Research and Responsibility

Ethics and Representation is first and foremost a book about the researcher's responsibility. The authors in this anthology all argue, in their own ways, that, after the death of authorial truth and meta-narrative, an ethnographer's primary responsibility is no longer to her objectivity" or evidence but rather to her subjects/informants. Thomas Newkirk, for example, in his chapter "Seduction and Betrayal in Qualitative Research," reminds those with social, professional or financial power over their subjects/informants that they "have a special obligation to recognize the vulnerability of those they study" (5).

Likewise, Patricia Sullivan cautions us to be "ever mindful that the ways we choose to render worlds from words have the potential to alter the spaces in which the other thereafter moves" because our actions, our representations of those we study changes the subject of the study ("Ethnography and the Problem of the Other" 112). This argument is made even more forcefully a year later in Opening Spaces, in which Sullivan and her colleague James Porter, argue that responsibility is the dominant characteristic of what they call the “postmodern research ethic” (112). Their discussion of responsibility, “caring…for the other,” is at the heart of their own postmodernity, and it characterizes a research ethic that privileges care over results (112). Such a research ethic, they say, “must do more than merely ‘respect’ participants in a passive or detached way. It must work to liberate the Other by naming and making space for that which is taken for granted or ‘routinely excluded and silenced’” (112).  This respect for the other is an example of a Levinasian kind of responsibility to the other in which the researcher is always responsible for the consequences of her research, especially when those consequences could be the silencing of the an alternative voice or the incomplete representation of another way of life (118). According to a postmodern research ethic, "caring is a necessary condition of critical research activity and an important principle of action balancing, and at times usefully counteropposing, more social principles” (115). 

For Newkirk, as well as Sullivan (and Porter), the researcher has a responsibility to offer as fair a rendition of the subject/informant and circumstances of the study as possible while remembering that subjects are more than the data collected about them. The researcher must also be as honest about herself as she is about those she studies. As Elizabeth Chiseri-Stratter suggests, the researcher must pay as much attention to her own positionality, which "includes  the ethnographer's given attributes such as race, nationality, and gender which are fixed or culturally ascribed" as she does to the character and behavior of her subjects/informants (116).  "Such attributes [of the researcher]," she says, "require textual disclosure when they affect the data, as they always do to some degree (116).

The answer, then, to the conundrum of positionality and representation lies in a collaborative approach to the research we undertake in the academy. This collaboration goes beyond a relationship between multiple researchers to active collaboration and meaning making between the researcher(s) and the subject/informant, which produces an ethnography that speaks with multiple voices (Blakeslee, Cole, & Conefree 137-9 and McCarthy & Fishman 159-60).