Governing Care

Abstract

This article compares the practices of care developed by theatre makers and teachers with those performed by research ethics committees. These two different ways of working through how to care – one an institutionalized, medical-juridical process and the other a relational set of practice-based principles of care – do not always align, but rather, create conflicts of care, exacerbated by the liminality of performance, which positions it as a problematic object of study, particularly when held alongside medicine and even the social sciences. Moreover, the institutional frameworks and committees that govern the collection of ‘human data’ in Western, Anglophone universities have considerable implications for undertaking performance research. After offering some context regarding the formation of the research ethics review committees, this essay draws on the authors own experience attempting to negotiate the way that consent might be informed, given, and confirmed in a theatre workshop environment, making explicit the different methods and conceptions of care, and the lack of recognition given to the skilled care practised by scholars and practitioners in the field of performance. What emerges, this essay contends, is a conflict of care, that raises complex ethical challenges as well as entwined methodological and epistemological issues for our field, as ethical review is increasingly an institutional requirement for performance research – yet these review processes are often ill-equipped to consider the complexity of performance as an object of research. This paper concludes with a research ethics thought experiment, an imagined project that attempts to exploit the loopholes of institutional ethical governance, but draws out the problematics of participant anonymity and the paradox of attempting to make a relational practice of care visible as a research object.

On the evening of 3 November 2021, during the intermission of a local repertory performance, I overheard a conversation. It shocked me. It cast light on the production, issues of cultural safety and care for the cast (or a lack of it) and a larger suite of issues regarding the representation of race and racism in the theatre. I cannot, however, tell you what I heard. Or who said it. Nor will I name the company, the production or theatre. I can’t because of institutional policies and legal protections, but also, I won’t because to do so would compromise my ethical position as a researcher. In the terms of the former, I do not have informed consent to capture or publish that overheard conversation, as required by institutionalized research ethics protocols. As for the latter, to pluck this statement from its context would contravene a principle that guides my work in ‘the field’, the rehearsal room and classroom: that these unguarded moments stay within the room. To take these overheard statements and attempt to interpret them, without further discussion or engagement with the people who voiced them, would be to succumb to what Dwight Conquergood terms the ‘Curator’s Exhibitionism’ that dehumanizes via distance and exclusion (2013 [1985]: 73). It may risk public shame, which would likely destroy the possibility of developing a relationship that could allow for dialogue and better understanding. These two different ways of working through how to care – one an institutionalized, medical-juridical process and the other a relational set of practice- based principles of care – do not always align, but rather, I will argue, create conflicts of care, exacerbated by the liminality of performance, which positions it as a problematic object of study, particularly when held alongside medicine, and even the social sciences.

In this article, I consider the institutional frameworks and committees that govern the collection of ‘human data’ in Western, Anglophone universities, and the implications for undertaking performance research. After offering some context regarding the formation of the research ethics review committees, I consider a particular example: my own experience attempting to negotiate the way that consent might be informed, given and confirmed in a workshop environment. In detailing this experience, I aim to draw attention to the different methods and conceptions of care, and the lack of recognition given to the skilled care practised by scholars and practitioners in the field of performance. What emerges, I contend, is a conflict of care, that raises complex ethical challenges, as well as entwined methodological and epistemological issues for our field, as ethical review is increasingly an institutional requirement for performance research – yet these review processes are often ill-equipped to consider the complexity of performance as an object of research. This paper concludes with a research ethics thought experiment, an imagined project that attempts to exploit the loopholes of institutional ethical governance, but draws out the problematics of participant anonymity and the paradox of attempting to make a relational practice of care visible as a research object.

