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Accepting roles created for us: The ethics of reciprocity
Abstract
Grounded in theories of feminist research practices and in two empirical studies we conducted separately, our argument is that seeing reciprocity as a context-based process of definition and re-definition of the relationship between participants and researcher helps us understand how research projects can benefit participants in ways that they desire.
... A community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach was selected for this study (Doberneck et al., 2010;Israel et al., 1998). CBPR methodologies provides a direct reciprocal partnership between academic researchers and community stakeholders that effectively builds a stronger capacity for change within the community while providing implications from research that are directly applicable to wider audiences (Israel et al., 2010;Powell & Takayoshi, 2003). CPBR allows for further empowerment of people and groups by enhancing their voices and power in society, and facilitating further social change (Tremblay et al., 2017). ...
... During the first CBPR phase, the research team connected with a local nonprofit organization to discuss their concerns and issues regarding sexual- ity education for adults with IDD. Through meetings, members of this organization were able to specify their concerns and begin to identify potential areas in which action needed to be taken (Powell & Takayoshi, 2003). During this phase, the research team learned more about the organization, specifically their sexuality education program, and they discussed areas in which they could collaborate. ...
... Due to the directly applicable nature of the CBPR study design (Powell & Takayoshi, 2003), the SHARE program has already used the results to create a sequential model for their program. In this model, adults must first take SHARE 1, which focuses on individual sexual health using didactic instruction and group education practices. ...
This study used a community-based participatory research approach to examine what adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) view as important topics in sexuality education. A thematic analysis was conducted on questions written by adults with IDD regarding sexuality after attending a sexuality education group. Results were checked for accuracy using a community focus group. Findings provide direct implications for community-based sexuality education programs for adults with IDD, demonstrating the need for mentoring regarding authentic relationship experiences as well as developmentally appropriate sexual health information. Programs need to focus on helping adults with IDD navigate these interpersonal experiences. This study also demonstrates the importance of including the voices of adults with IDD in research in order to ensure its applicability and acceptability.
... Reciprocity is essential to co-produced research. 41 Funders of global health research need to reconsider the rewards and impact of co-production. 37 42 Communities which devote their time, effort, and knowledge to shaping a research study should determine what benefits they receive and should be empowered by the processes. ...
... 1. Deciding whether and how to disseminate the digital stories 2. The day of the exhibitionary encounter: Showcasing the stories at the Peace in the Park event (see Figure 1) Resisting the common participatory impulse to organize around consensus, we demonstrate that participatory curation involves recognizing and navigating tensions that surface in the process (Fine & Torre, 2004;Powell & Takayoshi, 2003). ...
What does curation involve when guided by feminist, community-based participatory methodologies aimed toward social change? This article highlights that curation is a critically important intermediary rhetorical action in-and-of-itself when working with marginalized groups in a participatory action project. Participatory curation—a process of eliciting, shaping, and sharing creative-rhetorical works with members of a participatory action research (PAR) project—involves navigating tensions while striving to ensure that differently positioned participants have opportunities to voice their perspectives on when, if, and how to exhibit/disseminate the co-created knowledge. This web-text offers a deeper understanding of the praxis of participatory curation as participatory action research project. Drawing on a feminist PAR project to support marginalized youth in creating and presenting digital stories about critical issues impacting their communities, we argue that participatory curation involves creating a sense of “we” by prompting interpersonal moments of discovery and by confronting the commonplaces and structures that would immediately authorize those with privilege to decide when, if, and how to disseminate or make public collaborative creative-rhetorical works.
... Our understanding of power relations in research settings is crucially informed by experiences and analyses of gendered identity practices in contemporary societies. Relationship-building is framed within a power dynamic, and work over the past decade has documented the reciprocal relationship where both researcher and researched learn from one another and have a voice in the study (Pini & Peace, 2014;Powell & Takayoshi, 2003;Riach, 2009). More in line with activist research, reciprocity in researcher-participant interaction can be challenging to foster and remains difficult to define. ...
PurposeTo understand how research-participant relationships are formed in research settings through experiences and analyses of content-specific gendered identity practices.
Methodology/approachI draw upon a school-based ethnographically informed study exploring the construction of masculinities among white working-class boys in three schools in South London, United Kingdom between 2009 and 2011. To access participants’ perceptions, I used a methodology of observation, focus groups, semi-structured interviews and visual methods.
