Illegal ethnographies: Research ethics beyond the law

Abstract

The witness and prosecution sought to rationalise ethics as a transcendental code that could be applied equally across all situations, suggesting that the illegal was categorically unethical. Professional institutions, funding bodies and university departments are also recognising the importance of situated, embodied and relational ethics; an ethics that engages ethics as “an attribute of a pre-existing ethical subject but as a potential mobilised within particular creative instances” of spatio-temporal unfolding. Human geographers are only beginning to grapple with these issues, but disciplines such as Criminology, Sociology and Anthropology have a longer history of debating both precedent case studies and conceptual scenarios. The geographer Paul Chatterton, for example, highlighted in a researcher’s defence statement to a UK jury that his occupation of a coal train in Yorkshire with research participants was justified and imperative in light of the coal-fired power station’s ‘deadly and urgent threat to society’ responsible for '180 deaths a year’.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Thomas Dekeyser: orcid.org/0000-0002-3809-313X

ORCID for Bradley L Garrett: orcid.org/0000-0003-0414-3175

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