutral. It is shaped by affect, timing, power, positionality, and relation. Data does not exist in isolation, data comes into being through the dynamic intra-play of researchers, materials, and conditions of the research encounter. To attend to data this way is to understand it as already intra-active. It is not the residue of research. It is the place of ethical negotiation.

This also means refusing the impulse to settle or resolve what data “is.” It resists being finalized, finished or completed. This is not a failure. It is the ethics of partiality, of staying with what lingers. And yet, many research contexts, especially those tied to institutional deliverables or fixed timelines, demand that data be coherent, clean, and interpretable. Ethics committees often ask how data will be “secured,” “processed,” or “managed,” using terms that align data with extractive paradigms. But how do we manage data that haunts? That leaks? That resists?

One afternoon, sitting with a participant between workshop sessions, working with the ideas of grief, loss and agency, we were talking about nothing in particular. The recorder was still on, though forgotten. They paused “There’s something I want to show you,” and then hesitated. They reached into their bag and unfolded a piece of paper. A note from her husband, soft with being folded and refolded. “It was his last one” they said. “I thought it should’ve been thrown out, but . . . it still feels like him.” She folded it again. “I don’t want this recorded,” she added. “But you should know it was here and why I have it.” What was offered wasn’t data. It was something else. A residue, a presence, a relational charge. There was no form for this. No image captured, no transcription. But the encounter shaped the research. It stayed. It glowed. Not because it revealed something final, but because it refused resolution. It became an ethical obligation, not to interpret or document, but to remain with. What emerged in that moment asked not to be extracted, but carried.

This is the work of data-as-relation. Not as object, but as provocation. Not as proof, but as practice. The fragment of paper resisted representation, yet it demanded care. It enacted a kind of ethical intimacy that moved beyond any consent form or data management plan. And it left a trace. Not in the archive, but in the methodological and ethical commitments that followed. When data glows in this way, it asks something of us. To stay with, to hold back, to know without showing. Ethics does not follow the data. It moves with it. This involves a different temporality, one that resists closure and accepts that knowledge may remain unsettled.

This making of ethics has implications for research governance. Current ethics protocols often treat data as a risk factor: something to be secured, encrypted, anonymised. These are important protections. But they also narrow what is recognizable as data and what is allowed to be valued. If we accept that data may not always be stable or containable, we must build ethics frameworks that hold this uncertainty without foreclosing it.

This is not a call to loosen ethical oversight. It is a call to remake what ethical responsibility looks like in relation to the emergence of data. It is to accept that some forms of data need to be held in silence, or in pause, or in forms that cannot be made public. It is to acknowledge that data, like people, like place, has rhythms that do not always align with project timelines. It is to see data as a material-discursive phenomenon that is made by our methods, and also shapes our ethical accountabilities in turn.

What this requires is not simply methodological flexibility, but ethical improvisation. Not in the sense of acting without care, but in staying open to what research unexpectedly asks of us. MacLure’s glow is not simply a shimmer. It is an invitation to feel the stakes of research as they unfold. Ethics, then, is not separate from data. It pulses with it.

Reflexivity and Power in Practice

Reflexivity is often framed as an individual act: something the researcher performs to remain ethical. A ritual of accountability through introspection, documentation, or confession. But reflexivity, in the context of making ethics, cannot remain personal or procedural. It is not something to perform. It is something to negotiate.

Reflexivity is a material-discursive relation. It is produced with the encounter, not before it. What matters is not what the researcher intends but how their presence, tools, assumptions, and movements intra-act with the research world. In this framing, reflexivity is not a mirror. It is a relation that flickers, resists, and sometimes refuses to stabilize. Reflexivity is not explanation. It is accountability, to the entanglements one is already part of.

There are power implications here. Traditional approaches to reflexivity often reinscribe hierarchy. They re-center the researcher’s narrative, as if transparency absolves asymmetry. Feminist and decolonial scholars have long challenged this logic. Ahmed (2012) cautions that institutional narratives of inclusion can obscure structural power. Tuck and Yang (2014) remind us that even the language of reflexivity can be mobilized to sustain extractive research. The question is not only who speaks, but who is allowed to remain opaque. Who is being asked to reveal, and who benefits from the revelation? Mazzei and Jackson (2012) invite us to stay with the trouble of representation, not to force coherence or “give voice” to participants, but to sit with refusal, contradiction, and partial opacity as modes of ethical engagement. This resonates with my own approach, where meaning is not extracted from participants but co-emerges in what is withheld, in what is not said, or in what resists formulation.

