Abstract
As a master's student investigating curricular decolonisation at South African tertiary music departments, I found myself in a chain of fear driven by previous contestations of similar critical projects. Despite stringently following the institutional ethics requirements, ethical concerns regarding the critical content of my work were still raised, perpetuating this fear. In this article, I discuss my concerns that the issues raised stemmed from an environment in which moral knowledge has become codified in a template for ethical research. I consider the problems that occur when ethical procedures such as anonymity, protecting ‘vulnerable’ interviewees and member checking become mere tick-boxes on a template for ethical research, as well as how such templates can become a method of imbuing fear into the researcher. In conclusion, I propose the development of an ethical praxis premised on an ethics of care that enables, rather than stymies, critical research.
Keywords
Energised by my experiences as an undergraduate student during the #MustFall protests in South Africa and my concerns that curricular decolonisation would become a purely bureaucratic tick-box exercise in much the same way as transformation, my MMus research considered the extent of curricular decolonisation at four South African tertiary music departments. It drew on and joined a growing body of South African scholarship that considers the entrapment of disciplines in colonial matrices of power and their perpetuation of Eurocentric stereotypes and tropes (Fomunyam, 2017; Jansen, 2019; Lange, 2019; Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Zondi, 2016), the perceived lack of transformation in the curricula of music departments in post-apartheid South Africa (Devroop, 2014; King, 2018; Mapaya, 2016; Pauw, 2017; Stolp, 2015, 2016a) as well as the hegemonic superiority that Western art music has enjoyed and how the university system further enforces this hegemony (Johnson, 2018; Muller, 2017; Stolp, 2012; Venter et al., 2018; Viviers, 2017).
Alongside such critical responses runs the possibility of intense disciplinary and institutional retaliation with which researchers engaged in this sort of critical scholarly work must contend.
1
In a sharp critique of the new knowledge economy of universities which ‘track research on a balance sheet of risk and reward’, Stephanus Muller and Willemien Froneman (2015: ix) argue that: This economy is no longer one simply of the monetisation of intellectual capital; it has morphed into the commodification of academic scruple. While many South African academics have become entrained to the idea that scholarly work is to be tallied and expressed in decimals of achievement, the new economy prefigures academic work itself as a liability. … Ethical clearance is the operating mechanism and legalese the language of this economy, whereby a traditional critical toolkit of ‘challenging’, ‘provoking’ and ‘probing’ is increasingly eroded into ‘slander’, ‘libel’ and ‘infringement’. Run-of-the-mill academic processes of review, moderation and response are hereby fetishised into becoming more meaningful and riskier endeavours than they in fact are. Ironically, given its own reliance on exaggerated rhetoric, the standard institutional defence against resistance is to decry dissent as spectacle, or as the unreasonable (or even unlawful) foregrounding of internal red tape.
My research and ethics procedure
Although yearbooks and module outlines provide a clear paper trail concerning broad changes in the curriculum, module descriptions in yearbooks are frequently left intentionally vague to privilege curricular flexibility, and it was difficult to determine actual module content from module outlines alone. In addition, the formalisation of major content changes for inclusion in yearbooks demands time and often extensive bureaucratic processing, often resulting in a gap between what appears in yearbooks and actual taught content. To address this problem, I conducted interviews with past and current staff members of the music departments included in my study: Nelson Mandela University, the University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, and the University of KwaZulu Natal. In addition to creating a better idea of the true content of modules and shedding light on the presentation of certain modules, it was hoped that the interviews would give me insight into the dynamics around curriculum change and decolonisation in departments as well as the struggles that lecturers often face in their attempts to implement changes to the curriculum.
I conducted 27 interviews with present and past staff involved in several academic modules: music history, theory, musicology, music education and ethnomusicology. These interviews took place in person and, later on, virtually as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a small number of instances, interviewees opted to respond in writing to a list of questions I provided. Because of the nature of the interview process, interviewees had the option from the beginning to opt in or out of an interview – I contacted potential interviewees via email to enquire whether they were willing and able to participate. Although I noted that the right to participate naturally remained their own, I did emphasise the value that their possible participation would bring to the research. 4 At the beginning of each interview, I spoke about the aims of my research and informed the interviewees that they had the right to refrain from answering my questions in addition to being able to stop the interview or withdraw from the study at any point that they felt uncomfortable. I also detailed how I envisioned anonymity to be implemented in the research – statements about module content would be attributed to the interviewees (unless specifically requested otherwise), whereas critical statements about decolonisation and transformation would be anonymised.