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH WITH HUMANS

In Professing Performance, Shannon Jackson traces the institutional genealogies that frame the epistemological complications for performance studies, noting that as a result of the ‘enmeshment of “practice” and “production”’, performance has an ‘intensely contingent status as a research object, a radical contextuality that makes it difficult to locate as a research object at all’ (2004: 6). The scope of what might be ‘data’ for research, and how it might be gathered leads us, unsurprisingly, to the well-documented debates regarding the history of performance studies, and the connections to a range of fields including speech and oral history, anthropology, cultural studies, theatre and literary studies and performance training conservatoires.¹ Each brings distinct methods, techniques and concepts that produce performance knowledge. Moreover, the vast majority of this performance knowledge is generated through ‘human research’-which is to say, data collected from people. While the published text and the public performance are readily available for the researcher to draw on without ethical review, this article is specifically interested in the practices of data collection that are identified as ‘human research’, broadly defined in my Australian context by the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research as ‘conducted with or about people’, through methods including surveys, interviews, focus groups and observation.

In terms of performance studies, it is useful-although perhaps foolhardy- to broadly identify an array of research activities that are gathered under this definition of human research. My starting point is not the ‘origins’ of performance studies, but a more local perspective: Ian Maxwell’s account of the development of performance studies at The University of Sydney, Australia. Maxwell writes that fundamental to their departmental practice was ‘the capacity to produce de scription, analysis, and interpretation of complex, real time events’ (2006: 38). This includes research methods that, in general, do not require research ethics approval, such as the first-hand observation and experience of public events as spectator; as well as the use of publications, reviews, statements, archives and all matter of material in the public domain to describe, contextualize, analyse and interpret these events. Then, there are a range of methods requiring approval from an ethics committee, generally seeking a ccess to sources of data that are not made public , such as observing the process of creative development and rehearsal, undertaking interviews or correspondence with artists and access to documentation including rehearsal notes, annotated scripts and other communication.² There are also engagements with audiences and other types of participants in cultural performance, where data is gathered through interviews, questionnaires and observation. Notably, observation might be captured as written notes, but may include the capture of audio, photographs and video, and even data from eye-tracking software and sensors to measure heart rate and other physical attributes. Maxwell is keen to point out that while their practice of performance studies was deeply engaged with practitioners, ‘[c]ritically, the department does not understand itself as place for training people to be performers or performance makers’ (42), noting a disciplinary distinction between making performances and studying them.

With the establishment of practice-as-research within the contemporary institution, there are also methods to capture data about performance training and making, led by practitionerresearchers themselves. These activities, which create knowledge that is developed and shared in embodied practice (and often requires public performance to count as research outcomes) pose challenges for institutional ethical review, as the unfolding, iterative and relational nature and contingency of these activities problematize a number of the principles that inform human research ethics.

ON HUMAN RESEARCH ETHICS

Research institutions are invested in building and maintaining the integrity and transparency of their activities; and attempt to manage this through a range of regulations and systems of governance, generally a mixture of internal policies, legislated frameworks and externalized processes of peer review. While national guidelines are varied, there is broad international consensus around the key principles regarding ethical research with human subjects – which have been informed by the World Medical Association’s (WMA’s) Declaration of Helsinki (DoH), first adopted in 1964. The DoH was itself informed by the ‘Nuremberg Code’, a set of ethical research principles developed in the aftermath of the Second World War, as part of the so-called Nuremberg ‘doctors’ trial’ (officially United States of America v. Karl Brant, et al.). This trial focused on the crimes committed by Nazi physicians during the war. As part of the verdict, and with the help of American physicians Dr Andrew Ivy and Dr Leo Alexander, the judges drafted a set of ten principles under the heading of ‘Permissible Medical Experiments’ (Trials of War Criminals … 1950). They stipulate the need for voluntary informed consent, that benefit must outweigh risk, that physical and mental suffering or injury be minimized and that appropriate protections and planning is undertaken. Of note in the context of this essay is principle 8, which stipulates that any ‘experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment’ (182). A high degree of skill alone, the judgement suggests, is not sufficient; it must be partnered equally with care. Care, this medical-judicial body argued, is integral to an ethical research practice, yet precisely how care might be practised remains as open to interpretation as any of the other ‘skills’ that a researcher might deploy.

