Ethics as Regulation and Ethics as Morals in Linguistic Fieldwork

1. Ethics as Regulation and Ethics as Morals in Linguistic Fieldwork Claire Bowern Yale University (Chair, LSA Ethics Committee) claire.bowern@yale.edu

2. Background

3. What is ethics? • the agreed (good) values/customs of a particular community • culture-specific • time-specific • changeable • accepted codes of “good behavior” • basis for legal system

4. Research Ethics

5. “Human Subjects” • Nuremberg Code • Post-WWII Trials of war criminals • 10 points for legitimate medical research • Research only • For the greater good • With the consent of participants • With appropriate preparation • By people who are qualified • Avoid harm and injury at all costs

6. “Human Subjects” • Helsinki Declaration • Guidelines for acceptable (medical) research behaviour • Development of Protocols: • Explicit consideration of ethical issues in the research project • Distinction between research to help people and research for its own sake • Risk assessment • Must obtain consent (Preferably in writing)

7. Belmont Report > Title 45 • Consent • Privacy • Respect for Persons • Beneficence/Justice

8. Extension from medical research • At some point, the guidelines for medical research were extended to other areas • clinical medicine <> medical research <> psychology <> anthropology <> linguistics • Guidelines more or less caught up • (Australia, Canada vs US) • Special guidelines for working with Indigenous groups and vulnerable participants

9. Definitions

10. Definitions • Research on Human Subjects • Research: a systematic investigation designed to contribute to generalizable knowledge. • Human subject: a living individual about whom an investigator obtains identifiable private information through interaction or intervention.

11. Research • What counts as generalizable? • e.g. Folklorists successfully argued that what they do is not ‘research’ under the legislation, and their work is not subject to human subjects review. • How is folklore research different from collecting narratives in fieldwork?

12. Human • e.g. Syntacticians who argue that they study patterns of language, not the speakers themselves

13. Subjects • e.g. Community-based linguists who view their work as a collaboration with speakers, not as experimentation

14. Ethics in fieldwork

15. Fieldwork can be an uneasy fit for IRB review. IRBs expect: • well-defined research stimuli prepared in advance • a power differential that always works to the researcher’s advantage • risks that can be identified ahead of time • that risks will accrue to the participant as an individual • consent is obtainable and documented in writing

16. Emergent Research • Questions are developed responsively in the encounter • “Subjects” better identified as “consultants” or “collaborators” • Power dynamics complex • Terms of research are negotiated, rather than dictated by the researcher and consented to by participants

17. Emergent Research • Boundaries between life and research become blurred • Makes potential risks harder to assess • Interaction framed by multiple ethical frameworks (cf Holton 2009) • Therefore same protocol might work out quite differently in different field sites. • (cf Rice 2006, Newman and Ratliff 2001)

18. Therefore… • There is a temptation ‘not to bother’

19. The Social Science Victim Narrative • “my research is special…” • “my work is without risk…” • “IRBs don’t understand my work…” • “IRBs just regulate medical research…” • …. (Laura Stark, Law and Society Review, Dec 2007)

20. Under-regulation and Over-regulation • Over-regulation • common perception of IRBs and Social Sciences • Under-regulation • Probably more common • Since ‘ethics’ is more general than the IRB legislation, and since many fieldwork encounters are cross-cultural, it follows that there will be many areas which the IRB doesn’t touch

21. IRBs and ‘respect for persons’ • treat individuals as autonomous agents • allow people to choose for themselves Therefore, get people’s consent to participate, make sure that consent is informed, protect privacy of individuals and confidentiality of data, offer extra protections for vulnerable participants.

22. IRBs and ‘respect for persons’ • How do you do that when individuals aren’t fully autonomous agents? • Community-wide decisions for documentation/research. • Consultants may not feel qualified to speak on behalf of the community.

23. Consent and its Documentation • How can we be sure the consent is fully informed and not coerced?? • How can we be sure that the consent doesn’t jeopardize the research? • E.g. by revealing too much about the material being tested? • By exaggerating the perception of risk.

24. IRBs and the linguist There are situations where IRB review can be beneficial to the linguist: • Might be the only time the linguist considers these issues explicitly and concretely • Consistency check • Statement of what the linguist has promised – type of contract

25. Ethics beyond the IRB

26. Ethics Beyond the IRB • ‘Stakeholders’ in fieldwork • Researcher • Research participants • Their community • Researcher’s supervisor [if student] • The wider field of linguistics • Grant bodies • The taxpayer • … • Issues of stakeholder rights come up in collaborative fieldwork.

27. Collaboratory Fieldwork • CfEira (2008) for Australia • Expectations: • Reciprocation • Community calls the shots (determines the direction of research) • Highly applied; research must have direct, tangible benefit to that community • Documentation for revitalization • No ‘research for its own sake’ • Long-term commitment • Context • Severe language endangerment • Lack of community access to previous research • Assertion of rights to self-determination in all areas

28. Collaboratory fieldwork has advantages • Better documentation when speakers are more engaged • Increasing the community stake in the language • Giving back and setting a good example.

29. Collaborative Research brings up its own ethical issues • Good revitalization requires good documentary materials; spending a lot of time on revitalization might not be the best use of the linguists’ time in the long term (Bowern 2008: language revitalization isn’t just about language). • The current form of the collaborative paradigm puts all the risk on the linguist; community responsibilities are unclear. This isn’t collaborative.

30. Collaborative research has built-in assumptions • Still assumes that the researcher is from outside the community (cf. ‘giving back’). • How does this apply to researchers who work on their own languages? • Assumption that communities aren’t interested in research for its own sake is second-guessing.

31. Ethics for other stakeholders • What are the ethical questions we should think about beyond the field and the fieldworker’s interaction with the field site?

32. Supervisors and Students • Is it ethical to send a student to a risky field site? • How much support should supervisors give their students in the field? • …when the problems might not be related to linguistics. • …when the supervisor might not have much local knowledge.

33. Conclusions

34. Conclusions • Ethics has a legal component: linguistic research is regulated by IRBs. • But ethics is also broader than that: there is a substantial moral component beyond the regulation. • IRB review is important: but it’s not the whole story. • Emergent research doesn’t always fit too easily within the regulatory frameworks. • Emergent/collaboratory work has its own assumptions and ethical issues that need addressing.