The institutional process
Because of the inclusion of four different institutions and their staff, ethics clearance and gatekeeper permission had to be obtained from all included institutions. Informed consent was obtained from participants. As part of this process, interviewees had the option to choose to have their name made known, or to remain anonymous, with only the institutional affiliation disclosed. Interviewees also had the option to withdraw from the study if neither of these options appealed to them. Although permission was obtained from most interviewees to use their names for curriculum-related statements, upon recommendation from my university's ethics-advisors I ultimately anonymised all interviews and assigned them a random number. As a further measure to ensure the anonymity of the interviewees, all Afrikaans interviewee statements were translated into English. 5 Lastly, as interviewees’ institutional affiliation could be deduced from certain attributed statements, in instances where particularly critical statements were made, I omitted the interviewee's number to ensure complete anonymity. The reason for this was simple: my interest was not the attribution of statements to individuals but engagement with prevailing views on curricular change in the included departments.
Problems regarding ethics raised by the examination process
The examination process raised the issue of anonymity in my research. In particular, the concern was expressed that the naming of the music departments included in the research could lead to the (informed) reader being able to identify interviewees. Identifying the institutions included in the research, according to this line of thought, resulted in a breach of the supposedly total anonymity promised to the research participants. 6 To resolve this perceived tension, the suggestion was made that I significantly reduce the usage of interviewee statements and refocus my argument around the analysis of curriculum documents, with the interview data being viewed as secondary to this. In addition, I was asked about the issue of member checking, and whether interviewees were given the chance to read what I had written about them and to withdraw from the research or change their statements if they were uncomfortable with it.
As part of the examination process, I was able to respond to the suggestions, and the thesis was subsequently accepted without the proposed changes. 7 In grappling with this engagement then and in the subsequent years, I sensed that the suggestions put forward emanated from a larger problematic environment that has developed around ethics processes. In particular, I was concerned that the request for (further) anonymity and member checking was not so much applicable to my work, but rather indicative of the current ethics environment's codification of ‘moral knowledge … according to accepted protocols and procedures’ and its subsequent de-emphasis on ‘the historicism that brings responsibility for ethical choices’ (Muller, 2019: 108). That is, I was concerned that (further) anonymity and member checking formed part of a perceived template for ethical research, rather than being required for the specific situation of my thesis. The potential of such an ethics template to silence careful critical and probing work still troubles me several years later.
The problem with ethics templates
Despite playing an important role in the research process at tertiary institutions, the ethics practiced by ethics boards of universities are not universally praised or understood as good. First, institutionalised ethics systems, which are ultimately attempts to codify moral behaviour, are not fully objective, since even the slightest aspirations to ‘objectivity in the arena of morals’ are in vain (Coetzee, 1996: 187). It is thus unsurprising that it has been increasingly argued that ethics frameworks employed by most universities are based on utilitarian ethics (Christians, 2011: 66; Halse and Honey, 2010:131), ‘liberal–humanist ideas of the sanctity and sovereignty of the individual’ (Baez, 2002: 44) and rooted in a positivist biomedical model (Pitt, 2014: 314). Although this is not to argue for no ethical scrutiny – which I do not wish to do – scholars have also increasingly critiqued what is known as the ethics creep (Haggerty, 2004: 393), i.e., the increased bureaucratisation of ethics boards and procedures as well as the expanding importance of these boards and procedures. This has resulted in a tick-box approach to ethics reviews (Morrison and Sacchetto, 2018: 1122; Posel and Ross, 2014: 3; Shefer, 2020: 110), often at the cost of social science research that is rooted in a critical or constructivist paradigm (Guta et al., 2013: 302).