The Nuremberg Code was never adopted or actively enforced – in part, as Weindling observes in Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials, because of the climate of the subsequent Cold War, ‘which played down Nazi atrocities and prioritised progress in experimental medicine’ (2004: 330). Only in 1964, after a twelve-year process by the World Medical Association to formulate an international code of medical research ethics, did the WMA adopt the Declaration of Helsinki (DoH). Since then, the DoH has undergone seven revisions and two clarifications, most recently in 2013 (WMA 2022). The declaration sets out both principles and obligations intended to exist alongside and/or above national laws, holding adherents to whichever is the higher standard of responsibility. Key principles of the DoH include the prioritization of research participants and the investigators’ duty of care (nonmaleficence), the requirements for informed consent (autonomy), as well as an analysis of risks and benefits to both individuals and greater populations (beneficence), the suitable training or expertise of investigators and informed experimental design (integrity), safeguards for privacy (confidentiality) and the registration and public availability of research findings.

Importantly, the DoH is not legally binding under international law, but rather morally binding. It was the public awareness of controversial research experiments, such as the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, involving more than 400 black male sharecroppers, conducted by the US Public Health Service (USPHS) from 1932 to 1972, which failed to gather informed consent and withheld life-saving treatments from participants (Jones 1993), and experiments in the social sciences, most notably Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, which deceived and exposed participants to considerable psychological distress (Blass 2004), that led to the implementation of further governance. In English-speaking countries, these include the Common Rule in the United States, Canada’s Tri-Council Policy Statement, and the UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) Policy and Guidelines on Governance of Good Research Conduct in the United Kingdom. In the European Union, not only do national policies need to meet the obligations of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, but EU-funded research must also meet the principles laid out in the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) by the European Commission and Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (2015). The International Compilation of Human Research Standards (2021), produced by the US Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) offers further detail of the various national policies and guidelines.

This brief history of the development of this broadly adopted set of ethical principles across Western, Anglophone institutions highlights two periods of cultural and epistemological imperialism. The first is to note that these ethical principles have been ideologically constructed around European Enlightenment conceptions of individual rights. This is exemplified, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith observes, by the prioritization of ‘the right of an individual to give his or her own knowledge, or the right to give informed consent’, and informs evaluations of beneficence of research, as they are ‘based on the same beliefs about the individual and individualized property’ (2012: 123). As Smith notes, these beliefs are not universal – and the rights and views held by Indigenous peoples about their cultural and intellectual property, including how it might be exercised or shared, have historically been ignored. Moreover, we can also recognize the adoption of these principles by and through a series of globally significant institutions as influenced by postwar imperialism. While there are numerous examples of Indigenous ethical frameworks, many that lay out more nuanced relations of obligation and care – such as those identified by Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, in their discussion paper He Tikanga Whakaaro: Research ethics in the Maori community (1991), this essay is focused on the ‘imperial’ ethical principles, and the challenges raised for performance research by the implementation and governance of these principles within Anglophone universities by research ethics committees or boards.

ETHICS COMMITTEES

In the first revision to the Declaration of Helsinki in 1975, a clause was added, which stipulated that ‘[t]he design and performance of each experimental procedure involving human subjects should be clearly formulated in an experimental protocol which should be transmitted to a specially appointed independent committee for consideration, comment and guidance’ (WMA 1975). The 2013 revision clarifies that research projects must be approved by such committees before any study begins. Known as Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in the United States, Research Ethics Boards (REBs) in Canada, and Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) in Australia, these committees all function as a means of governance, to ensure that research is undertaken in line with the relevant frameworks and principles (hereafter, these boards will be referred to generically as RECs). Each country has specific rules relating to the composition and operation of of RECs. In the US, a minimum of five members is required for a committee, which must include at least one scientist, one nonscientist and one member without institutional or familial affiliation. The Australian guidelines are more prescriptive, requiring a minimum of eight, including a chair, ‘at least two lay people, one man and one woman’ (National Statement … 2018: 5.1.30(b)) as well as an expert with experience in professional care, a person who performs pastoral care, a lawyer and two researchers with appropriate expertise. Diversity has been a historical issue for these committees, with De Vries and Forsberg noting in their survey of IRBs that ‘membership of local boards still over-represents whites, medical researchers, and those affiliated with the sponsoring institution’ (2002: 212).