FindingsThemes of gendered embodiment, physicality and performance play a part in the formation of relationships in this study. Furthermore, such themes play a role – to varying degrees – in researcher-participant relationship-building. In understanding relationship-building practices, I make connections to my own reflexivity accounting for the multifaceted nature of identities, lifestyles and perspectives present in researcher-participant interaction.
Originality/valueThroughout the fieldwork, constructs of gender, nationality and class all contributed to how relationships were built. In navigating the power relations innate to all relationship-building, I discuss how I capitalised on my outsider status in terms of nationality to neutralise certain elements of class and gender that were normative to my participants, but, simultaneously, draw upon my insider status in terms of knowledge of the locale, humour and clothing which contributed greatly to how the relationships were constructed and maintained.
... As researchers we have much to gain from the work we do with community partners (Cushman, 1998). It is our responsibility, through "selfcritical, conscious navigation" (Cushman, 1996, p. 16) to define and redefine our relationships with partners and to ask and assess whether they are getting something satisfactory out of the interaction (Powell & Takayoshi, 2003). ...
This paper explores ethical issues of reciprocity, reflexivity and situatedness in conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Global South as part of PhD research projects. Against the backdrop of increasingly bureaucratised doctoral processes, we argue that PhD students occupy a particular terrain that involves continuous navigation of tensions between institutionally-required ethical procedures and ‘situational’ ethical processes in the field. We illustrate these tensions by analysing reflections on our experiences of conducting fieldwork in Indonesia, India and the Philippines. Guided by decolonial and feminist thought highlighting the politics of knowledge (co)production, this paper unpacks the problems of insider-outsider binaries and standardised ethical procedures, and explores the possibilities of ethics as visible, collaborative negotiation.
For the purpose of advancing the feminist commitment to inclusion and nonliberal articulations of pluralism, in this essay I conceptualize the Native account of individual autonomy that itself evolves from a commitment to pluralism. I demonstrate that Native individual autonomy is concurrently strong and feminist in nature-what I call "radical-cum-relational." That is, Native autonomy is more radical than the traditional liberal conception and is simultaneously grounded in relationality, which is the basis of much of feminist ethics. I demonstrate that the Native conception of autonomy is radical and promotes the highest degree of individual self-determination and independence qua individuality and particularity. Yet this radical self-determination depends on intense social interdependency. The grounding metaphysics and epistemology of the Native framework are conceived entirely in terms of ethical relationships between and responsibilities to other individuals, animals, and the Earth. That is, no part of the Native paradigm can be understood outside of the ethical connections persons have by virtue of their primary position as community members. It is by situating radical autonomy against a background of ethical social interdependence, together with the background condition of gender equality of Native practices, that the radical construal of Native individual freedom is feminist. To shore up and illustrate the connection between Native autonomy and feminism, I argue that an identification between the Native social practice of gifting and feminist reciprocity can be made, specifically Iris Marion Young's notion of asymmetrical reciprocity. Finally, I argue that this connection avoids the problem of incommensurability and so is theoretically possible, responsible, and fits the criterion of respectfulness also at the foundation of the Native framework. Broadly speaking, the problem of incommensurability is concerned with theorists' inability to recognize foundational incompatibilities between paradigms and their forced attempts to merge them, often at the price of ignoring inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and contradictions that result from impossible translations and conversions. Historically and to the present day, Western philosophy has been egregiously guilty of distorting Native theories and practices. In this essay I argue that since translation takes place at the level of praxis rather than at the level of language, my argument circumvents problems that arise from failed attempts to map cultural concepts onto others that do not share similar foundations.
Researcher Patti Lather has defined empowering feminist research as a method for counteracting the invisibility and distortion of women's experience, a type of long-standing patriarchal exclusion that for Patricia Sullivan extends to the academy. Indeed, Sullivan contends that academic discourse communities have been male dominated, focusing on mastery models and modes of discourse that "women had little voice in shaping" (39-40) but that they must adapt to in order to succeed. These mastery models have applied to technological literacy acquisition as well, with the larger cultural understanding of computer literacy all too often being perceived as a male domain (Kramarae; Stabile; Wajcman). Many computers and writing specialists have theorized digital identity development in a range of technological spaces and have questioned the role that the composition curriculum can play in fostering identity construction within the academy and beyond it. In the process, they have countered some of the presumptions about who has access to technology, noting that as writing and communication technologies become increasingly digital, it is vital that we pay attention to the cultural, political, and material conditions that impact access to these technologies.