The current ethics climate in the neoliberal university is thus one where research ethics have often become a template where Andrew Crane's (1999) question, ‘Are You Ethical? Please Tick Yes □ or No □’ seems less ironic than intended. In such an ethical environment dominated by tick-box approaches and templates, anything that falls outside the university's ethics paradigm is at risk of being classed as dangerous or even unethical. One strategy for navigating this quagmire that has emerged is a ‘performance of ethics’ (Muller, 2019: 108), where researchers apply certain strategies that are sure to confer with the template of ethical research according to the ethics committee, but which in fact masks more complex ethical issues underpinning the research. In what follows, I survey three such strategies prominent in my research process: anonymity, protecting vulnerable interviewees and member checking.
Tick-box item one: Anonymity
One of the major components of the performance of ethics in environments where ethics has been reduced to a template is the practice of anonymity, which has long been considered the gold standard of ethical practice in qualitative interview-based research. The main arguments for the anonymity of research participants relate to protecting research participants from harm, ensuring their privacy and ‘ensuring the accuracy or integrity of the research’ (Baez, 2002: 41). Underpinning these concerns is thus the ‘notion of the sanctity and sovereignty of the individual’ (Baez, 2002: 41). Anonymity can also be empowering, enabling research participants to speak freely without concerns about attribution or retribution (Guenther, 2009: 414). This can be of particular importance when research is based on a critique of power relations or powerful individuals and systems (Gordon, 2019: 543). However, the issue of anonymity is fraught and nuanced, and poses serious questions to researchers wanting to embark on ethical research practices.
The first problem with anonymity concerns the term itself. Martin Tolich and Emma Tumilty (2020: 19–20) argue that offering anonymity to interviewees is, in fact, ‘ethically flawed and methodologically clumsy’, as even when data are de-identified by the redaction of names and contexts, it cannot be anonymised, as the researcher(s) is always aware of the data's origin. At most, the researcher can offer confidentiality, but even this, they note, is not without its limits. If we then move away from anonymity to confidentiality, a further point to note is that research participants not only need to be offered external confidentiality – ‘the safeguard that their identities and information will be protected and cannot be identified by others’ – but also internal confidentiality, which concerns the recognition of participants’ identities by other participants (Tolich and Tumilty, 2020: 19–20).
A problem on the other side of the spectrum regarding anonymity/confidentiality is that certain participants may specifically want their identities disclosed. Postcolonial and feminist researchers are particularly concerned with this, drawing on the idea that naming is an act of power that challenges attempts to delegitimise, silence or erase personhood (Berkhout, 2013: 21, 29; Gordon, 2019: 544). As noted by Rebecca Gordon (2019: 551), anonymity might then ‘fundamentally hinder’ the emancipatory goals of the research, as well as its potential ‘to create spaces of resistance and transformative change’. Because of naming's overlap with the dimensions of the ‘ethical, political, methodological, and personal’ (Guenther, 2009: 412), the value of naming versus anonymity has been discussed by various scholars concerned especially with transformational or critical research paradigms. One such scholar is Katja M. Guenther (2009: 420), who has noted the lack of attention on the issue of naming, or not naming: This lack of conversation is disheartening because it renders important aspects of efforts in both fieldwork and presentation of findings invisible, neglects issues of power in research that should be part of social scientists’ discussions of ethics, and ignores how confidentiality serves not only to protect, but also to injure. To better recognize the complexities of the politics of naming, social scientists should question the general assumption that confidentiality is always best and should determine how to proceed with naming based on the specific contours of their research.
One other factor that needs careful consideration is the dilemma of ‘how to achieve both confidentiality and analytic rigor’ (Guenther, 2009: 418). For example, in my research it would not have been possible to anonymise the institutions unless I altered the curricular data to the point of complete non-recognition, as much of the curriculum data is available online and would have been easily identifiable. Altering the curriculum data to the extent of non-identification would have rendered much of the analysis futile in any practical sense. Such alteration of the data would have negated the research's potential to invite contextually grounded conversations about curriculum transformation. The other option, simply anonymising the institutions or providing pseudonyms without altering the data, could possibly have provided an easy way out under the cover of so-called confidentiality. However, Guenther (2009: 418) notes that such thin veiling seems to be the worst approach of all in that it serves to protect the researcher and limits their accountability while leaving respondents quite vulnerable to identification and possible retribution. It also risks losing the meanings of names, which are often important in analyses, and decontextualizes findings by disengaging them from the unique places from which they emerged.