ISSUES WITH RECS

Over the past two decades, research ethics committees have been subject to a number of criticisms. Researchers find the process can be overly time consuming, bureaucratic and legalistic, ‘nitpicky’ about language and terms and adversarial rather than collegial (see Sleeboom-Faulkner et al. 2017; Dingwall 2012; Hallowell et al. 2008; Burris and Moss 2006; Lederman 2006). As Mark Israel and Iain Hay observe, non-medical researchers also express frustration ‘that regulators are acting on the basis of biomedically driven arrangements that make little or no sense to social scientists’ (2006: 1). Sleeboom-Faulkner et al. highlight that these issues are often compounded by the lack of negotiation about what defines research:

This ethical entrustment gives a mandate to U-RECs – which may not always have suitable expertise – to vet research projects. In practice, this usually happens in a bureaucratic and time-consuming manner. It does not just lead to misunderstandings and frustration; it also privileges research as defined by research ethics committees rather than in negotiation with the ethics ethnographers encounter in ‘the field.’ (Sleeboom-Faulkner et al. 2017: 72)

There are, of course, always multiple perspectives, as human geographers Miggelbrink et al. note, ‘debates about research ethics are often partisan and parochial in the sense that they emerge from and relate to a discipline’s specific moral economy of attention’. Moreover, while ethical principles are often aligned, ‘they may differ remarkably in terms of their significance regarding concrete disciplinary and subdisciplinary practices’ (Miggelbrink et al. 2021: 5). Ethnographies of the working processes and cultures of review boards in Australia (Guillemin et al. 2012) and the US (Klitzman 2015) highlight this, noting the complex demands on RECs to interpret and apply their respective local guidelines or policies. Klitzman, in The Ethics Police?, concludes from his findings that ‘the work of IRBs is in fact closer to the humanities and social issues than to the hard sciences – filled with complex questions of meaning and interpretation, shadowed by uncertainties, and confronted within particular social contexts’ (2015: 29). It is perhaps no surprise then that there is much of the consternation surrounding ethics review centres around the use of language and questions of interpretation – primarily in consent forms, which have become the institutional standard for gathering informed consent.

CONFIRMED CONSENT ON PAPER AND ‘INTHEROOM’

The question of informed consent brings us to a specific example from my own experience seeking ethics approval for a research project in Australia. Primarily a community engagement activity, this particular project involved the development of a free musical theatre resource (the Living Room Musicals toolkit), so that anyone interested could make their own small musical, writing their own original lyrics, and staging their productions at home with family and friends. To ensure the toolkit was easy to use, the project included a research component to test the compositions and various different methods of instruction. Data would be gathered from sessions that included focus group discussion and practical exercises in the rehearsal room, where participants would use prototype versions of the toolkit, and collected as written notes taken during and after workshops, and from (un-named) exercise worksheets. A key demographic for the toolkit was young people aged 12 and up and, as such, I hoped to hold workshop/discussion sessions with high-school theatre students.

I lodged an application for research ethics on 9 October 2018, and had spent some time considering how best to gather informed consent from participants in schools below the age of 18. Information sheets and consent forms would be provided to parents and guardians before the workshops, and to teachers. The application required me to refer to the National Statement (NS) regarding the recruitment of children and/ or young people, and according to section 4.2, which identifies the different levels of maturity, from infants, through to young people able to consent without the need for additional consent from a parent/guardian. The statement notes:

Being responsive to developmental levels is important not only for judging when children or young people are able to give their consent for research: even young children with very limited cognitive capacity should be engaged at their level in discussion about the research and its likely outcomes. (NS 4.2).