Community-based service-learning (CBSL) integrates experiential learning and academic goals with organized activities designed to meet the objectives of community partners. CBSL has potential to enhance (1) academic learning, (2) foster civic responsibility, (3) develop life skills and (4) transform student attitudes. However, little research supports claims that benefits are mutual amongst host counterparts. A lack of empirical research into community partner conceptualizations of best practice approaches and impacts, reflects a uni-dimensional understanding of the mutuality of programs, and fails to challenge dominant power relations embedded in traditionally uneven partnerships. It remains problematic to engage with service-learning without considering neocolonialist ideologies underpinning the ways community service, international development, and volunteering are defined and practiced. Drawing on development discourse, this paper first demonstrates how intertwined CBSL is with contemporary development agendas; second, brings attention to the absence of partner perspectives and involvement within CBSL studies; and third, outlines a CBSL research agenda.
Current practice, reified through typical IRB guidelines, has its roots in traditional positivist frameworks about research. The positivist research paradigm is traceable back to Enlightenment epistemologies, which emphasized the fact-based, value-free nature of knowledge (Christians, 2000; Cunningham & Fitzgerald, 1996; Howe & Moses, 1999; Muchmore, 2000). Christians (2000) suggests that researchers who were grounded in positivist approaches used utilitarian perspectives on research ethics. The utilitarian approach suggested that a single set of moral considerations could guide all inquiry; these considerations were outlined in a generally accepted code of ethics that emphasized informed consent, privacy/confidentiality, and accuracy, and that opposed deception in research. Many of these conventions were codified in national legislation in the USA beginning in 1974, in response to several experiments that had mistreated research participants (Hecht, 1995; UCRIHS, 2004). According to Christians (2000), ‘Three principles, published in what became known as the Belmont Report, were said to constitute the moral standards for research involving human subjects: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice’ (p. 140). These principles were intended to ensure that people participated in research voluntarily and anonymously; that researchers protected the well-being of their participants; and that both the benefits and the burdens of research be distributed equitably (Christians, 2000). This legislation established requirements for IRBs that would review and monitor federally funded research conducted by universities and other institutions. Most universities and other research-conducting institutions have since expanded the purview of their IRBs to monitor all institutional research – not just that which is federally funded (Hecht, 1995).
Geographers are increasingly grappling with the theoretical and practical implications of integrating an ethics of reciprocity into undergraduate learning and teaching. This paper draws on the unexpected experiences of a third-year human geography research methods fieldtrip to examine the process of balancing undergraduate student learning and assessment outcomes, with tangible outputs often-desired by Indigenous tour operator partners. Reflections from students and academic staff highlight the challenges of realizing ideals of reciprocity within the complex and ever shifting cross-cultural research context.
In this study, the author analyzes the websites of 32 universities’ Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to explore two specific issues: (a) how individual IRBs define vulnerable populations, and (b) the guidelines those IRBs offer with respect to participants who may have limited or no English language proficiency. Analysis indicates wide variation in IRB guidelines. Despite a trend to develop separate IRBs for biomedical and social and behavioral research, social science IRBs still use language reflective of medical models for research. Second, there is great variation in the definition of vulnerable populations, as well as in the requirements for including, or excluding, their participation in research. Finally, university IRBs offer little, if any, guidance about conducting research with participants whose first language is not English. The author offers specific recommendations for the ways in which qualitative researchers may advocate for changes in how IRBs conceptualize these types of research studies and participants.
A major component of community-based research (CBR) in the field of HIV is the Meaningful Involvement of People Living with HIV/AIDS (MIPA) through hiring, training, and supporting peer research assistants (PRAs). CBR researchers and PRAs have begun to dialogue about the successes and challenges associated with peer research assistantships as they attempt to address the range of ethical issues that impact the PRAs' experience at different stages throughout the research process. I discuss some of the ethical tensions related to the PRA/researcher relationship, the relationship of the PRA to the research itself, and suggestions for how to move forward in addressing these tensions.
Government efforts to universalize access have resulted in narrow constructions of access as ownership of technology. This article posits a more substantive dialogue of access, one that goes beyond connectivity issues, to consider how the “practice of access” influences technology-use, examining attitudes and ideas about communication and computing technologies. Looking at one effort to address the digital divide in a technology camp for middle school students, I argue that access is practice and that if we examine the “practice of access” in our classrooms and in our research, we look not at the technology but at the practices—what gets reinforced, valued, and rewarded by local communities. The “practice of access” is a more useful way of understanding how social and economic infrastructures mediate access. In this way, access is re-cast as a mutable practice that is influenced by real, everyday practices.