A further suggestion that was expressed during the examination process, namely that interviewee statements be given much less attention due to their potential to be identified, would have resulted in a complicitous disguise of the institutional mechanics that play out around conversations about change and transformation. These statements addressed the ways in which transformation can be thwarted by institutional processes, particular individuals and inaction. Their removal would have ‘undermined the extent of the problem’ (Baez, 2002: 40) I wanted to address: institutional and often disciplinary indifference towards curricular transformation. This would thus have constituted the undermining of the project of transformation and decolonisation at universities, and the individuals who work towards this. It also would have contributed to the continuation of hegemonic and discriminatory knowledge practices at South African universities. As noted by Baez (2002: 40–41), although decisions such as removing the aforementioned interview data are often taken with the goal of being ethical and ‘resolving the problem of confidentiality’, the result is ultimately ethically questionable and arguably more problematic for research that aims to work towards transformation, as it essentially keeps ‘oppressive power arrangements hidden’.
There is no easy resolution that responds equally to the norms of ethical research as set out by ethical review boards and the goals and aims of transformative research. Here the moral conscience of the researcher needs to play a role in balancing out these (sometimes) contrasting imperatives in a way that is morally and ethically acceptable to them, the research participants and, ultimately, the ethics review boards. In the case of my research, I used the flexibility of ‘multi-institutional designs’ (Baez, 2002: 40) to my advantage. I balanced out what I believed was necessary to achieve the critical and transformative goals of the study – naming the institutions and keeping the critical statements regarding decolonisation – and the anonymisation of all participants which was required by the ethical review board.
As has been noted by various researchers (Baez, 2002; Gordon, 2019; Matheson et al., 2020; Svalastog and Eriksson, 2010), such compromises are rarely perfect. In my case, anonymising critical statements regarding decolonisation jeopardised my research findings in many aspects. For example, I lost the opportunity to draw institutional-specific conclusions from these comments, which might have enabled me to deliver a more thoughtful critique of the individual institutions or to point out discrepancies between institutions’ stated visions for curricular transformation and the on-the-ground experience of those working to make it happen, and instead had to rely on drawing more general conclusions. Yet, by keeping these comments confidential, I was able to use them in my research, which I ultimately deemed more important than attributing them to specific institutions.
Tick-box item two: Protect the ‘vulnerable’ interviewees
Regarding the ethical landscape of transformative research paradigms, another important consideration is the effect of differing power dynamics in interview-based research. Contrary to the ‘liberal individualist and utilitarian ethics’ … starting … assumption of equality between people and relationships’ (Pitt, 2014: 316), the research process, and the interview in particular, is tensioned with power relations. Here power relations are often skewed in the researcher's favour. To navigate these power relations, many researchers have turned to feminist ethics, which ‘begins with asking and addressing questions about power relations and difference’ (Pitt, 2014: 315–316). However, as noted by Carol Smart (1984: 157), the general assumption for feminist ethics is that ‘the power imbalance between the people ‘being researched’ and the researcher is basically in favour of the latter’. As such, feminist ethics and methodologies do not always sufficiently allow for research on powerful people or institutions, what Sarah Neal (1995: 518) terms research with an upward gaze.
This is precisely the problem that I encountered in my study. I was a 23-year-old female master's student interviewing senior academics, professors as well as current and former heads of departments. The very antithesis of marginalised subjects, my interviewees were institutionally empowered individuals. Had an interviewee taken offence to what I published, they had disciplinary and institutional power to respond in direct and indirect ways to the research and the researcher. While their comments were anonymous, they wielded institutional power that could also be exercised punitively. Interviewees are therefore not always the most vulnerable, and the profound impact of such power relations on research needs careful consideration.
