Reflections concerning ethnographic ethical decisions and neo-liberal monitoring

Abstract

Hypothetical, speculative ethical concerns are no match for real situations. As such, this paper argues that there is an unsurpassable gap between planned, prescriptive ethics and real-time, relational, ethnographic decision making. The enforcement of procedural ethics may actually prevent the development of ethnographic work. Also, we critically assess procedural ethics as being not really about ethics, but rather about the risk management embedded in contemporary academia. We organize ethical issues in three political vectors (the ethnographer him/herself, the relationships with the people in the field, and the ethnographic texts), and then offer suggestions for a humanistic research ethics that involves reclaiming the researchers' ethical power, enlarging the notion of what is ethical, and accepting that there is a darker side to ethnography. The account offered here is based on the ethnographic experience of Portuguese and Scotland-based researchers.KEYWORDS: ethnography, critical ethnography, ethics, IRB and academic freedoms.Monitorização neoliberal e decisões éticas na etnografia: algumas reflexões Na ética, preocupações hipotéticas e especulativas não correspondem a situações reais. Existe um hiato insuperável entre uma ética processual e prescritiva e os processos de tomada de decisão etnográficos, relacionais e necessariamente em tempo real. A aplicação de uma ética processual pode chegar a impedir o desenvolvimento de trabalho etnográfico. Uma avaliação crítica da ética processual revela que o seu objeto não é realmente a ética, mas sim a gestão de riscos tal como tem sido incorporada na academia contemporânea. Organizamos as questões éticas em três vetores políticos (o/a etnógrafo/a, as relações com as pessoas no terreno e os textos etnográ-ficos) e avançamos propostas para uma ética humanista de investigação, que passa pela recuperação do poder ético dos pesquisadores, por ampliar a noção do que é ético e por aceitar que a etnografia tem um lado mais sombrio. O relato aqui apresentado baseia-se na experiência etnográfica de investigadores portugueses e escoceses. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: etnografia, etnografia crítica, ética, comités de ética e liberdades académicas.NEVES, Tiago

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