In making ethics, reflexivity is not something the researcher declares. It is something the research co-produces. It lives in the misalignment, the misrecognition, the moments of friction. I have experienced this most sharply not when I prepared to be reflexive, but when I was caught off guard. During a project in a rural school, I was interviewing a teacher in a sunlit corridor when she paused mid-sentence and said, “It’s funny how you talk . . . sometimes you sound real Pommie, and then other times you sound just like us.” It wasn’t a question. It was a reading. In that moment, speech became more than voice. It became a negotiation of familiarity, distance, belonging, and cultural memory. The interview turned. It became a moment of shared recognition, but also of difference, where accent, space, and tone remade the encounter as a place of relational navigation. I did not respond by clarifying my background. I paused. Let it hang. Reflexivity, there, was not confession. It was listening.

This was not simply a verbal exchange, but an intra-active process of place-making, where identity, belonging, and relationality were negotiated with sound, tone, and affective rhythm. The comment did not require explanation. It required attunement. Page’s (2020) account of “place-events” offers one way of understanding this: that research unfolds not as a series of methodologically discrete moments, but as situated events co-constituted by place, materiality, and relation. The corridor itself mattered. It shaped how we spoke and what became speakable. Because place is never neutral. It intra-acts with the research and with the researcher.

In another project, working within a small rural community, the school did not simply host the research. It shaped it. Its institutional rhythms, spatial arrangements, and unspoken histories governed who entered the room, who spoke, and what was said. The building itself carried a kind of institutional residue, of who belonged, who had been excluded, who felt safe. To be reflexive here was not to narrate my position. It was to remain accountable to how that position was always being remade by place.

All of this demands a reflexivity that is embodied, situated, and responsive. Reflexivity unfolds with movement, breath, gesture, pacing. The chair I pulled up. The pause I didn’t fill. The way I held the camera. These are not neutral decisions. They are reflexive relations. Sørensen (2013) reminds us that governance is not abstract. It is infrastructural, spatial, embedded in things. Reflexivity lives there too. In the door left open, the informal chat on the walk back to the car, the laughter that unfastens a held silence. These are not soft data. They are ethical places.

Making ethics reflexivity means that researcher subjectivity is not pre-formed. It is made with and through encounter. Jackson and Mazzei (2013) develop this by drawing on Barad’s (2007) notion of intra-action to argue that reflexivity is not a researcher’s interior capacity, but a co-emergent material-discursive phenomenon. They challenge the idea that reflexivity can be added to research as an ethical supplement, proposing instead that it is embedded in the very conditions of knowledge production. It is the researcher being undone and reconstituted with research.

Levinas (1998) offers another vital anchor here, the ethics of relation begins not with knowing, but with exposure. To encounter the Other is to be ethically compelled, to be destabilized. This form of ethics is not about control or understanding. It is about response. Reflexivity, then, becomes the space in which that ethical call is felt. It is not a declaration of identity. It is a staying with what unsettles it.

This also then extends to how we engage silence. Silence does not always signal absence or lack. It can mark refusal, protection, or care. Shotwell (2016) reminds us that opacity can be a form of dignity. To be reflexive is to respect this, resisting the extractive pull of research that demands everything be spoken, shared, disclosed. Ethical reflexivity does not seek to render all visible. It accepts that some things are not for the record. Some things remain felt, held, withdrawn.

These entanglements of power, place, and ethics do not belong to the researcher alone. They are shaped by institutional expectations, funding timelines, project deliverables. Research ethics boards often request that reflexivity be described, evidenced, and planned in advance. But making ethic reflexivity cannot be predicted. It cannot be scheduled. It arrives in the corridor, in the wrong question, in the breath held too long. It demands methodological improvisation, not as carelessness, but as attentiveness.

Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) frames this as an ethics of care: not a soft or benevolent orientation, but a practice of accountability to what emerges. Care here is labor, friction, and the willingness to remain with what cannot be resolved. It is the capacity to listen not only to participants but also to place, to pause, to shifting atmospheres.

