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Kategorie: Beyond Guidelines: The Question of Ethics in Transregional Research and Knowledge Production

Taking the workshop Beyond Guidelines as a point of departure, this blog series of the BEYONDREST research group continues the conversation on research ethics both in methodological and conceptual terms, with a focus on transregional research. Among the topics which will be examined are questions of disclosure and non-disclosure, the dynamics of off-the-record remarks, differential vulnerabilities, the digitization of (unpublished) research findings, data storage and “benefit sharing.” A more detailed description of this series is available here.

Editors: Banu Karaca (Principal Investigator), Çiçek İlengiz (Postdoctoral Researcher)
Editorial support: Jessica Metz (Coordinator), Loes Hendriks (Student Assistant)

Beyond Guidelines: The Question of Ethics in Transregional Research and Knowledge Production / BEYONDREST / EUME

Poor Connections

By Jeremy F. Walton. In this contribution to the “Beyond Guidelines” Series, Jeremy F. Walton sheds light on a neglected aspect of the heavily ethicized field of European academia: the manner in which research ethics as a fantasy of best academic practice abets and exacerbates longstanding regional hierarchies among nation-states, and fundamentally complicates the professional lives of scholars who mediate between pan-European discourses and local institutions. There are connections here that have yet to be adequately grasped.

Beyond Guidelines: The Question of Ethics in Transregional Research and Knowledge Production / BEYONDREST

Ethics of Listening to the Silence: Voices, Archives, and the Unspoken Past

By Himmat Zoubi. In recent decades, critical intellectual trends have achieved significant breakthroughs in analyzing the relationship between power and knowledge, as well as in analyzing the dynamics between dominant and marginalized groups. These trends have led to profound debates about the production of history, emphasizing the need to consider the identity of the producers of history, the perspectives of those recording history, methods of reconstructing the past, ways of framing the present, the selection and availability of sources, and techniques of historical revision.

Beyond Guidelines: The Question of Ethics in Transregional Research and Knowledge Production / BEYONDREST

When Off-the-Record Takes Over: Research Ethics under Authoritarianism

By Çiçek İlengiz. In recent years, restitution demands for several artifacts raised by the Turkish government have fueled heated debates on “what belongs to whom and under which conditions,” and have simultaneously opened a new ground to reinscribe civilizational narratives onto the politics of heritage. Centered on questions around the construction of legal ownership, as well as “imaginations of inheriteance”, the author’s project aspires to connect the notions of heritage and inheritance by illustrating the links between what is considered public and private. In other words, it is an attempt to understand how what is supposedly belonging to everyone (world heritage) is legally, discursively and materially treated as inheritance.

Beyond Guidelines: The Question of Ethics in Transregional Research and Knowledge Production / BEYONDREST

Doing Research Under Current Ethics Regimes: Some Observations

By Birgit Meyer. Even if one does not find issues regarding data management and research ethics particularly exciting as such, it is necessary to delve into the rules and regulations that underpin the institutionalization of current ethics regimes in the social and cultural sciences. This is part of the basic infrastructure of knowledge production, that scholars need to know so as to be able to operate therein.

Beyond Guidelines: The Question of Ethics in Transregional Research and Knowledge Production / BEYONDREST

Introducing “Beyond Guidelines”: Navigating Mismatched Expectations between Research Ethics and Institutional Ethics Regimes

In this introductory post to the blog series “Beyond Guidelines: The Question of Ethics in Transregional Research and Knowledge Production”, principal investigator at BEYONDREST Banu Karaca raises a few issues pertaining to the key concepts in ethics guidelines that emerge from the mismatched expectations between scholarly research ethics and institutional ethics regimes. Tackling these mismatches is ever more urgent as these ethics regimes are ultimately part of governance structures of higher education and academic research that are themselves increasingly subject to critique in the social sciences.