As such, I also proposed, ‘The researcher(s) will ask a series of plain language questions of children prior to each workshop and discussion about the project to judge the vulnerability and capacity to consent for every child.’ If the child could ‘reiterate the risks of minor injury, fear, and anxiety/embarrassment, and indicate they wish to continue, the researcher will deem they are able to comprehend the purpose of the research, and give an adequate level of consent’. This was not the sole means of gathering consent, but rather a process to confirm the consent provided by their legal guardians – as suggested by the National Statement. This ‘checkin’ with participants, however, became a major sticking point. The initial feedback asked that I provide further information regarding how ‘youth will be assessed for their capacity to give informed consent’ – in particular how I would deal with the challenge of confidentiality and peer-pressure if this confirmation was done as part of a group. As I attempted to resolve this issue, I learned it was something of a catch-22. Asked in a group setting, I could not assure the REC that confirmed consent was confidential, or free from peer pressure from other students, or indeed teachers, and gathering consent away from the group (and their teacher) would open up the issues of oversight, transparency and duty of care (visitors cannot be alone with students). I tried a workaround: to give students an individual writing activity, and then move throughout the room, confirming individually with all students while the activity was underway. This was not accepted. In the third revision, I removed the additional confirmation of confirmed consent entirely, simply stating, ‘at the beginning of the workshop, the researcher will also reiterate the nature of the project, the possible risks, and the capacity for participants to withdraw at any time’. This version was approved.

This example raises a few important issues concerning differing interpretations of the National Standard. Clearly, the review committee prioritized the signed consent form, and were highly resistant to attempts to combine – let alone replace – these forms with a relational, interpersonal interaction between researcher and participant. Could I be assured that the parent/guardian had properly read the form and explained it or, indeed, not coerced their child to participate? Which would do less harm while also treating participants with respect: avoiding the confirmation of consent, or seeking it despite the risks of peer pressure? Moreover, I felt my own skills, to observe the dynamics of a group while leading drama workshops, and capacity to perceive the exertion of pressure or participant reluctance, were written out of the equation. This issue – of prioritizing a form opposed to a process, appears in Klitzman’s interviews with board members, with one noting: ‘[t]he consent form is important. But the process is much more important … You lose the forest for the trees. Better education is needed’ (2015: 136). Such a statement, however, might cause sociologists to gasp in exasperation, as their discipline has been debating this epistemological and methodological challenge since the early twentieth century – neatly summed up in the concept of Verstehen.³

Most associated with Max Weber (1978 [1921/2]) and a general scepticism towards positivist sociology, Verstehen (which lacks a direct equivalent in English) is often translated as ‘a deep accord’ or ‘holistic understanding’, and as Bednarek-Gilland suggests, includes ‘a kind of ethical sensitivity in order to gauge the feeling state of the research participant’ (2015: 26). This is to suggest not only the centrality of care-filled processes when engaging ethically with participants, but extends to the interpretation and understanding of data that might be gathered: as Weber argues, ‘empathetic or appreciative accuracy is attained when, through sympathetic participation, we can adequately grasp the emotional context in which an action took place’ (1978 [1921/2]: 5). We can readily recognize the development of these ethical and epistemological concerns in Dwight Conquergood’s formative contributions to performance studies, of a commitment to dialogue and attention to embodied expression in order to struggle for ‘epistemological authenticity instead of accuracy, moral honesty instead of innocence’ (2013 [1986]: 22).

