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This study aims to explore and discuss the ethical challenges that the authors encountered in the SWIPSER project, a study about the well-being of West-African women who work in the red-light district in Brussels.

The study was commissioned by the municipality of Schaerbeek and executed by a Nigerian–Belgian research team. Data were collected using a multi-method qualitative approach, predominantly through ethnographic fieldwork that consisted of detailed observations, informal interviews (with 38 participants), complemented by document analysis and stakeholder interviews.

The study presents the main ethical dilemmas in four themes: (1) representing diversity, i.e. how do we get access to all members of a migrant community that is inherently hierarchical?; (2) in the margin, i.e. how can we conduct research with undocumented migrants and what do we do when faced with violence and injustice?; (3) attraction and repulsion, i.e. what ethical consequences are involved when working in a multi-ethnic research team?; and (4) unveiling secrets, i.e. which ethical challenges are we faced with when presenting the results of research on vulnerable migrant communities?

This study goes beyond procedural research ethics and highlights the specific relational ethics (related to the relation between research(er) and participant) and the socio-political ethics (related to the relation between the research(er) and the socio-political context) involved in qualitative research with female migrants who work in prostitution.

Paradigms are shifting in research involving Indigenous peoples: research with Indigenous peoples instead of research on them. To do this, we must acknowledge a shared and sacred space of multiple world views. Negotiating this meeting place – the ethical space – demands that researchers, Research Ethics Boards (REBs), and Indigenous peoples collaborate to find mutually agreeable solutions to research ethics tensions. This chapter addresses the principle-to-policy-to-practice gaps in the application of Canada’s research ethics policy (i.e. TCPS2) by demonstrating how one 2018 study navigated ethical engagement by practising Etuaptmumk: Two-eyed seeing (the Mi’kmaq concept of learning to see from and integrate multiple perspectives to find remedies to issues/challenges/questions that benefit everyone). Movements within both Indigenous and academic communities – in Canada and elsewhere – to develop policy on research ethics for research with Indigenous peoples present an opportunity and impetus for researchers to do differently and with the leadership of Indigenous peoples. This chapter shares reflections from one study that offers an example of doing differently and acknowledging self-in-science or examining self-as-science, which is not a common practice. The acceptance of creative research methods, like autoethnography through poetry and spoken word, demonstrates academic culture can change, too, and provides researchers methods and mediums to explore and examine the self without separation from the research. This chapter discusses these as relational and reflexive, a way to challenge conventional positions of ‘researcher’ and ‘participant’, and reimagines research innovation through relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the position of a former insider with multiple levels of knowing and being known, afforded me benefits and challenges in a complex higher education institution in Uganda. A reflexive autoethnographic account of the author’s research experience is employed as methodology. The study observes various benefits and challenges of this position. These include: firsthand knowledge of institutional culture and informants, leading to multiple levels of access; ability to conduct enriching interviews; and good rapport with informants. The challenges include: complexity of the institution; ethical challenges; power dilemmas; and anonymization of data. Access was noted to be a key benefit and it was experienced at five levels: personal relational networks; informant’s knowledge of a family relation; links to institutional and national networks; the role of media; and situational factors. In accordance with Bourdieu’s (1986) concepts of forms of capital, the study established that four levels of knowing were linked to social, cultural, economic or media capital. The study reveals existence of a link between different levels of knowing and being known and their affiliated forms of capital. It shows that possession of any or a combination of these forms of capital leads to what the study defines as “information access capital.” The study suggests that the different levels of knowing and being known determine the breadth and depth of a researcher’s information access capital. The study implies that power imbued relationships can limit access.

The paper applies a reflexive autoethnographic methodology where the author uses their personal research experience to make sense of the benefits and challenges of gaining access as a former insider with multiple identity positions. The paper draws from the author’s personal experience (auto) set in an institutional cultural context (ethno), to analyze the research process (graphy) of gaining access of top and middle management informants. First person (auto) accounts of the author’s organizational cultural (ethno) and research process (graphy) experiences and how they link to the benefits and challenges of researching an organization as insider are used as data.

The study observed various benefits and challenges of the insider position. These include: firsthand knowledge of institutional culture and informants, leading to multiple levels of access; ability to conduct enriching interviews; and good rapport with informants. The challenges include: complexity of the institution; ethical challenges; power dilemmas; and anonymization of data. Access was noted to be a key benefit experienced at five levels: personal networks; informant’s networks; institutional networks; the role of media; and situational factors. The four levels were linked to social, cultural, economic or media capital.

