Dr. Sue Timmis (University of Bristol) presented at the ESRI seminar “The role of digital media in sustaining epistemic engagement and belonging in higher education”. The talk focused on some incredibly timely issues relating to students engaging with learning and universities, academics and academia through technology but also the various day-to-day activities of studying at a university from the stresses of medical student, not having any meaningful relationships with academics, to spending one and a half hours trying to get something photocopied. As universities are increasingly positioned in a battle for students (read) these issues are becoming a matter of survival for higher education institutions.

The relationship between the student and institution has been conceptualised in terms of student experience but Sue explained that this is currently being usurped by a focus on engagement.  There are multiple ways of defining “engagement”.  Rather than using a normative definition, Dr. Timmis explained that she prefers relational definitions of engagement that go beyond a focus on activities and instead illuminate the relationships between students and the academic domain and discourses.  Ludvigsen (2012), for example, defines engagement in terms of the core aim of education to foster participation in specialised discourses.  Furthermore, engagement is a cognate issue to retention and belonging.  Sue described research that asserts the importance of a ‘culture of belonging’ with students developing supportive peer relationships and meaningful interaction with academics.

Technology has been positioned at the interface between the student and academic community, as a way of encouraging or mediating engagement.  Sue explained that previous approaches to understanding the potential of technology in such a role has been subject to either technological determinism or social constructivism, rather than engaging with the technology in a relational way that considers embodiment, action and usability.

The talk highlighted a series of potentially very serious problems building in higher education.  There has been a shift to mass-higher education systems, with increased student-teacher ratios and reduced contact hours in addition to the heavy debt burdens that students are required to accept for access to university exacerbated by the prospects of a reduction in the graduate premium in future earnings.  Technological innovation in this context presents the possibility of free, online courses for the masses and technologically-enhanced learning in elite universities for the few (read this).

Sue described a project that she is developing that will seek to develop a culture of attachment through digital media and new learner interactions. Reflecting on some of her earlier research projects e-SIGs and Tel-Me it seems that the most important factors will be students off-line relationships with peers and staff in addition to the learning environments they find themselves in. Rather than focusing on digital media as a plaster on existing problems in higher education, this raises significant questions beyond how the technology works, such as what is education for and how do universities re-design the context to improve student engagement, retention and belonging.

James Duggan

It’s déjà vu all over again…

Michael Gove’s hysterical response (read here) to the recent letter published by a group of academics criticising the revised National Curriculum suggests that it’s a lot easier to rattle the cage of powerful politicians than might be realised.

Obviously all is not well in government. Our ‘impact’ narrative is writing itself on an almost daily basis at present. That reasoned criticism, from 100 academics representing a very wide range of views and empirical research on teaching, learning and the curriculum over many years, should be so instantly dismissed as ‘marxist’ is quite extraordinary. It’s also rather quaint and faintly reassuring to find out that ‘reds under the bed’ is still thought to sell newspapers.  Amazingly, the Tories seem to have forgotten their own history in this area.  They’ve been attacking ‘marxists’ in education, and indeed the social sciences more generally, for more than 30 years.  Successive reforms of the Social Science Research Council (remember that?), teacher training (‘recent relevant experience’, remember that?), the National Curriculum and Assessment system, etc. seem not to have vanquished this terrible menace.  Either the Tories are incredibly incompetent, or the marxists are incredibly resilient, or both? Or perhaps the marxists never existed in the way depicted in the first place – though the trope lives on – if it’s critical of conservative policy it must be marxist…

Plus ca change…

See:

“the SSRC’s research programme on transmitted deprivation (1974–82) …it has been argued that it was the disappointment of Sir Keith Joseph with the research programme that fuelled his contempt for social science and his attempt, as Secretary of State for Education and Science, to abolish the Research Council.” (Welshman 2009).

“Following the election of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 general election, the Government expressed reservations about the value of research in the social sciences, and the extent to which it should be publicly funded. In 1981, the Education Secretary Sir Keith Joseph asked Lord Rothschild to lead a review into the future of the SSRC. It was ultimately decided…that the Council should remain, but that its remit should be expanded…to include more ’empirical’ research and research of ‘more public concern’. To reflect this, in 1983 the SSRC was renamed the Economic and Social Research Council” (Wikipedia).

