Codes, Committees and Other Such Conundrums!

Abstract

How do we engage with research ethics? How can we engage with research ethics? From ‘doing’ them, to ‘teaching’ them, to sitting in committees about them … This is a brief effort at teasing out some of the problems and potentialities of encapsulating issues that, I argue, are emergent through social relations in place – ethics are always contextual – within academic structures and other official organisation. Key concerns surround the tensions between increasing corporatisation and auditing within universities, the diverse range of research undertaken, and the different epistemological approaches to what constitutes ethics within research.