The study is limited to the researcher’s personal experience of the institution. The paper shows the role that social, work, political, media, institutional and national networks and their affiliated forms of capital play in affording insider researchers access. It shows that researchers deficient in these capitals have low-information access capital and face challenges of access. It also shows that although friendship may enable access, if infused with power dynamics, power hinders access. The study shows insider researchers in complex organizations have to continually navigate the insider-outsider continuum and challenges thereof. Practicing relational ethics during and after research is key when conducting organizational insider research.

The paper shows the role that social, work, political, media, institutional and national networks and their affiliated forms of capital play in affording insider researchers access. It shows that researchers deficient in these forms of capital have low-information access capital and face challenges of access. It also shows that although friendship may enable access, if infused with power dynamics, power serves as hindrance to access. The study also shows insider researchers in complex organizations may have to continually navigate the insider-outsider continuum and challenges thereof. Practicing relational ethics during and after research is a key consideration of insider researchers.

The paper reveals the challenges of accessing top and middle management in complex, bureaucratic and guarded higher education organizations. It shows that although higher education institutions, by virtue of their research orientated missions, should ideally set the right example for easy access to information at all levels and ranks of the organization. However, the reality of access for an insider research may be far from the ideal due to factors of complexity and previously formed power imbued relationships.

The paper contributes to understanding factors at play when gaining and maintaining research access to top and middle management in a higher education context. In accordance with (Bourdieu’s, 1986) concepts of forms of capital, the paper contributes to understanding the relationship between multiple levels of knowing and their affiliated forms of capital and how these capital forms may facilitate information access. It shows that possession of any capital form increases a researcher’s information access capital. The paper expands Weinreb’s (2006) definition of stranger and insider interviews, by showing multiple ways of “knowing or being known” before and during the study.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight levels of power in research ethics that are insufficiently addressed in self-ethnographic research literature.

The paper reflexively draws from a qualitative research that was conducted in a higher education institution (HEI) in South Africa. The reflection is substantiated with literature on various aspects of the reflection. The research design was self-ethnography, conducted within a postmodernist paradigm.

The reflection exposes the hidden levels of power in the process of ethical clearance and gatekeeping of access to participants. It also suggests that different theoretical perspectives about ethics work together throughout the self-ethnographic research process.

The research on which the paper is based was conducted in only one college of one HEI. Therefore its findings may only be contextual.

The exposure of the levels of power contributes to the discourses of research ethics and may caution self-ethnographic researchers about the complexities of research ethics involved in this research design.

Although there is plethora of literature about ethics and insider research, little has been done to bring to light the various levels of power that this paper highlights.

This paper aims to draw attention to a unique paradox concerning doing an autoethnography as a PhD. On the one hand, a student may feel a pull towards revealing a vulnerable, intimate, autoethnographic self, yet on the other hand she may be pushed away from this because the oral/viva voce examination process may deny the student anonymity. Through the telling of this tale the complexities concerning self‐disclosure and student autoethnography reveal are explored.

The tale is autoethnographic: a fictionalised account based on real events and co‐constructed from substantial field notes, personal diaries, e‐mails, and reports.

This paper contributes to relational ethics concerned with self‐disclosure and the “I” of a reveal, and highlight the possibilities for developing Medford's notion of mindful slippage as a strategy for removing highly personal and possibly harmful elements within student autoethnography.

The paper provides a preliminary theoretical framework that has not been empirically tested and is situated within “introspective” autoethnographic research.

The paper takes an innovative approach to autoethnography, addressing ethical value systems specifically within a PhD context.

Often, researchers view silence as antagonistic to equity-aimed projects. Because verbal, written, and textually agentive communications are presumed to be the most valid qualitative-research data, moments of silence are under-analyzed. Yet, we argue that silence holds meaning as data and that it is a valid, rich form of communication.

Through this reflective analysis of silence, we invite readers to reconceptualize silence in research from a critical disability-research perspective with emphasis on crip willfulness. We introduce silence as an interpretive, agentive and relational gesture.

We attend to silence as necessary in all research because it helps researchers excavate able-bodied expectations about communication in qualitative-data-collection practices.