And the Open University tells its own story:

“In 1984, after being told that a social science course showed a Marxist bias and offered a critique of monetarism, the Secretary of State for Education, Keith Joseph read ‘all the relevant teaching materials’. .. Interviewed in 1995…Anastasios Christodoulou, the University Secretary, 1968-1980, recalled that Keith Joseph ‘didn’t like the OU at all ─ it was politically motivated, ideologically unsound and its standards suspect ─ and I’m almost quoting.’…In the 1990s the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips expressed her concerns about bias. She described Open University course books for a post-graduate teaching qualification as: ‘not so much educational texts as ideological tracts’

Harry Torrance

Dr. Hanne Knudsen’s (Aarhus University, Denmark) talk ‘Playful hyper responsibility: Deconstructing parental responsibility’ described how parents are being encouraged to take on new obligations through playing of games with other parents.

Hanne described a series of historical shifts in how parental responsibility in Denmark was approached by the state.  From 1814 onwards responsibility was framed in terms of rules such as send children to school unless they are ill.  Then in the 1950’s expert advise and demands became more prominent, describing what parents ought to do, such as helping children with their homework. It was recognised, around the turn of the century, that the amount of advice offered was too great and so the emphasis was on encouraging parents to reflect and imagine how they could take responsibility to better take care of their child. 

The Responsibility Game is an example of how schools are encouraging parents to reflexively engage with being more responsible parents.  Parents play the board game in groups on parent’s evening.  They are given 30 sentences (e.g., Who is responsible for ensuring the child learns to lose a game with good grace?) and they have to decide where the responsibility lies between school, mutual, or home. Then the parents are asked to decide how these responsibilities will be met (e.g., Telling grandmothers not to lose games on purpose). Finally, the parents sign up to performing these responsibilities.

The key focus was what is going on in this situation where parents are made to play a game and in doing so in front of peers determine they will be more responsible, and effectively better parents in the future?

To answer this question, Hanne drew on Derrida’s (1996) notion of ‘classical’ personal responsibility as described in ‘The Gift of Death’, which identifies two forms of responsibility:  general responsibility (e.g., You respond to general obligations, rules, ethics, duties. You can account for your actions) and absolute responsibility (e.g., You do what you think is right. You stand alone, You do not respond to anyone, do not account for anything).  In Hanne’s analysis, there is always a conflict between absolute and general responsibilities, quoting Derrida,

“The ethical therefore ends up making us irresponsible. It is a temptation, a tendency, or a facility that would sometimes have to be refused in the name of responsibility that doesn’t keep account or give account, neither to man, to humans, to society, to one’s fellows, or to one’s own. Such a responsibility keeps it secret; it cannot and need not present itself” (Derrida 1992: 62).

The game attempts to align the parent’s absolute responsibilities with the child’s best interests but this creates tensions with existing general responsibilities and this leaves the parent unable to meet all their responsibilities and so either more or less responsible.

In practice it is likely that parents will agree to do something (e.g., read to their child more) but not actually do so. Thus as older forms of ethics are superseded by new ethics of play, this scenario in which parents are meant to become more responsible by agreeing in public to be better parents may lead to parents agreeing in public but break, have no intention of keeping, or fail to live up to these brief and public visions of their better selves.

James Duggan

A number of academics from ESRI were signatories to letter to Michael Gove published in the Independent on Wednesday 20th March so we are reposting it here.

Gove will bury pupils in facts and rules

Following an earlier blog a few months ago, on the emerging story and furore around the posthumous exposure of Jimmy Savile as a serial abuser, who for decades managed to hide in full sight, this is a kind of follow up. Following extensive media coverage, a series of inquiries have been or are being conducted by/into the circumstances and organisations which (to varying degrees unwittingly) facilitated or masked his activities. Some have been rapid and self-lacerating (eg the BBC), while others appear suspiciously slow and private (eg the health service and prisons). Now we will begin to see a trickle, probably growing to a torrent, of books describing and discussing what happened and what the story supposedly tells us about our society, our culture, and the evils of paedophilia and sexual abuse.

An early tributary has just been published by Frank Furedi (read here), which is less concerned with the detail of Savile’s nefarious exploits than with the way in which our society conceives of and deals with the idea and reality of childhood risk and abuse. In a sense, the Savile case is adopted as a model upon which an argument can be usefully hung or developed: one which will hold few surprises for those who have read Furedi’s earlier work around fear, risk, and childhood. An early (and pretty hostile) review, is careless in suggesting that Furedi understands the Savile case in particular, or our approach to child abuse in general, as a moral panic. On the contrary, the distinction is made that once the terms of a moral panic have become normalised and taken for granted, achieving the status of a dominant discourse, the concept of panic is no longer adequate or applicable. Beyond this, it is not my purpose to defend Furedi’s rapid-response book in detail or in general, but to note what this review tells us about the difficulty and challenge of making any contribution to public discussion which deviates from the extremely powerful mainstream discourse around abuse and risk.