With the convergence of digital media into ever-widening social and technological networks for creation and distribution, the contexts for writing and the study of writing and writers have certainly changed. Researchers must navigate a dense matrix of ethical and legal issues in all phases of research when studying the ever-changing processes and products of digital communications. In this article, I draw from numerous sources to articulate a few of the challenges facing digital writing researchers in this age of convergence, focusing on issues of representation (researcher, participant, third-party), issues of informed consent, and issues of copyright and fair use.
Service-learning and Writing: Paving the Way for Literacy(ies) through Community Engagement discusses service-learning as a teaching and learning method and its integration with writing. The various authors, from different disciplines and institutions, present service-learning as a means of having students practice writing in real world settings, and they show how relationship-building and partnerships between higher education and diverse communities produce benefits for all involved - the students, faculty, administrators, and the communities themselves. This volume demonstrates how writing instruction and/or writing practice can complement community engagement and outreach at local, national, and international contexts. Through different cross-cultural contexts and academic disciplines, the various authors explore reflection, assessment, internalization, diversity, and multiple literacies and their importance when integrating service-learning in higher education and community literacy. © 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. All rights reserved.
Within new paradigm research, collaborative inquiry (CI) is used as an umbrella term to encompass genres of research that are participatory, democratic and reflective in design, method and dissemination. The principles embedded in participatory methodologies emphasise inclusive participation within a mutually beneficial research project where deep interpretive processes occur and members co-construct knowledge. At the heart of CI is a call for research to be a catalyst for action and, therefore, for change.
In this essay, I propose that the field of composition/rhetoric can make important contributions to the understanding of ethics based on our critical perspective on language as interactional and rhetorical. The actual language of decision making with ethical dimensions has rarely been studied directly in the literature, a crucial gap our field can usefully fill. To illustrate this approach, I analyze the language of research recruitment in two biomedical and behavioral studies, arguing that different ethical frameworks - a principle-based ethics of rights and a context-based ethic of care-license different kinds of interaction and rhetorical persuasion. The findings identify and complicate certain concepts and assumptions within these ethical frameworks, with implications for the context of regulated research in the university.
This article examines the experiences of advanced students and of graduates in a non-traditional MA in professional writing program to discover how faculty may assure student success in professional writing occupations. The study investigates the knowledge domains and habits of mind that foster student success in writing. The research is the collaborative effort of three rhetoric and composition specialists. Their research discovered that successful writers (1) define success as gaining a response from readers; (2) master six knowledge domains—genre, writing process, rhetorical, subject matter, discourse community, and metacognitive knowledge; (3) put their knowledge into action through eight similar habits of mind—persevering, embracing learning, attempting challenges, responding positively to critique, engaging in collaboration, understanding how to write in complicated contexts, and engaging in metacognition; and (4) acquire these abilities from a range of personal, professional, and academic experiences.
The disruptions of the pandemic highlighted the role of the presence of the researcher and participants in our conceptions of literacy research and allowed us for a moment to reflect on the implications of our embodied presences as researchers. In this chapter, I draw from theories of affect, emotion, and memory to explore how we have constructed and understood the physical presence of the researcher in literacy research and how the challenges of research during the pandemic, as well as other social and political disruptions, challenge us to rethink the purpose and significance of that presence. In particular, I explore how embodied, affective experiences and physical locations not only shape our interactions with participants but also construct our identities as researchers and writers. The experiences we have doing research, and how we process those experiences as emotion and memory, create our individual stances and meanings of research and would benefit from reflection as individuals and as a field.
There have been strong calls from the higher education community for greater reciprocal, collaborative and mutually enriching relationships between the community and the academy. Underpinning the PACE initiative for example, is the "principle of reciprocity”, a “commitment to mutually beneficial learning and engagement” and an overall aim that students make a “valuable and valued contribution to partners and the communities they serve” (PACE, PACE Strategic Plan 2014 to 2016, 2014). What is it, however, that higher education institutions, practitioners, and scholars mean by such calls and commitments to service, mutual benefit, and reciprocity? The agenda and goals of community engagement in higher education remain somewhat ambiguous, as these guiding concepts are understood and interpreted in diverse and problematic ways by different actors and institutions. This chapter invites the higher education community to deconstruct key terms used to describe community engagement activities and relationships, and encourages critical reflection on our attempts to enact them through our research and practice.