In my case, severely skewed power relations led to a particularly disconcerting experience that occurred during the interview process. During one interview with a senior academic, I found myself agreeing with a statement made by the interviewee regarding so-called ‘problem students’ during student protests, whereas, in actual fact, I disagreed with their position. This immediately raises questions of collusion with the interviewee, and whether I was engaging in a performance to draw out the answers I suspected would not come had I adopted a critical posture. For Alessandro Portelli (2003: 71), performance is an inevitable part of interview-based research, as interviewees often tell interviewers ‘what they believe they want to be told’ in reaction to ‘who they think the researcher is’. My agreement could have resulted from a desire to project an image of myself as sympathetic to the interviewee so that they would feel encouraged to keep talking. For Ronald J. Grele (2003: 48), in seeking to understand the ideological position of the interviewee, our own ‘particular present ideological conceptions’ should never come into play. Together with Paul Thompson's (2003: 24) claim that the premise of interview-based research is to ‘imagine what evidence is needed, seek it out and capture it’, one can argue that agreeing was simply a strategy I employed to seek the necessary evidence. Although these arguments bring to the fore the role of performance in interviews, what is particularly troubling about this instance is that my ‘performance’ involved a betrayal of my convictions and personal moral code, making me complicit in beliefs I do not share.
Through reflecting on this incident I have come to understand that rather than an act of collusion, my actions were largely influenced by the skewed power relationship at play in the interview. Interviews are ‘conversational narratives’ or ‘joint activities’ between interviewer and interviewee (Grele, 2003: 44). As such, a relationship between interviewer and interviewee is not only developed over the course of the interview, but shapes the form and meaning of the interview. 8 One should therefore not only consider what was said in an interview (as well as how it was said), but understand the relationships involved and their possible influence on the creation of meaning (Grele, 2003: 44). For Luisa Passerini (2003: 58), examining these relationships might be so fruitful that ‘in the long run the interviews themselves will prove much more useful to scholars than the texts grafted upon them’. In other words, an understanding of the interview relationship will help us to understand not only what was said but that which cannot or will not be spoken.
My positionality as a young, Afrikaans, female postgraduate student interviewing senior and seasoned (mostly male) academics, and the resultant power dynamic, is crucial when considering this incident. 9 In many ways, this interview (and the others I conducted), were enactments and re-enactments of gender, race and other rituals, stereotypes and allegiances. My agreement, then, can be seen as the learned behaviour of respecting the views of a senior and highly experienced academic, in addition to an attempt to avoid appearing combative and causing an uncomfortable confrontation, which could have ‘jeopardis[ed] the interview’ or resulted in a ‘significant alteration in the nature of what the respondent is prepared to tell the researcher’ (Neal, 1995: 528). Here fear again makes an appearance: fear of a distressing interview experience, fear of not obtaining the required information, fear of the possible repercussions if I dare question or critique a senior academic, fear of appearing combative. Skewed power dynamics such as these often play into and exaggerate the fear already experienced by the researcher. To better prepare (young) researchers for such events, it is vital that we start to understand that the flow of power and vulnerability in interview-based research is multi-directional, rather than simply one-directional.
Tick-box item three: Member checking
As mentioned above, the examination process of my research raised the issue of member checking, and whether interviewees were given the chance to read what I had written about them and to withdraw from the research or change their statements if they were uncomfortable with it. The implication was that member-checking would have made the research more ethically sound. 10
Member checking commonly takes place by sending the transcripts of the interviews to the interviewees for review. Although this allows interviewees to ensure that their statements were accurately represented and can in some cases lead to reflection and a shifting of views, it also gives them the opportunity to change their minds and retract statements (Gordon, 2019: 548). For scholars such as Irit Mero-Jaffe (2011: 245), the potential damage to studies in terms of important statements being retracted by interviewees outweigh the possible benefits of member checking. Arguably more problematic is how member checking dramatically changes the power dynamic of interview-based research by shifting the power in favour of the interviewee. Although the researcher always maintains some sort of power through their ability to control the selection and writing up of material, interviewing powerful people introduces a difficult power dynamic to navigate, a power dynamic that is often skewed in the interviewees’ favour (Neal, 1995). The outcome of this shift in power dynamics can result in the interviewees taking control of the transcripts or data and becoming the validators and/or challengers of what is written (Mero-Jaffe, 2011: 239).