Beyond focussing less on what he (more or less clearly) says, and more on particular aspects of who and what he (more or less apparently) is, in terms which could almost themselves be construed as moral panic, Furedi is castigated for having the temerity to write about the Savile case without placing the horror of Savile’s acts, and the experience of his victims, at the very heart of the discussion. The fact that almost every other commentary has done and will do so is no excuse; there is only one way to understand and discuss these issues, there is no other legitimate priority, and anyone who diverges from the true path must expect to be dismissed and vilified, their motives called into question. Any number of unreflective and simplistic pieces will be published, based on dodgy assumptions, dubious evidence and naive arguments, in accordance with the blinkered discourse of child abuse and protection promulgated by the NSPCC and similar crusaders, but their authors will not be attacked McCarthy-style, in personal terms. When the powerful organisations which seek to control this discourse can apparently rely on independent and normally reflective and critical commentators to do their job for them and jump on transgressors, the task of conducting careful research, seeking real understanding, asking critical questions, suggesting alternative solutions, and seeking to contribute to positive practice around abuse and protection, is shown to have become extremely challenging.

Heather Piper

This was first posted on the blog for the ESRC Seminar Series on Moral Panics. To learn more about the series follow this link.

Interviewer: Is there anything you would like to be known for [in the future]?

Jason:   Um, no, not right now.

Our first phase of data collection is almost complete, and the team are currently working their way through pages upon pages of transcripts from 24 group interviews with year 10 and 12 pupils from six schools across England. In this post, Kim reflects on some of the emerging findings and the thornier methodological issues arising for us as a team.

In this first phase of data collection, we’ve been talking with participants about their thoughts about celebrity, focusing on the celebrities they like and don’t like and their feelings about these; their understandings of what defines a celebrity and distinctions between different types of celebrity; and how they engage with and access celebrity more generally. These group interviews were specifically designed to generate data on young people’s more general and collective understanding of ‘celebrity’ rather than young people’s personal aspirations and future plans which will form the focus of the one-to-one interviews we will be conducting this the summer.

Yet, the participants’ aspirational orientations and desires were present in these group discussions, produced and claimed through various ways and at various points albeit under the veneer of celebrity ‘banter’. In our initial work looking through the transcripts, we have been struck by the broader social and symbolic function of young people’s collective talk about celebrity: the claiming of gendered and classed positions; the performance of taste; and processes of identification with and through celebrity.  In participants’ seemingly mundane chat about the celebrities they like and those they despise, or about who deserves to be famous, this ‘celebrity talk’ enables them to say something about themselves and others. It has a performative function, providing a set of tools for young people as they construct their own (future) selves and navigate possible transitions and spaces of belonging in education, work and the wider social world.

For example, we’ve heard animated and heated discussions about which celebrities have ‘rightly’ achieved their fame through hard work, dedication, talent and a passionate commitment to their ‘craft’ (people like Bear Grylls or Jessica Ennis), and a repeated (though not always consistent) repudiation of reality TV stars, glamour models and socialites such as the Kardashians (‘What are they famous for?’).  We have also heard young people discuss other routes to fame, including critiques of nepotism in celebrity culture where ‘connections’ and money can get you success and fame regardless of talent, as more ‘talented’ individuals struggle to ever get noticed. It doesn’t take much to draw parallels between these injustices and the kinds of nepotism, cultural capital and powerful social networks that operate to police access to many top professional careers.  Discussions about whether participants would want to be famous themselves have also drawn out interesting themes around the ‘deservedness’ of fame and the difference between international renown ‘just for being famous’ and respect and recognition within local communities (such as sub-cultural music genres) for doing something that is ‘good’. In these discussions, participants draw on distinctions within celebrity culture – and broader moral debates about the rise of the ‘famous for nothing’ – to position their own future selves and ‘successes’.

In the one-to-one interviews which we will be conducting this summer, we will ask participants in more detail about their own educational experiences and ideas about who and where they want to be in the future.  We will then be looking across the data from the group interviews and individual interviews to trace the connections between young people’s talk about celebrity, and the ways in which they construct their own aspirations and imagined futures.  Such a project is rife with epistemological and ethical challenges for those interested in young people’s lives and the stories they (can) tell about themselves and their futures.