To write reflexivity into ethics is not to add another requirement. It is to remake what ethics means. Not compliance. Not justification. But an embodied, situated, and intra-active practice of response-ability. What emerges is not a better account of the self but a more accountable engagement with relation, place, and power.

The Ethics of Material-Embodied Methods

Material and embodied research methods, whether sensory, visual, poetic, or performative, remake how ethics is lived in research. These methods challenge procedural understandings of ethics that assume knowledge is collected, named, and stored. Instead, they ask: what does it mean to be in relation with others, with materials, with movement, with place? And how does that relation remake ethical responsibility?

Conventional research ethics treat ethics as front-loaded: a set of universalised, pre-approved guidelines. But embodied and material methods resist this structure. They are processual, affective, and situated. As Barad (2007) and Manning (2016) remind us, such methods are not afterthoughts. They are not simply how knowledge is captured.They are how knowledge is made. Ethics, then, must be co-produced with method. It cannot be assumed in advance.

Participatory photography offers a clear provocation here. When working with participants, we are “making” photographs as part of a research process, and this is not simply contributing data. We are making meaning. The choices of framing, light, gesture, and moment do not only reflect something. They shape the very world of the research. One participant handed me a photograph and said, “This is what it’s like,” before immediately taking it back. That image was never formally included, but it remained in the research. Not as data, but as relation. The ethical charge was not about what the photo showed. It was about what it asked me to carry, and what it withdrew.

These moments disrupt representational certainty. They ask us to stay with affect, ambiguity, partiality. They demand an ethics of shared authorship, co-composition, and relational attunement. As Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) writes, care is not a soft addition to method. It is the work of staying with what emerges. Even and especially when it is uncomfortable, unfinished, or unresolved.

Practice-based research methods do not operate at a distance, they are embodied, sensory, entangled. It involves breath, timing, rhythm, and space. Page (2019) writes of a poetic mapping of an everyday journey, where breath, motion, and sensory perception become places of ethical knowing:

A breath, air in, fill, rise, and fall, shoulders, chest and see and feel and it is clearly ok . . . now what I can do . . . And move . . . And forward . . . Forward . . . Step . . . Next step . . . Moving . . . And breathe and . . . ok.” (1)

This is not a description. It is method as encounter. The rhythm of the body becomes the relation. Knowledge is not abstract. It is intra-active. Ethics here is not a decision made before the walk. It is made in the walking, with the step, the pause, the sensation of weight shifting. The body becoming a place of ethical negotiation.

Place too participates. In a rural school, the architecture shaped who entered the space, who lingered in corridors, who spoke in certain rooms. The school was not a neutral container for research. It was a co-composer. Its histories of exclusion and care were felt in the timing of a conversation, in the way someone turned toward or away from a window, in the unspoken knowledge of which door stayed shut. The ethics here was not in the protocol. It was in the pacing. In the attentiveness to how space held risk, comfort, memory, and resistance. Such methods are not legible to institutional review boards that demand fixed outcomes, predefined methods, and linear timelines. Guillemin and Gillam (2004) and Cannella and Lincoln (2011) critique how ethics frameworks function as surveillance structures, reproducing colonial, extractive epistemologies. Practice research, in contrast, is not about managing risk. It is about making relation. Its ethics is not procedural, but situated.

This becomes even more complex in multispecies and ecological research, where the ethical field expands beyond the human. As Bastian et al. (2017) and Neimanis (2017) argue, research is already an ecological act. Bodies leak, materials circulate, places carry memory. A recording is affected by wind. A shared moment unfolds under changing light. These are not background conditions. They shape what becomes sayable, feelable, knowable. Ethics here must be attuned not only to participants but also to ecologies. To multispecies entanglement. To the rhythms of place.

These are not abstract provocations. They are methodological urgencies. If ethics is to remain situated and responsive, it must accommodate methods that move, sense, and breathe. Embodied and material methods are not deviations from rigor. They are practices of accountability. They do not guarantee care. They require it. This is an ethics made with intra-action, not through regulation. An ethics where refusal, silence, and withdrawal carry weight. Where consent is not a form but a relation. Where the researcher is accountable not for knowing everything but for staying with what cannot be resolved.