In a more recent turn, scholarship and practice in dance, theatre and performance has continued to engage with ethics, drawing on frameworks developed in the field of care ethics. First developed by Carol Gilligan (1977, 1982) in opposition to normative, abstracted ethical principles, and continued by feminist philosophers such as Virginia Held (1993), Joan Tronto (1993) and Nel Noddings (2003), care ethics has advanced a moral philosophy that is contextual, viewing people ‘as relational and interdependent, morally and epistemologically’ (Held 1993: 13). It follows, as Stuart-Fisher argues, that it is ‘impossible to conceive of caring practice outside the parameters of how it is performed’ and that ‘care also involves forms of embodied knowledge’ (2020: 7). As Thompson suggests, this means we can conceive of an aesthetics of care, that is a ‘sensory ethical practice’ (2020a: 44), but that is, in essence, a kind of performative, where ‘the art is being made with and between people, in one sense modelling forms of a caring relationship that might be an inspiration for a more cooperative form of social arrangement, but also crucially enacting that relationship in the moment of the art making’ (2020b: 219). Hammington proposes that this kind of care can be expressed as an ‘improvisational moral performance’ (2020: 21), stressing that improvisation is not innate, but a learned skill, honed through practice. This is to acknowledge that skills developed through performance – such as the specific modes of ‘attention training’ posited by Cull (2011), the ‘education of attention’ that Kilian argues actorly practices might provide to ethnographers (2021: xvi) and the focused attunement of careful, slow listening advanced by Grehan (2019). These modes of being with, attentive to others and oneself, through a process of interaction and negotiation, are methods of care in rehearsals, socially engaged practices and performance, that are deeply engaged with the central principles of human research ethics, yet consistently fail to be recognized by governance bodies as methods of sharing and knowing.

MATTERS OF CONSEQUENCE

There are, I argue, consequences of these disciplinary methods remaining unrecognized by research ethics committees. The first is a cluster of problems that emerge when engaging with performers. While the vast majority of scholarly engagement with performers (observing them in public performances) does not fall under the definition of human research, gathering data beyond the public performance is often made complex by ERCs. Describing the ‘risks’ of acting may often involve elaborations of paradoxes in a consent form: is the portrayal of various emotions the same as exposure to them? A colleague of mine, after requests for revision from their REC, shared with me their statements developed for this challenge, that included this warning: ‘You may experience some mental discomfort, such as embarrassment, disappointment, disillusionment, existential despair, or feelings of shame if your family, friends or theatrical critics do not enjoy the production’ (Woollard 2022). Conversely, a signed consent form offers no guarantee of careful and attentive processes of negotiation and exploration of complex thematic, emotional and physical material in the rehearsal room. A better recognition of the kinds of embodied knowledge and processes needed to create safe, creative workplaces would, in fact, provide greater care for participants. Similarly, engaging actors to perform a research outcome, but who do not provide ‘data’ to a project (a contracted service, like the printer who binds a manuscript) means that they fall outside the purview of ‘human research’, despite the fact the performance of research may pose considerable ethical issues.

The strong preference of RECs to maintain participant anonymity also poses thorny problems for creative research projects engaging with communities and nonprofessional performers. In professional and community engaged projects, participants have a particular embodied relationship to the data they are creating, which is lost when this data is abstracted from their bodies – but RECs are often hesitant to grant permission to photograph, film or undertake other recording that identifies these bodies. These concerns stem from biomedical issues of privacy, and seldom take into consideration the relationship between rehearsal and performance, the capacity to negotiate what is made visible as research data as an ongoing process, nor the desire of participants in performance projects to be publicly visible. Conversely, there is considerable nuance required in determinations as to where the public sphere ends and the private begins. So often, we are asked to make decisions about intention; does something a heckler shouts figure as part of a performance? What of a whispered comment intended only for the person in the next seat? Or, what of the engagements of audience members that might be elicited from performers, often placing people in socially pressured positions, and without knowledge of how their participation will be used?

The strictures of consent forms and ‘approved activities’ also place constraints on following the emergent and often unexpected turns of performance. These constraints limit our engagement with an ongoing epistemological problem in performance research – the structure of performance knowledge around a singular perspective. Michael Y. Bennett describes this issue in The Problems of Viewing Performance, arguing that ‘viewing performance is not a shared experience’, and as such ‘knowledge of a performance is made more accurate by triangulating (or superimposing) the experiences and justified beliefs of multiple viewers’ (2021: 3, emphasis in original). My own doctoral research also attempted this work of gathering and superimposing multiple perspectives (Warren 2017), and I can attest to many findings that emerged outside of the limits that I was required to set in the process of applying for ethics approval. As such, these emergent findings could not be included as research data – effectively remaining unknown. This brief example points towards the larger challenges faced by the myriad of generative methods deployed in creative research projects, that are designed – quite deliberately – to retain levels of uncertainty or ambiguity. While anecdotal, when discussing this issue with colleagues there was consistent recognition and agreement, with many noting their own experiences of having to constrain or reduce the ambition and flexibility of their creative research projects to gain approval from an ethics review board.