These challenges were helpfully evoked by Professor Les Back (Goldsmiths College, London), in a recent talk on ‘Dialogue, Ethics, and Authorship in the craft of ethnography’ as he spoke about his current ethnographic project on the lives of 30 young migrants, conducted with his colleague Shamser Sinha. Les talked about the kinds of techniques deployed  – or craft practiced – by him and Shamser as they sought to observe, record and ‘curate’ the complexity of young migrant lives. In particular, he discussed the challenges in attending to their lives in ways that did not reproduce the violence suffered by immigrants and asylum seekers as they are constantly made to account for themselves in immigration interviews, where survival – and permission to stay – means having to tell their stories to immigration officers in particular ways.

Echoing Carolyn Steedman’s work (2000) on how women and the working class have historically been made to give redemptive, confessional narratives to authorities and official figures of the state, Les warned that interviews in social science can bear the trace of the kinds of ‘rendering of self’ that are present in other spaces of surveillance, power and misrecognition. Stirring this sense if the interview as an intrusion and form of judgemet, interpellating subjects to account for themselves, Les showed us images of an evocative,  macabre sculpture by Juan Muñoz showing two human figures being suspended in the air by their tongues.

Les asked then, how his research could avoid those ‘enforced narratives’ circulating in the interview rooms of the immigration office. How, he asked, do we open up spaces for dialogue and representation within qualitative research that allow participants to tell their story outside of those bounded dominant narratives and ways of speaking? How can we open up the qualitative research project in ways which bring new textures to the story of the migrant – or in our case – contemporary youth?

Les’ talk compelled me to think about the tensions and epistemic challenges in our research, where an enquiry that is centrally and broadly about young people’s aspirations, carries the risk of demanding and eliciting similarly ‘enforced’ narratives.  As we have written about elsewhere, young people are surrounded by a discursive regime – reproduced by politicians and across popular culture – which compels them to be ‘good’ neoliberal subjects in which ‘being aspirational’ is key (Raco, 2009).  To be recognized as subjects of David Cameron’s ‘Aspiration Nation’, young people must aspire towards certain things and ways of being  (secure, professional jobs, university) and away from others (welfare dependency, unplanned motherhood, celebrity). They must produce themselves as responsible, reflexive and alwaysfuture oriented: as already knowing where they are going and how to get there.   These demands to produce and tell oneself as aspirational are part of a broader ‘autobiographical’ injunction – a technology of the self – characterizing the contemporary, where in order to be rendered ‘successful’ we must ‘have a story’.

Celebrity culture is central to reproducing these modes of self-production: the pervasiveness and power of the celebrity backstory which tells us how celebrities have, through will and sheer determination,  ‘made it against the odds’; the proliferation of the celebrity autobiography which provide ‘inspirational’ tales of becoming; and the redemptive narratives of transformation in the celebrity confessional interviews (from Lance Armstrong with Oprah to Jade Goody’s apology for her ‘racist bullying’ on Big Brother). Looking at the inter-connection between these and young people’s narratives of selves – present and future – will be fascinating.

Yet, modes of articulating or ‘telling’ the self are not equally available (Lawler 2002; Skeggs 2004). They are also, as Les reminds us, informed by certain expectations and ‘demands’ rather than necessarily an ‘urge to tell’ (Byrne 2003). How then do we both interrogate these relationship between celebrity culture and the modes of self-production taken up by young people, whilst, in that interview encounter, avoid making similar demands of them? And how do we understand our role in producing that research encounter and its ‘discursive terms of engagement’ (Skeggs and Wood 2008), as participants read us – and our expectations of them – in particular ways?

Is it possible to open up the space for them to tell different stories, like Jason’s, above: of ambivalence and uncertainty about their futures? A space where being in the present rather than always accruing for and working towards the future is not simply written off as a sign of lack, failure and stagnation?  Or a space to articulate desires for belonging and being that fall outside of the frame of ‘desirable’ aspirations (such as for motherhood or fame)?

This dilemma is one of many that we, as a team, will be thinking about over the next few months as we prepare for the next stage of fieldwork.

