Niamh Moore

Everyday ethics in community-based participatory research

This article explores a range of ethical issues that arise in community-based participatory research (CBPR), drawing on literature and examples from practice. The experience of CBPR practitioners adds further weight to the growing critique by many other social researchers of regulatory approaches to research ethics (which focus on rule following in accordance with research governance frameworks, codes of conduct and ethics review procedures). Yet, whilst many of the ethical challenges in CBPR are common to social research generally (informed consent, anonymity, issues of ownership of data and findings), the dynamic, complex and value-based nature of CBPR gives them particular prominence. There are also specific issues relating to the ethics of partnership working, collaboration, blurring of boundaries between researchers and researched, community rights, community conflict and democratic participation that are more frequently encountered in CBPR. Four practice examples are used to demonstrate this argument. These are taken from a young womens community allotment, a community organisation researching poverty, a youth peer research project and a museum-based digital storytelling project. The article concludes that current institutional ethical codes, guidelines and ethical review procedures are not particularly well-suited to CBPR, in that they adopt principle-based and regulatory approaches to ethics; whereas character- and relationship-based approaches to ethics are also very important in CBPR, which is adopted by many researchers with a strong value commitment to social justice.

Re)using Qualitative Data

Recent interest by social scientists in the questions posed by reusing qualitative data has been prompted by two related events. The first is the establishment of the Qualitative Data Archival Resource Centre (QUALIDATA, and, since 2003, ESDS Qualidata) at the University of Essex in 1994. The second is the publication of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Datasets Policy (1996) which asks that those in receipt of ESRC grants offer copies of their data for deposit to QUALIDATA. This perceived injunction to archive data has been met with resistance by recalcitrant researchers who are wary of the implications of depositing data, and the possibilities of reusing data. The debate risks becoming polarised between those advocating the archiving and reuse of qualitative data, and those more sceptical of these possibilities. This paper aims to open up this debate and to seek a more fruitful path between these positions. I begin by calling into question the supposed ‘newness’ of reusing qualitative data, through turning to examine some of the assumptions embedded in the key terms and premises of the debate thus far, including the reliance on distinctions between primary and secondary data and primary and secondary analysis. I examine some common tropes in accounts of reusing data: comparisons with secondary analysis of quantitative data; efforts to distinguish between reusing qualitative data in a sociological context and other disciplinary and methodological traditions; and reliance on particular interpretations of key principles of qualitative research, context and reflexivity, in establishing the challenges of the reusing of qualitative data. I suggest that reuse may be more productively understood as a process of recontextualising data, and that attending to the reflexive production of data in the contemporary research project may offer more hopeful possibilities for reuse. I conclude by offering some reflections on why discussions of reusing qualitative data appear to have become so fraught.

The Contexts of Context: Broadening Perspectives in the (Re)Use of Qualitative Data

Questions of ‘context’ are one of the central issues on which debates about re-using qualitative data pivot. Advocates of reuse propose guidelines about how much and what kind of context to include when archiving qualitative data. Sceptics are concerned about the possibility of ever including enough context. The difficulty, if not impossibility, of accessing the context of the production of the original qualitative data is often the issue on which the possibility of re-using qualitative data flounders. Context, and its close companion, reflexivity, are seen as so intrinsic to the process of qualitative research, that without access to these, reuse of qualitative data remains impossible or at best limited. At a moment when the debate over reuse risks becoming increasingly polarised, this paper seeks more fruitful possibilities for reuse, by suggesting that despite persistent ruminations on context, we have not yet paid enough attention to context. Paradoxically the attention to (particular) contexts has excluded attention to other contexts. Certain contexts have been privileged, particularly the context of the original research, which is often reduced to the reflexive production of the data by the researcher. Other contexts are then lost, such as the contemporary context of data (re)generation. The taken-for-grantedness of context in qualitative research has meant that work on context in other domains such as literary theory, cultural studies and history has not been invoked in these dialogues. Yet drawing on this work can enable us to shift attention from context as something static and fixed and bounded, to the process/es of the identification and construction of context. In this way we can understand reusing qualitative data as being about the process of recontextualising data, opening up a more productive notion of reuse and more possibilities of meaning-making from reusing data.

Evidence for the effectiveness of Alexander Technique lessons in medical and health‐related conditions: a systematic review

Background:  Complementary medicine and alternative approaches to chronic and intractable health conditions are increasingly being used, and require critical evaluation.

The politics and ethics of naming: questioning anonymisation in (archival) research

Anonymity is often taken-for-granted as an ethical necessity. Discussions around reuse of qualitative data have added further weight to its importance for protecting research participants from unknown future use of data. Yet, anonymisation also compromises the possibilities of future reuse. This paper argues that default anonymisation forecloses discussion of the ethics of naming; it calls for a reorientation of debate, away from an assumption of the universal/ist ethical good of anonymity, towards a politics and ethics of the question of naming. Rather than a slide from an ethic of avoiding harm to a paternalistic notion of protection, I suggest that questions of naming in research, and avoidance of harm, could productively be approached through a feminist ethics of care.