This challenge of having a creative praxis recognized within the institutionalized context of the university is not a new one, and there is a growing – and hard fought – recognition of the distinct and legitimate knowledges that practice as research can produce. As Barbara Bolt argues, ‘tacit knowing and the generative potential of process have the potential to reveal new insights: both those insights that inform and find a form in artworks and those that can be articulated in words’ (2010: 31). However, this remains a work in progress, particularly in relation to research ethics committees. In Performance Ethnography, Norman Denzin made a strident call for reform to the way human research ethics was governed, noting the range or research practices where

subjects and researchers develop collaborative, public, pedagogical relationships. The walls between subjects and observers are deliberately broken down. Confidentiality disappears, for there is nothing to hide or protect. Participation is entirely voluntary, hence there is no need for subjects to sign forms indicating that their consent is ‘informed.’ The activities that makes [sic] up the research are participatory; that is, they are performative, collaborative, and action and praxis based. Hence participants are not asked to submit to specific procedures or treatment conditions. Instead, acting together, researchers and subjects work to produce change in the world. (Denzin 2003: 249–50)

It seems that progress has been scant in the twenty years since this call – and despite a range of developments in policy, the localized interpretation of these policies by governance bodies can tend towards convention and risk aversion. As a member of a REC myself, I can attest with Klintzman’s obervation that ‘the challenge of defining, interpreting, and weighing abstract principles, ambiguous policies, and competing future risks and benefits by a committee is in its own right a complicated and often idiosyncratic human process’ (2015: 351).

Faced with the challenge of considering how the models of care used in performance research might be better recognized, I am drawn in two directions. As a conclusion of sorts to this paper, I offer both as generative impulses. Each takes up the ‘idiosyncratic human process’ that Klintzman rightly identifies at the heart of ethical debate. The first is most straightforward. It is a call to increase the representation of our methods and approaches, and advocate for the modes of care and applied ethics that are part of making and researching performance. The structure of any ethics committee is a model of enacting ethical deliberation: a gathering where people speak, listen and collectively debate merits and risks. This reciprocal, interpersonal and negotiated performance of care is foundational to the function of RECs, and their very capacity to provide evaluations about ethical conduct, so it is no small irony that such processes are reticent to acknowledge these methods as a means of knowing. As such, it seems imperative that creative scholars and artists are represented on these committees – not only to advocate for a wider understanding of disciplinary practices of care – but to offer reflection on implicit hierarchies in both knowledge production and ethical concern. So, what would it take to join a committee – and get in the room where decisions are made?

A second direction would be to thumb one’s nose at the problem by playfully exploring it as a research thought-experiment. I am calling this ‘Research Anonymous’ – or R-ANON. Simply, it is to design and enact performance research activities with humans that avoids ethical review yet can still produce data. This could take the form of publicly available anonymity workshops, providing coaching for audiences in the use of ‘dead-drops’ and cyphers. Or perhaps developing radically public events where the concept of participation is replaced by performance, allowing the gathering of ‘research data’ to be negotiated as a matter of moral rights of creative authorship. This is to take an antagonistic approach towards the institutional review process, an attempt to create short-circuits and expose loopholes around the space that performance occupies as a research object.

To briefly expand on this thought experiment, I might return to the eavesdropping that opened this essay. Spurred on by the overheard statements, I could seek out a conversation after the show. If my engagement was welcomed, I would explain that I was interested in their choices regarding casting and portrayal of race and racism in the mid-century classic that they were presenting – and propose that I would like to engage with the cast and crew and note their reflections on these issues over the remainder of the season. For the sake of the thought experiment, they agree. With approval, I leave a chalkboard and chalk outside the theatre. Each evening, the chalkboard would have an open question related to these issues in the play that cast, crew and the general public could respond to by writing, drawing – or even erasing. Before the subsequent performance, the blackboard would be shown to the cast and crew, and responses discussed. The blackboard would be photographed, and erased for the next performance. Over the season, a series of artefacts would emerge – an R-ANON research object that is unattributable.