Kim Allen

This is re-posted from the Celebrity and Youth blog which documents a research project entitled: ‘The role of celebrity in young people’s classed and gendered aspirations’. It is being carried out by Heather Mendick and Laura Harvey at Brunel University and Kim Allen at Manchester Metropolitan University between September 2012 and April 2014 and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Prof. Les Back (Goldsmiths University) came to ESRI to present “From Afghanistan to Croydon: Dialogue, Ethics and Authorship in the Craft of Ethnography”.  He began his talk by describing the incredibly moving stories of two asylum seekers who came to Britain.  Hissani took two years to travel from his home in Afghanistan but his claim for asylum was denied in twenty minutes.  Christian was given notice to leave and as he was sitting on the plane waiting to be deported he received a text message from the United Kingdom Border Agency wishing him the best of luck with the rest of his life.

Prof. Back’s research, with colleague Shamsher Sinha (Goldsmiths University) is seeking to explore the mobilities of migrants in an increasingly interconnected world, where using David Harvey’s (2011) phrase there is considerable “time-space compression” but as Les reminded us this compression is uneven.  Technologies, media, travel and capital flows bring some closer together but equally the world remains divided by national borders and regulated. The same technologies that enable the compression of space are the same used in surveillance and regulation of migrants. Les and Shamsher are trying to figure out how to appropriately research migrants in these conditions but also to ask what it means for ethnographic research more broadly.

A central theme running through the talk was the relationship between the researcher and the individual migrant or asylum seeker focusing on the exchange of information, knowledge and experience.  There were issues of using interviews as a data extraction processes.  Furthermore, it is problematic to research a group such as asylum seekers or migrants who are so scrutinised and used to being interviewed.  There was a definitive shift in the research to open up a dialogue and space of representation with the participant, to include the ‘researched’ in representation and authorship.  A challenge for researchers is however to enable participants to be included in the research, by naming them as co-authors, within the ‘ethical hypochondria’ around the claimed need to anonymise participants in research.  Les thought, on this subject, that as researchers we just need to be braver.

Research is and has always been integrally related to the technologies available to the researcher, and consequential forms of doing research. Audio and video recording, photography, the humble pen and paper, even the millennia-old words/ language and numbers/ mathematics.  Each of these technologies relate to particular ways of doing research, using an audio recorder requires a quiet and potentially unsociable room.

Les talked about the ‘ethics and technics’ of doing research and this raises questions of what will be the new technologies and how will they will be used?  You could, in the near future, use Google Street View to map a migrant’s journey across continents and enable the research audience to virtually follow these routes to ‘experience’ migration.

In the research Les and Shamsher gave Dorothy, a participant, a camera and asked her to go and take pictures of things that were meaningful to her.  The photo – a picture of Buckingham Palace – enabled the researchers to expand the horizon of the research by knowing more of the research participant.  Technologies are however being purposefully developed with greater surveillance and connectivity integral to them. These new horizons might be tempting for researchers.  Participants could be given Google Glass, which would record photos, videos, locations, Internet searches and more.  For me, this prospect seems hugely problematic, but as the technology is normalised how will we view a participant’s choice to wear a product like Google Glass and ‘consent’ to take pictures and search the web… all of which will be recorded and available to the researcher?

James Duggan

It’s the debased discourses of democracy at the back of all talk of ‘privatisation’, performance management and the making of ‘hard decisions’ by leaders that rankles.  I was involved in a panel debate and the University of East London.  It was a good debate about ‘education for sale’ involving Prof. James Tooley (Newcastle University), Dr. Glenn Rikowski (Northampton University) Dr. Patricia Walker (University of East London and labour councillor) and myself.  It was chaired by Claire Fox (Institute of Ideas).  Two things from this debate have stayed with me as I think about democracy as a practical response to social issues, political policy and the key importance of education in people’s lives.

The first is the conflation of ‘voice’ with the ubiquitous use of opinion surveys by political parties, marketing and management.  There is a fashion for ‘listening’ to pupil and student voices as a means of assessing the effectiveness of teaching or of various ‘services’ by the use of surveys.  That these are management devices for the manipulation of staff  or ‘consumers’ is muddled with discourses about ‘choice’ and ‘democracy’.  This is no accident, of course.  Back in the early twentieth century the pioneers of the public relations industry saw their role as one of ‘manufacturing’ or ‘engineering’ consent by ‘experts’.  Lippmann, one of these pioneers, explicitly saw people as being simply a ‘phantom public’ who effectively played no part in democracy but were necessary only as a source of ‘opinion’, that in turn could be shaped by clever advertising.  Ivor Goodson and I developed this notion in our recent paper ‘What’s wrong with democracy at the moment and why it matters for research and education’.  Jill Schostak and I have developed it much further in our book ‘Writing research Critically. Developing the power to make a difference’.  In order to think through the ways in which research and educators can contribute to the development of a truly effective public.