This is particularly problematic when interviewing powerful people and discriminatory institutions or systems, or when broaching ‘controversial’ topics, such as the decolonisation of the curriculum. Particularly when interviewing powerful people about topics that they might feel sensitive or defensive about, member checking can raise questions of collusion between the researcher and researched (Neal, 1995: 521). This can result in a betrayal of the researcher's ethics and morals, as well as in the perpetuation of the system or status quo that the researcher is aiming to expose or overturn through the research. When the interviewee is actively upholding a discriminatory status quo and in a powerful position, would allowing them to change their statements, which they made in full knowledge of its potential uses, be ethical?
It is also sometimes stated that member checking builds trust between the researcher and the interviewees (Birt et al., 2016: 1802). However, I want to argue that not to perform member checking does not constitute a betrayal of that trust. During the interviews for my research, I had worked hard to build up genuine trust and rapport with the interviewees, and my decision not to conduct member checking does not imply the betrayal of this trust, or unethical behaviour. In this situation, I believe that acting ethically entailed representing what they said truthfully, and in a way that did minimal harm to them, but not eliding the uncomfortable aspects of their statements. Discomfort with decolonisation and transformation was an essential part of the story about the lack of curricular transformation at South African universities that I wanted to tell, and not doing so would have constituted a betrayal of my own ethical and moral values, the decolonial aim of my research and the decolonial project at large.
Although member checking might be appropriate in some contexts, and ethically imperative, I want to complicate the notion that it is always ethical to member check, and subsequently that the presence/absence of member checking alone marks research as ethical/unethical. As I have demonstrated here, research ethics is always constituted by circumstances (i.e., it does not exist separate from something else). In recognition of this, a shift away from a focus on the presence or absence alone of specific ethics procedures to a consideration of the wider ethical dimensions of a work is necessary.
Moving away from fear-inducing templates to the cultivation of an ethical praxis
Template-based ethics can play a role in perpetuating, not alleviating, fear, resulting in self-censorship, censorship or self-policing. This is what Stephanus Muller (2019: 3) warned about when he noted his concern about how a particular institutional ethics process could ‘be understood by other students as a warning not to push too hard, not to think too radically, not to embrace risk’. Fear can become institutionalised, and function seemingly independently of the individuals on ethical review boards. 11
When I reflect on the writing-up period of my thesis, I am struck by the amount of communication between my supervisor and I regarding the inclusion of potentially explosive comments made to me in interviews, or a particularly sharp critique informed by what I had learnt about the institutional process of curriculum transformation from the individuals involved which I wanted to include in my research. In some instances, these comments and critiques were omitted from the thesis. However, most of the comments and critiques did not even make it into the drafts sent to my supervisor, falling victim to self-censorship resulting from my self-doubt about the limits of critique, and fear of what consequences I might have to deal with. These omissions took place not because these comments were not important; in fact, they were in many ways the crux of what I wanted to say. Rather, these comments were omitted because I thought that they might be too close to a dividing line where critique offends administrated ethics.