Remaking Institutional Ethics Governance

If research is to be ethically remade, lived, as intra-active, situated, and co-constituted, then institutional ethics governance must be remade too. Current structures, especially those tied to funding, operate through logics of compliance. They position ethics as a procedural hurdle: something declared before the research begins, assessed once, then archived. This is not neutrality. It is control. It is the regulation of methodological possibility through administrative legibility. Ethics governance is not peripheral. It is constitutive. It decides which methods are permitted, which knowledges count and what forms of relation are seen as viable. Sabati (2018) calls this the upholding of “colonial unknowing” through institutional review. Ethics boards reproduce not just bioethical norms, but epistemological closures. What counts as ethical is shaped by what counts as knowable, fundable, and reviewable.

As St. Pierre (2019) reminds us, to refuse method is not to abandon ethics, but to stay with its making, as an entangled, material-discursive practice. When governance systems predefine ethics, they reduce it to a form of methodological compliance, foreclosing the possibility of becoming ethical with the research world. This is not just a structural imposition, it is an epistemic disciplining that dictates what matters, who counts, and how relations can intra-act.

As I argued in a prior intervention (Page, forthcoming), ethics governance does not merely oversee, it constitutes. It produces particular kinds of research subjectivities, shaping what forms of care, knowledge, and relation are rendered legible. With this paper, I return to that critique with a methodological and institutional focus, asking how ethics might be remade with practice, with, the systems that govern it. The turn to iterative ethics offers one possible response, but it is not without risk. If institutions adopt iterative models without remaking the underlying logics, they risk turning reflexive practice into surveillance. Sharpe (2016) warns of the ways institutions “inhabit the wake” of slavery and colonial extraction, absorbing critique as performance. Making ethics, if folded into existing compliance structures, could become just another tool of capture, endless documentation, risk-mitigation, and self-reporting masquerading as responsiveness. So what does it take to remake ethics governance as something other than oversight?

It begins with recognizing ethics as a research relation, not a risk category. As Todd (2016) writes, ethical practice with Indigenous communities is not about recognition but about accountability. Staying with the obligations that emerge from place, history, and relation. Ethics is not a promise. It is a commitment made and remade through time. In a recent arts-based project exploring cancer experiences in Indigenous communities in Canada, Rookwood et al. (2022) demonstrate how ethical practice was not defined through compliance but co-constituted with community-led storytelling, culturally embedded methods, and situated refusal. Their work unsettles extractive framings of data, showing that what emerges in creative research is not always meant to be analyzed, shared, or even named within dominant paradigms of health research. But, this has practical implications. Many funding bodies still require ethics statements at the application stage, often months or years before a first encounter with participants or place. These statements freeze ethics in advance, treating it as a stable plan. But research is not stable. And neither is ethics.

However, there are some governance structures shifting. The Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS2, 2018) introduced “proportionate review,” allowing lower-risk research to be fast-tracked while higher-risk or relationally complex projects receive ongoing oversight. In practice, this has enabled more context-sensitive ethics for Indigenous and community-based projects. The Research Ethics Platform (REP) (n.d.) in Gothenburg offers another model: researchers submit evolving ethics reflections over the course of a project, supported by advisory consultation and not punitive review. These are not perfect systems. But they signal movement, the start of a remaking.

This remaking is echoed by Stouten et al. (2018), who propose ethics as opportunity-led not compliance-bound. Their study, which draws on creative inquiry projects and emergent design processes, highlights how ethical frameworks can function as generative spaces and not regulatory checkpoints. In their model, ethics is not something to get past but something that invites pause, rethinking, and possibility. This aligns with the infrastructures I outline here: iterative, relational, speculative. Importantly, Stouten et al. (2018) challenge the assumption that ethics necessarily slows or obstructs research. Instead, they show how ethics can function as a collaborative method, fostering care, shared risk, and adaptive responsibility. In doing so, they offer a conceptual vocabulary for institutional change, one that moves beyond risk-mitigation and toward ethical relation as practice. Their framing complements the call here for plural forms of governance that can accommodate and support, rather than constrain, processual research. In my own research with communities in Australia, we built an advisory structure composed of senior community members, cultural practitioners, and researchers. Ethics was not reviewed once but returned to in seasonal meetings. These were not audits. They were ethical remakings: moments of collective reflection, course correction, and renewed relational commitment. We spoke less about risk and shared more about responsibility.