But what on earth would an ‘effective public’ mean in these days of omnipresent ‘marketization’, ‘performance indicators’ and ‘expert leadership’?  In the debate I mentioned the notion of democracy as requiring the creation of public spaces in which people can voice their concerns, their complaints, their demands and fully engage in decision making in all the organisations that impact on their lives.  Think of all the organizations in which people work.  To what extent are they involved in decision making and action?  Do a mental walk down a high street or a mental wander through your own organization and mark out the spaces and places where free debate, decision making and engagement in courses of action can be made.  In schools, say, think of all the places where all those intimately concerned with the school – parents, children, teachers, admin staff, cleaners, caretakers, etc can all come together to talk and work at the processes of decision making together.  A core principle of democratic organization is that all are free and equal to be counted as contributors to decision making.  If one person or group has a greater voice in the process that another then it is no longer a democratic process but a process where power is exerted over others.  Privatisation, the notion of expertise (to decide for another), leadership (to command/instruct another), crowd out the possibility of people working and deciding together as free and equal beings. Discourses of democracy are debased with every attempt to overrule the voice of another through command and coercion.

Democracy is not an easy option.  But a society composed of organisations where democratic practices, procedures, and values are crowded out by managerialism and privatization of control and command over resources cannot legitimately claim to be democratic.  Dewey saw this very clearly at much the same time as the early pioneers of public relations were writing and practicing their craft.  He proposed the notion of the laboratory school as a way of stimulating social innovation and ‘educating’ (or drawing out) the key experiences that ground democratic practice.  His notions of discovery learning and ‘progressive’ organic development have been largely crushed over the last 30 years in the UK.  The second thing that has stayed with me about the debate we had at UEL is the extent to which public intellectuals have so bought the rhetoric of the free market that democracy has all but vanished from everyday discourses of education.

Prof. John Schostak

While she is visiting the University of Keele, supported by a Fulbright Scholarship, Prof. Mary Brydon-Miller (University of Cincinnati’s Action Research Centre) presented ‘Community Covenantal Ethics and Structured Ethical Reflection: Enacting the Values of Action Research’ at the ESRI seminar. 

The talk focused on ethics and action research, for Mary both of these were intimately related to personal narratives and identity as a researcher seeking to, in line with Action Research Centre’s (ARC) mission, “promote social justice and strengthen communities, locally and globally, by advancing research, education, and action through participatory and reflective practices.”

ARC’s mission is something that many researchers would sign up to but for those action researchers working in a university there are potential tensions between the progressive values of action research and the ethical review process in universities or, in America, the Institutional Review Board.  Currently, Human Subject Review processes are guided by principles of autonomy, beneficence and justice yet in universities these are typically interpreted in a narrow, contractual and legalistic sense that emphasises risk avoidance to exclusion of all else.

Mary suggested that rather than approaching action research through a contractual approach it is better to adopt a covenantal model, whereby an, “understanding of our deep and abiding responsibility to act in the interest of others shifts our current identification of research as commodity to a system in which all research, not simply action research, is regarded as a source of common good” (Brydon-Miller, 2009, p. 254).

Like action research covenantal ethics must also be situated in an institutional context and there are questions as to what this would look like in practice?  Mary outlined ‘structural ethical reflection’ as a potential approach and befitting a talk on action research, we all had a go. The process involved choosing values from list that we considered appropriate to our research. Then accepting the values the task was to understand what these values mean at different stages of the research, using a grid – see below.

Of the values on the list, I felt most comfortable with applying honesty, respect, transparency, critical thinking, and determination to my research, rather than more open and expansive values such as wonder, love or courage.  I’m concerned that adopting and seeking to adhere to ‘lofty’ values while researching could create situations where I would let vulnerable individuals or groups down when a funding stream ended or I have to move job.  It is interesting that the reflection grid ends with the dissemination of findings, the end of the research from the researchers’ and funders’ point of view, and so there are questions as to what it means to commit to higher and more commendable virtues within such time-limited periods and potentially temporary relationships?

On the whole, covenantal ethics provides a positive foundation for researchers to navigate the ethical challenges they face while researching both in the short-term and over a career, beyond not being sued, being reminded and remembering to reflect on the ethical, moral and political dimensions of doing research can only be a good thing.

James Duggan