J.M. Coetzee (1996: 35–37) has noted the phenomenon that in a paranoid state that seeks to appease its paranoia through exercising a degree of control over what writers write through some form of censorship, ‘all writers … are at least potentially touched by paranoia, not just those who have their work suppressed’. The disturbing manner in which the writer internalises this general sense of paranoia and becomes his/her own strictest censor has been described by Danilo Kis (1986: 45): The battle against self-censorship is anonymous, lonely and unwitnessed, and it makes it subject feel humiliated and ashamed … [It] means reading your own text with the eyes of another person, a situation where you become your own judge, stricter and more suspicious than anyone else… The self-appointed censor is the alter ego of the writer, an alter ego who leans over his shoulder and sticks his nose into the text… It is impossible to win against this censor, for he is like God – he knows and sees all, he came out of your mind, your own fears, your own nightmares. (emphasis in original)
Even though my master's project has been completed for over three years, there is still a part of me that fears the critique it offered will be found offensive and, by invoking tenets of administrated ethics, unethical. The initial fear that I experienced during the research process has thus entered a disturbing and lingering afterlife. This fear persists despite the knowledge that my supervisor and I complied to the best of our abilities with normative institutionalised ethical templates, whilst taking care not to outsource ethical responsibility to bureaucratic instruments and to deliver as potent a critique of institutional mechanisms of transformation as possible. This fear has, at least for me, become an accepted part of doing research that probes disciplinary and institutional complacencies. Doing this work requires dedication, perseverance and courage. Having seen the effects of such fear on friends and colleagues, I worry about the intensely personal emotional toll on those who take up the task of critique. As eminent historian Dominic LaCapra (2014: xxxi) has poignantly noted, ‘the aftereffects – the hauntingly possessive ghosts – of traumatic events are not fully owned by anyone and, in various ways, affect everyone’. 12
Living in such fear, I am again reminded of the parallels to apartheid South Africa, which normalised a culture of looking over your shoulder, fear and distrust amongst its citizens, particularly those opposed to and resisting the system in some way. Muller (2019: 3) has drawn this parallel even closer to ethical processes, noting with concern that South African universities, particularly Stellenbosch University, had to the best of his knowledge ‘never attempted to gauge the extent to which apartheid-era culture and values in research had endured and continue to shape the contemporary university community, in particular, its ethics environment’. It is perhaps the lack of such reflection which has on occasion led to deeply troubling decisions by institutional review boards. A study published by a group of sports scientists at Stellenbosch University in 2019, which claimed that ‘coloured women … have an increased risk of low cognitive functioning’ (Nieuwoudt et al., 2019: 321), passed Stellenbosch University's internal ethics screening process (Strode et al., 2021: 11), while the article appeared in a prestigious international journal, ostensibly having passed peer review. This is a powerful example of how research that seemingly corresponds to a tick-box list of ethical research can be flawed and unethical and presents a compelling argument for discarding the template approach to ethics.
Another argument for discarding the ethics template lies in its fear-producing potential. Sara Ahmed (2014b: 71) has noted that such institutionalisation of fear ‘functions as a technology of governance’ in two key ways: it is used by those in power ‘to make others consent to that power’, or to encourage people to accept protection from that which is feared in exchange for consent. Thus, fear plays a role in the conservation of power and the status quo. This has significant ramifications for those involved in transformative or critical research that pushes the boundaries of knowledge and knowledge production as we know it. Currently, these researchers are too easily held hostage by ethical templates, which favour research that complies with general expectations and rules for research – here ‘fear works to restrict some bodies [the critical/transformative researcher] through the movement or expansion of others [the conventional/template-based researcher]’ (Ahmed, 2014b: 69, emphasis in original). If universities take seriously the imperative to transform or decolonise their research, curricula and the broader institution, it is vital that ethical clearance procedures are not an obstacle to such efforts.
The first step in moving away from the idea of a template of ethical research will be the reconsideration of the importance of ethical clearance procedures. These procedures were never able fully to predict potential ethical problems emerging from the research. Tolich and Tumilty (2020: 17) remark on the speculative nature of the questions posed by ethics reviews committees and boards to researchers, noting that while researchers are asked to describe their research, detail the potential ethical issues that could arise from this research and how these will be addressed, arguably the most important question: how researchers will respond when their research's ethical dimensions develop and change, is not addressed by such reviews. Thus, although research might fit the template of ethical research at the initial review stage, the ethical dimensions of a study rarely stay static throughout the research, and new considerations emerge almost continuously.