We demonstrate that silences in research can be an interpretive, relational, and agentive gesture that can teach us about taken-for-granted assumptions about research practices. Revisiting our research encounters with this framing of silence informed by critical disability studies allows us to question how traditional social science research methods value some modalities of expression over others. Rather than viewing silence in research as moments when nothing happens, we show that silence indicates something happening and is valid data.

Exploring subjective experiences of people living with dementia through qualitative research has become increasingly common in recent decades. Nonetheless, researchers have shared a number of ethical challenges in involving people living with dementia in research. A concept that has been influential in discussions about ethics within the field of dementia care, in particular, is person-centredness. A person-centred approach reflects values of respect for personhood and the rights of a person and of building mutual trust and understanding. This chapter presents my experience of adopting person-centred ethical practices in a sensory ethnographic study involving older adults living with dementia. I highlight person-centred ethical considerations at the design stage of my study and occasions during the conduct of my research when research methods and processes were adapted to further meet the needs of the participants. A person-centred approach required that I continually assessed the need to make ethical decisions in every aspect of the research process throughout its duration. Building and drawing on positive researcher–participant relationships to inform those decisions and an adaptable research design allowing research practices to be adapted in situ were therefore essential.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the problems and potential of conducting ethnographic research among people with ideologies that are opposed by the researcher and the importance of reflexivity in confronting ethical issues at the field site.

This paper is a reflective account of the author’s ethnographic fieldwork, during which the author studied Chinese fatherhood in Hong Kong. The author chose a men’s center as a primary field site but later found that the men held views on gender and family to which the author was opposed. Neither remaining silent nor confronting the men was an option. The author was concerned that the informants would interpret the silence as agreement with their views and would then accuse the author of deception when they read the later publications.

Being reflexive of the positionality as a young research student in the research milieu allowed the author to come up with a passively active approach to tackle the situation. The author shared own experiences or stories that the author had heard and asked if a feminist interpretation of an issue would be a better alternative. This approach not only solved the ethical risk of deception but also provided possibilities to acquire data that provided deeper insight.

This paper argues that bureaucratic ethical guidelines are not enough to yield ethical ethnography because ethnographic research involves intense human interactions and complex ethical issues specific to the research milieu. Rather, an ethnographer’s being self-reflexive is the key to an ethical ethnographic research.

Image-based researchers have previously noted the failure of institutional ethics guidelines and frameworks to adequately address the issues and methodologies used in visual research, citing a need for more creative and flexible approaches. Screen scholars work with traditional (non-visual) data sources, human subjects, visual data, and colleagues. This produces a range of ethical issues which are not addressed by institutional frameworks, based as they are on individualism and utilitarian ideals. Drawing on the ideas of Johann Neem and Savannah Dodd, this chapter suggests the need to shift our research practices towards a more collective, reflective, and empathetic mode of working.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate “walking alongside” in the three-dimensional space of narrative inquiry, as explored through the field texts of two teacher educators, one mentoring the other through layered stories of “place.”

Approach – The authors use several interpretive tools to explore the question, “What sustains us as teacher educators?” The dialogue deepens as the authors make their professional knowledge landscapes more visible, bringing sacred stories, stories of gender, stories of hierarchy, stories of power, and stories of race forward, exploring how these stories are held in tension with one another. The authors ponder the questions: what happens when the small stories’ educators living in “place” become so far removed from authorized meta-narratives also underway in “place”? And, how can we remain wakeful to the numerous story constellations of others that revolve around us?

Findings – The analytical spaces described by the researchers helped them to realize and share with others that researchers may more fully respect the vulnerability our research participants feel that comes along with their own restorying. Vulnerability brought forward a common bond found in the experiences of “place” in the field texts. Narrative inquirers who write field texts, then restory their own narratives of place, add to the empirical dimensions of narrative inquiry and its attentiveness to lived experience.

Research implications – This demonstration, through its examples of the three-dimensional space of narrative inquiry, shows how interpretation emanates from the various cracks, corners, and even the air within this important analytical space. Narrative researchers may continue to unpack this space in their work. Narrative inquirers are also reminded that place is storied and that human beings are narratively anchored in place, an important consideration for relational research ethics.

Value – Readers can interact with the tools used by narrative inquirers, in this case, “tracing” and “burrowing and broadening.” Narrative inquirers may also recognize vulnerability as an effect of interpreting within the three-dimensional inquiry space, and understand the necessity of vulnerability as a part of thinking narratively.