Miley and Downs argue for a practice of programmatic relationships
between administrators of writing centers and writing programs that is rooted in the interactions between people in the programs rather than in the projects they share. Examining the inadequacies of both the term “collaborate” and “reciprocity,” Miley and Downs propose a new term for interaction between directors of programs: “collaboricity.” Using the metaphor of force fields to theorize collaboricity, and drawing from their own institutional history as example, they describe the independence and interdependence of writing center and writing program work. Through “collaboricity,” they argue for programmatic relationships that focus on a mutual crafting of writing community, collaboration, and care for one another.
This paper shares an innovative methodology to ‘co-create’ a curriculum with eleven international community development organisations from seven countries to prepare undergraduate students for international work-integrated learning activities. The co-creation process was complex, messy, and always evolving. Here we reflect on and document the process, identifying three key methodological principles that might guide the co-creation process for others. These principles embrace the unpredictable, emotional, and personal reality of bringing together diverse ideas and perspectives, as well as opening up possibilities for more creative ways of communicating and listening to what is seen, heard, and felt.
Many international programmes include work-integrated learning (WIL) and community-based service learning (CBSL) in order to teach students to collaborate and increase their intercultural sensitivity. The support curriculum for these experiences, however, may implicitly emphasize a divide between overseas “experience” and “reflection” facilitated by staff from home. This chapter describes the Classroom of Many Cultures project, a curriculum design project that used principles of co-creation for a series of learning modules to support international WIL and CBSL. These modules use pedagogical principles and activities that originated with host country staff, incorporating intercultural respect and collaboration into pedagogical design. The project involved significant refining of the co-creation method itself over time; the chapter explores the lessons that the research team learnt during the co-creation process.
Increasing numbers of Australian students are travelling overseas to undertake short‐term work‐integrated learning placements with community development organisations. In light of recent criticisms emerging in academic and public commentary on short‐term international volunteering, this paper highlights the need for a support curriculum that caters for students from diverse discipline backgrounds, often with little or no previous understanding of community development principles or intercultural engagement. In doing so, we question who is best placed to develop an appropriate curriculum and what might it look like. We draw on Macquarie University's Professional and Community Engagement community development programme to critically reflect on the importance of engaging with diverse knowledge frameworks, approaches to learning and subject expertise of our international community partners. In particular, this paper showcases a community‐based development module co‐created with community partners that aims to encourage students to rethink western‐dominated understandings of development, poverty and inequality. To conclude, we explore how co‐creating curriculum with community partners unsettles assumptions of the university as the only site of expert knowledge and knowledge‐making practices, and reflect on the challenges encountered as we try to contribute to the development of socially and environmentally conscious students.
This article proposes keeping with as a rhetorical practice used by communities to maintain cultural heritages in unfamiliar or unwelcoming settings. Grounded in interviews from participatory research with urban Appalachian advocates in Cincinnati, Ohio, the article provides a view of cultural rhetorics in action at points of community crisis. The article argues that keeping with is a rhetorical migration practice that helps account for a range of rhetorical practices rhetors use to maintain cultural connections to homes and heritages.
When conducting social media research, scholars inherently examine people’s personal lives due to the nature of social media engagement. While some social media platforms allow for efforts of anonymity to be made, due to facial recognition software and other technologies it can be difficult to truly be anonymous online as one shares details and photos from their lived experiences. Digital research ethics in the field currently advocate for a situational approach to inquiry rather than providing rigid rules and frameworks. However, I argue social media scholars need a more comprehensive research ethic, namely an ethic of care, when studying content so intimately tied to people’s lives. Drawing on digital research and feminist ethics, social media research guidelines from the Association of Internet Researchers, and on my experiences studying embodied performances on social media, I propose a feminist digital research ethic of care that further prioritizes the safety and care of those being studied due to the ease of searching and finding people online. Adopting more comprehensive ethics when conducting social media research becomes especially important when studying minority and vulnerable populations, such as may be the case when conducting social media research tied to gender, sexuality, and the LGBTQIA + community.
This case study describes an incident at Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant in Oak Harbor, Ohio, and discusses ways in which the case study can be used to examine ethical communication problems and as a basis for writing analytical reports that compare, justify, and analyze materials and issues in technical writing courses. It relates case elements and assignments to broader course and program objectives, poses sample instructional guidance, and offers examples of student performance. Suggested assessment methods to evaluate student learning are also given.
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