Rather than simply an administrative act of committing to a set list of procedures that constitutes model ethical research at the outset of research, ethics processes need to be a flexible, ongoing intellectual exercise (Posel and Ross, 2014: 3) centred around fostering a personal ethical praxis. Ethical research would therefore involve the realisation that the formal ethics review is merely ‘one stop along the way of practising ethics’ (Tolich and Tumilty, 2020: 16), perhaps even a ‘prologue’ to ethics (Ross and Grant, 2014: 168), and consist of an ongoing ethical praxis, not a template – when one is truly involved in the research, dedicated to one's topic and the research participants, there is not an ethical template to follow. 13
As detailed in this article, such an ethical praxis would require constant reflection and consideration by the researcher (and even the research participants in some cases) and involve compromises. It would also entail more transparent communication with ethical review boards before, during and after the research process – where confusion regarding ethical processes is discussed in a supporting and learning-focused environment, and consultation between various parties is encouraged. An alternative suggested by Tolich and Tumilty (2020: 17), is the formation of a reference group consisting of peers and colleagues, which the researcher can consult for advice regarding unforeseen ethical considerations that develop. In order to work against the chain transmission of fear when doing critical research, such communication and discussion regarding ethical issues is particularly important when the researcher is young, and still a student. Concomitantly, a move away from punitive approaches to ethics to those in which mistakes are viewed as part of the process of developing an ethical praxis, would have to occur, not to encourage a breaking of rules or unethical behaviour, but to recognise the importance of risk-taking in critical and probing work. 14
Essentially, I am suggesting that ethics boards exercise an ethics of care towards researchers. While many feminist scholars have in recent years gravitated towards an ethics of care, attention has predominantly been aimed at research participants. This has meant that the degree to which a researcher's ethics of care can also extend towards the object of research, or the researcher's discipline, through thoughtful and considered disciplinary critique has been elided. Furthermore, by stringently following the current ethics regime intent on reducing harm to participants, researchers might inadvertently harm themselves. If the ethics mechanisms at work are not attuned to the ways in which power-relations in research are not one-directional, such harm to the researcher might particularly occur when the participants are powerful, or when the research investigates sensitive subjects such as racism and equal opportunities, as explored by Neal (1995: 526), and transformation or decolonisation. Scholars have also increasingly pointed to the unimaginability of an ethics of care in the current ‘neoliberal fast, competitive, individualist industry of academic work, directed by extractivist, exploitative and violent practices of research and pedagogical work’ (Shefer, 2020: 110).
In such an environment, some might think it useless to argue for an ethics of care. However, as Tamara Shefer (2020: 108) maintains, an ethics of care is needed precisely in these spaces and will play a vital role in the ‘project of transforming the university, its internal workings and potential impacts on society’. In the same spirit, Sara Ahmed (2014a), inspired by Audrey Lorde (1988), contends that enacting an ethics of care in a system or environment that typically does not tolerate it, towards people or objects not typically considered to require care, is a radical act, an act of warfare.
Considering the ‘institutional violence … exercised by disciplinary regimes’ and inherent in the maintenance of the institutional status quo (Ahmed, 2021: 215–216), such radical acts will be crucial if the project of transforming academia and universities is to succeed. As this article has shown, one necessary act would be abandoning the idea of ethics clearance as simply an administrative exercise, along with the template and tick-box approaches to ethics, as ethics procedures thought in this way are not only easily co-opted as a regulating device for research that does not fit a predefined template, whether in its research design or critical stance, but can often be put to work punitively against such research and the researcher after the fact. Instead, ethics procedures should become predominantly intellectual exercises focused on the cultivation of a personal ethics praxis. By centring care, both towards research subjects and researchers, the chain transmission of fear to (young) scholars engaged in critical research can be interrupted, or at the very least, mitigated. Although transformative research which aims to expose and resist oppression of any kind will always involve a degree of risk-taking (Baez, 2002: 46), the measures described above will contribute to ensuring that researchers engaged in such research will not be cowed by ethics procedures in their critical undertakings.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author biography
Mieke Struwig is a postdoctoral fellow at the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her doctoral research, completed in March 2024 under the guidance of Dr Carina Venter and Professor Stephanus Muller at Stellenbosch University, constructed an intellectual history of institutionalised music studies in twentieth-century South Africa. She also holds a BMus: Performing Arts (Cum Laude) from Nelson Mandela University (where she received the 2019 Vice-Chancellor's medal for the best first degree in the university) and a MMus: Musicology (Cum Laude) from Stellenbosch University. As the secretary of the South African Society for Research in Music, Mieke is passionate about working towards a more inclusive music studies discipline in South Africa. Her research interests centre on decolonial thought, intellectual and institutional histories – particularly of music in South Africa – and discourses of Apartheid and colonialism. Her work has been published in South African Music Studies.