To institutionalize such practices, three remakings are required.

1. Governance as iterative and situated. Ethics review cannot be singular. It must be porous, revisited, open to alteration. This does not mean constant documentation but rather structured opportunities for return. Mid-project reflection, post-research accountability conversations, and advisory-based models can replace static forms. Ethics must move with the research.

2. Decolonizing oversight structures. Ethics review bodies must include people who are accountable to the communities and conditions the research touches. This means not only representation but also epistemic authority. Indigenous, feminist, and more-than-human ethics frameworks cannot be side-notes. They must shape the questions review boards ask, and how they ask them.

3. Ethics as relational practice, not bureaucratic proof. Research ethics cannot be about compliance. It must be about co-creation, care, refusal, and staying with. This means enabling ethical opacity (Shotwell, 2016), for decisions made in the moment, and for forms of knowledge that do not translate easily into outcomes.

These shifts are not simple. Institutions will cite administrative load, legal liability, and inconsistent implementation. But these are solvable design challenges. What is harder, but more urgent, is relinquishing the fantasy that ethics can be stabilized through form-filling. As long as governance remains extractive, relational research will remain exceptional, rather than supported.

I am not calling for a single model. I call for plural, speculative ethics infrastructures. Some might be community-led. Some might be practice-based. Some might involve slow consent, refusal documentation, or place-specific protocols. What they share is a recognition that ethics is not a matter of rules. It is a matter of relation. Without structural transformation, even the most ethically-attuned methods remain constrained. What is needed is not more oversight, but different forms of ethical relation. Governance must learn to move with the world, not contain it.

Yet if we are to truly remake ethics governance, it is not enough to describe new forms. We must also grapple with the frictions that arise when ethical innovation rubs against institutional inertia. This is not only a problem of logistics or oversight. It is a problem of institutional desire, what gets protected, what gets surfaced, and what gets absorbed under the banner of ethical improvement. Sharpe (2016) warns that the wake is not simply behind us, it is the weather we inhabit. Institutions may gesture toward change while reinforcing their own architectures of knowing. Ethics, in this frame, becomes aesthetic: stylised in public-facing documents, performative in reports, but unchanged in its structural logics. What appears as responsiveness may be a strategy of absorption, where refusal, relation, or care is taken up only to be neutralized.

This is where speculative ethics, making ethics, infrastructures must be more than gentle alternatives. They must be places of friction, not accommodation. Todd (2016) reminds us that accountability is not a metaphor. It is material. It requires attention to what is at stake, and for whom. Ethics is not ethical because it listens. It is ethical because it stays. Because it changes shape under pressure. Because it remains when institutional attention moves on. This means holding open the possibility that ethical relation cannot always be reconciled with institutional form. Some forms of ethics, slow witnessing, seasonal return, non-disclosure, may resist capture entirely. Instead of trying to retrofit these into policy, we might ask: what does it mean to fund the ungovernable? To make room for ethical gestures that are atmospheric, emergent, fugitive? These are not hypothetical provocations. They are already being piloted, in grassroots feminist research collectives, Indigenous-led projects, and relational community partnerships, where ethics is a practice of return, refusal, and ongoing accountability.

One such gesture might be the ethical drift, a mid-project turn not toward completion, but remaking. Another might be community refusal protocols, where participants set the terms not only of consent, but of withdrawal, opacity, and post-research invisibility. A third could be attunement sabbaticals, structured time in which researchers pause not to produce but to recalibrate their obligations.

These practices are not utopian. They are already in motion, in grassroots feminist research collectives, Indigenous-led projects, multispecies engagements. What remains is for institutions to catch up, without co-opting. To fund relation without extracting it. To enable ethics to be not just a checklist but places of living encounter.

Conclusion

Ethics cannot be extracted from the research encounter; it is co-constituted within, with it. As research methodologies evolve, so too must our ethical frameworks. With this paper, I have argued that ethics is not an external structure but an entangled, material-discursive practice that must be continually reworked, enacted, and negotiated. If institutions fail to evolve, adapt, and respond to the changes already happening, research will remain bound by outdated governance models that constrain methodological innovation.

