Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris […] historia, tomus II (1619), tractatus I, sectio I, liber X, De triplici animae in corpore visione.

A.7.1 Responding to Emerging Ethical Issues in Autoethnographic Research

• Christine Crisol, OCAD University
• David Griffin, OCAD University

Autoethnographic research methods have long been exempt from research ethics board review at OCAD University (OCAD U). However, the broad expansion in our faculty and student-researchers’ use of autoethnography in data collection and analysis, across faculties and programs, has raised a number of questions that indicate a need for ethical oversight to protect both the individuals who appear in the research, and to protect researchers themselves as participants. It has been the experience of our REB that this growth gives us a range of fascinating problems in ethical review, due for example to the inclusion of sensitive topics tangentially involving incidental participants, or the emergence of potential harms - unclear because unanticipated - to the researcher.

The peculiar, amorphous nature of the research in which our institution engages, led to the OCADU REB’s decision in early 2020 to take the view that anyone who features or provides data, including the researcher, are considered human participants for REB purposes. As such, these individuals should be afforded the same rights as all human participants, namely, justice, concern for welfare, and respect for the individual (Tri-Council Policy Statement, 2^nd Edition, 2018). To support this view, the OCADU REB developed guidelines and a questionnaire to help researchers recognize the need for ethics approval when undertaking autoethnographic research. Derived from Tolich (2010) and the TCPS2, the guidelines reflect consideration of four key elements: risk, vulnerability, confidentiality and privacy, and consent. In addition, the OCAD U REB created a review rubric adapted from Richardson’s five criteria for evaluating autoethnographic research (2000). We would love to engage in a conversation about problems and solutions that our colleagues can see in our premises and our response.

A.7.2 The Worn Words Project: The Ethics of One Multimedia Mobilization of Refugee Cultures

Erin Goheen Glanville, University of British Columbia

This paper presents the praxis of the SSHRC-funded postdoctoral project, Digital Storytelling as a Method for Critical Dialogue on Refugees in Canada or Worn Words. The practice of research interviews, animation, and filmmaking were conceptualized and theorized as cultural refugee studies, producing a refugee knowledge mobilization praxis dependent on slow, relational, collaborative, and creative ethics. This research is an experiment in breaking the patterned narrations of refugee lives, through ethical praxis that combines creative media making practices and critical refugee theory. Given the project’s theme and its digital dissemination, the methodology and methods deeply engage the dilemma of how to do ethical community-involved research with vulnerable populations. Going beyond establishing and following ethical principles in a research protocol, Digital Storytelling embeds questions about ethical refugee research into and across two years of media production practice. The potential public and long term aim of this praxis is to re-narrate refugee discourse in uncommon ways and so to mobilize it for constructive public dialogue that cultivates deep listening. The ethical challenge of making media that resists being subsumed into prevalent frames for refugee cultures and that also remains responsible to the communities being represented has salience intellectually, relationally, and politically. Intellectually, the project is asking, what does critical theory look like in the process of ethical media making and in the form of creative digital narratives? Relationally, the project is asking, how can researchers and media makers remain responsible to refugee claimant communities — put plainly, can I remain in good relationship with my community networks once this project is completed and disseminated? Politically, as assaults on global asylum rights intensify, so does the urgency of constructively engaging humanitarian storytelling traditions, rather than simply critiquing them.

Futurefarmers, Victory Gardens, 2007, Civic Center Plaza, San Francisco (A Common Field Collective Member's Project)

A.7.3 When Research in a Research-Creation PhD Discourages Further Research or Creation in Academic Spheres and in the Public Realm

Jill Price, Queen’s University

Hyper-sensitive about my Canadian settler history amidst a culture that remains complicit in the ecological extraction and devastation of Indigenous land at home and abroad, I have come to recognize how the art world is part of the capitalist machine that contributes to the material excess that colonizes living and shared landscapes. Particularly critical of land-based art practices that deny the multi-species ecologies and histories of sites and art about the anthropocene that carries forward colonial, capitalist, patriarchal and resource perspectives and approaches to land, my comprehensive exam set out to answer,

Specifically proposing to speculate on unmaking the colonial aesthetics and ecological sterility of lawns found at settler and militaristic historic sites such as Fort Henry, this paper explains how my comprehensive exam; exploring the science of trees and climate change in conjunction with the political realities of decolonization, reparation theory and non-representational theory, produced a number of conceptual paradoxes, practical difficulties and calls to action for self-identified white settler artists to unmake themselves from pursuing ecological research, remediation and presentation in public and academic spheres. Asked to pay special attention to land-based artists’ responsibilities to involve Indigenous perspectives, this paper also reveales how researching, citing and building relationships with Indigenous persons for the purpose of economic or academic gain brings about many other ethical issues unresolvable through parameters and procedures outlined by General Research Ethics Board (GREB, Queen’s University) and exasperated through graduate study timelines, graduate funding parameters, hierarchies of scholarship and academic silos of learning still firmly rooted within individualistic modes of knowledge acquisition and academic performance.