Strath Fem: Tackling Ethics in Research with VAW Survivors

Join Strathclyde Feminist Research Network on 25th March for a talk from Strathclyde's Dr Emmaleena Käkelä. All welcome; please register so we have an idea of numbers.

Tackling tensions between intersectional ethics and institutional ethics in co-produced research with VAW survivors

Working with, and not on, participants is an essential feminist research commitment. The often “messy” and iterative nature of co-productive research (Cook, 2009; Thomas-Hughes, 2018) calls us to let go of our desire to embark on a clearly laid out research journey, to enable meaningful spaces of co-production, where ethics in practice can emerge. This stands in stark contrast to the bureaucracy of institutional ethics. While procedural ethics provide essential safeguard for steering responsible social research, these are too often experienced as a hurdle to clear and a box to tic (Hammett, Jackson & Bramley, 2022). With the increased recognition of the power of co-production, there is a need for the structures and processes which scaffold research to evolve. This talk brings together insights from two projects to illuminate the ethical challenges for feminist researchers to practice what we preach. I draw from my experience of co-producing research with refugee survivors of Female Genital Mutilation to illuminate how feminist reflexivity can attend to issues of intersecting inequalities in situated research encounters. These findings are contextualised with a scoping project which mapped the wider challenges institutional ethics procedures pose on co-produced research, to tease out the tensions between ethics on paper, and ethics in practice.

Emmaleena Käkelä is a Lecturer in Social Policy and chair of the Departmental Ethics Committee at the University of Strathclyde. She specialises in participatory and creative research methods, and is particularly interested in researching asylum harms, “honour”-based violence and refugee integration.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Strathclyde Feminist Research Network