The challenge for institutions, researchers, and ethics review bodies is to move beyond risk-management paradigms and recognize that ethics cannot be pre-determined but must be continuously made and remade. If institutions are to take ethical praxis seriously, research governance must embrace:

• Process over prescription. Where ethics is not a compliance box to tick but a continuously evolving practice

• Accountability over abstraction. Ensuring that ethical engagement is responsive to lived, material, and relational research contexts

• Care over compliance. Recognizing that ethical research governance is not just about risk-mitigation but about fostering attuned, just, and situated research engagements

While I have shared a methodological and institutional argument for remaking research ethics, I have not proposed a singular, prescriptive model. Instead, I offer a generative pedagogic framework that invites further exploration into how we, with institutions, might enable iterative, intra-active ethical praxis. These provocations do not offer closure; they invite new ways of thinking about and doing ethics with research. What might making ethics look like in STEM research, clinical practice, or policy-driven inquiry? How might ethics be made and remade across different disciplines and research encounters?

While iterative ethics models disrupt extractive paradigms, they also raise practical tensions. How can review research review bodies balance responsiveness with accountability? How might funders support ethics as an unfolding process without bureaucratic weight? These frictions do not negate the call, they deepen it. They signal the need for structural change that is not only feasible but epistemologically alive.

Ethics cannot be a promise of neutrality, nor a structure that preserves the methodological status quo. It must be a live negotiation, felt, returned to, unsettled, and made again. By positioning research ethics as an iterative, co-constitutive process, this work challenges the procedural, compliance-driven models that dominate current practice, proposing instead an ethics of intra-action, refusal, care, and material engagement. Across both this paper and my earlier intervention (Page, forthcoming), I have sought to remake ethics as situated, relational practice. What began as a critique of compliance now unfolds as a methodological and infrastructural invitation: to live ethics differently, and to let institutions be changed by that living. This work is not only about method, it is about how ethics is lived and felt in research worlds. It aligns with shifts in policy, such as the UK’s Arts Humanities Research Council’s recognition of non-traditional outputs and the European Research Council’s (2023) evolving post-award ethics models. But beyond reform, it contributes to a growing movement in feminist, posthumanist, and post-qualitative research, one that centers relation, opacity, and situated responsibility.

What happens next is not just administrative. It must be imaginative. In one project, we held seasonal community ethics meetings with no formal deliverables, no minutes, no reports, no outcomes to file. But they offered something else: ethical clarity, a collective pause, and the time to stay with uncertainty. We gathered not to resolve ethics but to return to it, attuning to what had shifted, what remained unresolved, and what obligations had emerged since the last meeting. This was not ethics as oversight. It was making ethics. If we are to take seriously the ethical weight of relational research, then we must also take seriously the responsibility of holding space for that which cannot be documented, predicted, or neatly reviewed. Ethics, in this frame, is not only about what is done but also about how we remain accountable to what we cannot fully know and to those whose stories, silences, and absences shape the research field in visceral ways.

This means embracing friction as method. Refusal as relation. Slowness as a form of care. It asks institutions not only to accommodate difference but also to be changed by it. Not through inclusion alone, but through a transformation of epistemic terms, so that opacity, pause, ambiguity, and not-yet-knowing are not risks to be mitigated but conditions through which ethical practice becomes possible.

These ways already exist, in grassroots collectives, in Indigenous-led inquiry, in feminist archives, and in embodied methods that persist outside institutional recognition. The challenge is not invention, it is recognition, redistribution, remaking. This work extends my earlier argument (Page, forthcoming), where I first proposed making ethics as a material-discursive, relational practice grounded in care, refusal, and becoming. Here, I have deepened that commitment by exploring how institutional structures might respond, not by stabilizing ethics, but by staying with its friction, its emergent demands, and its call to remain with relation. Making ethics is not just to govern research differently. It is to live research differently. It is to hold space for ethics-in-motion, responsive to uncertainty, shaped within encounters, and committed to staying with what resists resolution. To let ethics be felt. And let it stay.