In the first instance, the process sketched here attempts to practice an ethics of care that is engaged in an ongoing discursive and reciprocal relationship – working to develop understanding that is meaningful to all participants, developing a space for sharing that isn’t immediately subject to judgement, and fluid in terms of the contours the discussions and reflections might take. The ‘data’ created through the chalkboard might capture a polyphony of views, perhaps competing, and perhaps uncomfortable. There may be offensive, discriminatory utterances recorded – and rebuttals. It could capture a series of developing positions and nuanced reflections. Alternatively, it might demonstrate disengagement, indifference or refusal. Creating this research object, however, which is removed from the activity of dialogue and reflection, pushes at the edges of an aesthetics of care. The fixing of these photographs as ‘stable’ objects arguably falls outside of the ‘improvisational moral performance’ described by Hammington. Conversely, though, could such an improvisation be undertaken without these objects to frame it? In seeking to try to make a process guided by care ethics visible through an anonymous research object, the care is (once again) rendered invisible.

Moreover, the choice to title this thought experiment R-ANON is a less than subtle reference to the political conspiracy theory and movement known as ‘QAnon’, which developed from comments posted anonymously online under the moniker ‘Q’. The posts of ‘Q’ have generated a wild fecundity of interpretive acts and have been used to shape and affirm ideological positions and conspiracies with deadly, real-world consequences – most notably the attempt to overturn the 2020 US election. In a similar way, the hypothetical data generated through the R-ANON chalkboard might be easily dissociated from the care-oriented process that created them, and without this processual framework, open to interpretive approaches that do not subscribe to the relational principles of care ethics. Taken ‘outside the room’ of care-led practice, these images open the possibility of a more speculative version of Conquergood’s ‘curator’s exhibitionism’, which dehumanizes through indiscriminate implication. Thus, not only could R-ANON obscure the practices of care that it seeks to render visible as research object; it holds the potential to cause participants shame or distress, and even be interpreted as a justification for discrimination. This brief thought experiment illustrates how the embodied, relational and contextual processes central to an ethics of care are challenging to render within the epistemological paradigm established by the Western university – and specifically the governance of human data by research ethics committees. The conflict of care explored in this paper draws attention to both the limits of an ‘imperial’ research ethics framework, and a paradox of care ethics in performance: like Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, the practice of care is often only rendered visible when the sealed box is opened: yet opening the box can undo the care. However, a performance-making process (and a performance-research process) does not remain eternally in superposition: it generally opens to an audience. It is, as a conclusion of sorts, this question of the how and when things are made public that offers two questions for further exploration. The first is to question attempts to ‘universalize’ research ethics – and the second to consider how the data created through practicebased and performance-oriented research is made visible. What might happen if the R-ANON blackboard is never published – but the data held by the participants, and made visible only through their collaboration? Could this find its way into their performances, as embodied knowledge? How might we attribute this new knowledge? These questions suggest another way of thinking (and practicing) deliberations about how we care for research participants and researchers – and the complications of anonymity. Most importantly, though, these issues suggest the necessity of broadening our understanding of practice as research to include practice as research ethics.

Notes

1 Interestingly, more recent revisions of the DoH have not been unanimously adopted or referenced by a number of national bodies, such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which refused to recognize changes after the third revision in 1989, and in 2008 removed reference to the DoH altogether. See Kimmelman et al. (2009).

2 Varied genealogies of performance as an object and method of study have been offered, and rather than repeat the oft-cited syllabus, I would direct readers to a contextual genealogy offered in Chapter 7 of Madison’s Critical Ethnography (2005) and the ‘Performance Studies Genaelogies’ section in Harding and Rosenthal’s edited collection, The Rise of Performance Studies (2010).

3 An exploration of the term Verstahlen and its history in sociology is explored by Outhwaite (1975).