Eco/Feminism, Non-Violence and the Future of Feminism

This article turns to an eco/feminist peace camp of the early 1990s in order to revisit the often passionate and troubled debates in feminism about pacifism, non-violence, maternalism and essentialism. Many readings of feminist peace activism, and eco/feminism, have collapsed a complicated politics into simple manifestations of maternalism, while at the same time reducing maternalism to essentialism. In this process essentialism has been invoked to disavow feminist peace activism and eco/feminist activism. Yet the critique of essentialism has now been the subject of much reflection by feminists. Rather than ascribing the category of ‘essentialism’, genealogical approaches attend to how the categories of ‘essentialism’ and ‘woman’ are invoked and to what ends. Such approaches thereby open up possibilities for understanding ecofeminist activism beyond essentialism. While an eco/feminist peace camp may appear an archetypal site for the re-inscription and repetition of essentialism, I suggest that without returning to such sites it will remain impossible to go beyond essentialism. Through a genealogical examination of contestations over the meanings and practice of eco/feminism at the camp, I understand this late-twentieth century peace camp, not as a quaint throwback to the disavowed activism of the 1970s and 1980s, but as a site through which the future of eco/feminist politics was, and can be, re-imagined.

Co-designing non-hierarchical community arts research: the collaborative stories spiral

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential and durability of arts practice as research through developing a new approach to arts research that challenges the conventional association between dominant constructions of community and dominant modes of research. Design/methodology/approach – A co-design approach, situated in arts practice, has been used to generate a conceptual framework that offers potential to open up the workings of communities by examining them from the standpoint of those who have everyday experience of these communities. Findings – The paper argues that there can no longer be clearly demarcated boundaries between “academics” and “community partners” in a genuinely co-designed arts research process. Rather, there are “research partners” who share mutual recognition of skills and experiences that allow them to commit to a durable “new creative scholarship” that reflects their collective identities. Social implications – The conceptual framework celebrates the life sto...

Eco/feminism and rewriting the ending of feminism: From the Chipko movement to Clayoquot Sound

This article draws on research at an eco/feminist peace camp set up to facilitate blockades against clear-cut logging in coastal temperate rainforest in Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in Canada in the early 1990s. The camp was said to be based on feminist principles and sometimes these were even articulated as eco/feminist principles. The slippage between these terms provides a focus for my discussion. Specifically the article explores the apparent paradox of the sheer vitality of this eco/feminist activism, and in particular its insistence on international connections, in contrast to the widely circulating accounts of the end of feminism, and especially the end of global sisterhood, which emerged in the early 1990s. Thus this article is also necessarily about how recent histories of eco/feminism, including tensions between theory and activism, are narrated. I take as a departure point references to the work of Vandana Shiva and the Chipko movement which circulated in accounts of the camp, and explore ways in which eco/feminists might read such utterances as more than evidence of a naive and problematic universalism. I situate eco/feminism’s internationalism genealogically in feminism and eco/feminism and read this as a counter-narrative to the ending of global sisterhood. Through paying attention to various movements, back and forth, between Clayoquot and Chipko, Canada and India, and drawing on Anna Tsing’s notion of ‘friction’, I offer an account of what has been at stake in disavowals of the possibility of reading Chipko as eco/feminist, and suggest the importance of a more generous reading of eco/feminists’ attention to the Chipko movement.

Imagining Feminist Futures

The debates around the contentious categories of third wave feminism, postfeminism and eco/feminism should be understood as manifestations of a broader anxiety about the current state of feminism. This anxiety plays out through contestations over versions of feminist histories and the possibilities and desirabilities of imagining feminist futures. These three terms, these ‘kinds’ of feminism appear to sit in uneasy relation with each other, suggesting very different accounts of these issues: eco/feminism is commonly critiqued for an assumed return to second wave essentialisms; postfeminism seen as a manifestation of the end of feminism, and third wave feminism regarded as suggesting a defiant insistence on the continuity of feminist politics, though in part produced through a suggested rupture with the second wave and the emergence of a new ‘younger’ generation of feminist activists.

Growing intimate privatepublics: Everyday utopia in the naturecultures of a young lesbian and bisexual women's allotment

The Young Women’s Group in Manchester is a ‘young women’s peer health project, run by and for young lesbian and bisexual women’, which runs an allotment as one of its activities. At a time when interest in allotments and gardening appears to be on the increase, the existence of yet another community allotment may seem unremarkable. Yet we suggest that this queer allotment poses challenges for conventional theorisations of allotments, as well as for understandings of public and private. In this article we explore how the allotment project might be understood to be intensely engaged in ‘growing intimate publics’, or what we term ‘privatepublics’. These are paradoxical intimacies, privatepublic spaces which are not necessarily made possible in the usual private sphere of domestic homes. Here we focus on the work involved in materialising the allotment, which we understand as a queer privatepublic ‘natureculture’ (Haraway, 2008) which appears as an ‘everyday utopia’ (Cooper, 2014).