Consent, Mediation, and Complicity: The Complex Ethics of Informed Consent and Scholarly Representation in Violent Contexts

ABSTRACT

As fieldworkers engage in research in unstable social contexts, standard processes of informed consent are complicated and unsettled. In addition, our work in the field raises complex questions of potential complicity with the violence around us. In this paper, we present a comparative autoethnographic analysis of these dynamics in distinct fieldwork and archival projects dealing with topics of state violence: Gruner-Domic’s work drawing on video archives of testimonios of genocide survivors in Guatemala, and Hallett’s research on the experiences of Salvadoran migrants in the U.S. immigrant detention regime. Both research projects entailed challenges in accessing data without contributing to further violence in the lives of research subjects, given complex and unpredictable future risks and fraught political fields involving warped representations of research subjects. Drawing on these experiences, we argue that ethical responses to such complex field research problems require a flexible approach to methodology, an acute critical reflection on the reproduction of violence, and an awareness of the temporal-geographic complexity and fluidity of risk. While ensuring that we follow standardised protocols for consent and data analysis, researchers should also be prepared to move beyond the standard and think both critically and concretely about our ethical obligations not only while collecting data, but also in the construction of representations.

Acknowledgments

Miranda Hallett’s research discussed herein was funded by a generous grant from the Human Rights Centre at the University of Dayton, and she would like to thank the Hope Border Institute, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Centre, and the Border Network for Human Rights for intermediation, support, and critical conversations. Sandra Gruner-Domic expresses gratitude to the Centre for Advanced Genocide Research of the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation for access and collaboration. The authors would also like to thank colleagues and participants from the seminar on Challenges for Researchers in Violent Environments in June 2018 (facilitated by Cristosal in San Salvador, El Salvador) for rich discussions and ethical engagement—your voices influenced the reflections herein and no doubt improved our thinking process and research praxis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The authors owe a debt of gratitude to participants, presenters, and facilitators at a June 2018 workshop “Challenges for Researchers in Violent Environments” that was co-organized by Noelle Brigden, Jeanne Rikkers, and Miranda Hallett and hosted at Cristosal, a human rights-based nonprofit. To the extent that readers find insightful ideas in this essay, it is largely due to the excellent dialogues that took place in that workshop. Any errors or omissions are, of course, the responsibility of the authors.

2. In this special journal edition, other papers will address questions of security, access, and the ethics of participation and presence; our essay instead explores questions of informed consent and work through intermediaries.

3. This positionality also has limitations and drawbacks that go beyond the lack of physical presence in fields of violence; the authors’ geopolitical location at the hub of hemispheric power also entails a position of privilege. While privilege can sometimes be leveraged for social change, it has limits and complications (Koopman 2011). Privilege can also produce ignorance and blindness. If we do not question and interrogate the very ideological ground from which we think, we run the risk of reinforcing problematic narratives of marginalized social groups and replicating their Othering and exclusion, or placing such narratives in the service of our own personal or political projects. For more on the ways that power permeates perception and representation across Otherness, see foundational works such as Asad (1973), Said (1979), Taussig (1993), Wolf (1999), and Pratt (2008).

4. The term “disappearance” has come to refer to a practice of state violence – common in authoritarian dictatorships in Latin America in the 20th century – wherein persons are abducted by police, military or paramilitary forces, held in undisclosed locations, usually tortured and interrogated, and often murdered. While the term was already common throughout the Americas in the 1970s and 1980s in reference to the Argentinean “dirty war” and other conflicts such as the Salvadoran civil war of 1980–1992, it was codified in international human rights law as “forced disappearance” in the 1992 Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action. The distinguishing quality of this form of state violence is terror and sense of instability it inflicts on the family and the social community by keeping the individuals’ fate ambiguous and unknown, thus attacking their social personhood as well as their physical well-being. Therefore, just as in the contemporary immigrant enforcement regime in the United States, blocking loved ones’ ability to locate or communicate with detained people, as well as the “disappearing” of public data and records, are crucial components of this mechanism of state domination.

5. Collecting data in this way is clearly not ideal for multiple reasons. The situation put considerable constraints on what could be spoken and what could be asked without entailing legal risks. For this reason, very little of these phone conversations consisted of “interviews” in the traditional sense of asking pointed questions to extract information. Instead, as is the case in much participant observation, I let the people I was speaking with determine the topics they wanted to discuss. Because all were at least acquaintances of mine before being detained, much of the discussion was about family, sharing personal experience of daily life in detention, or discussing practical dilemmas and questions regarding how to endure detention or how to understand the meaning of particular legal hearings. I was constantly vigilant about two issues: one, not to represent myself as a legal advisor and expressing the limits of my knowledge about what would or could happen, and two, avoiding any conversation that could be prejudicial to the person’s chance of being released or winning their asylum case. In most cases, my sense of the conversational “danger zones” aligned with my interlocutors and many conversations were full of pregnant silences and conversational gaps when we approached delicate subjects (these are gaps that I must keep in mind as I analyse the data). Occasionally, I would sense a risk around something that was being said, and would redirect gently with a statement such as “perhaps we could talk about that more after you get out.” While the process was fraught, I do not regret communicating with detained persons by phone as it was the only alternative to total non-contact. For me, the latter is less ethically acceptable both because it makes gathering scholarly information from these sites impossible and, more importantly, would have denied persons in detention the opportunity for a type of social contact that they saw as a valuable support.

6. Accompaniment is a concept that circulates in grassroots and solidarity movements in the Americas, and involves a distinction from both top-down “saviourist” approaches to social change and from individualist ideas of competitive striving. Under the accompaniment approach, people from different backgrounds and different levels of privilege or status “walk together” in a way that aims for egalitarianism, mutual support, and change towards a more just society.

7. The USC Shoah Foundation was created by Steven Spielberg to collect the testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust. Since its incorporation into the University of Southern California, the Foundation has acquired a more scholarly profile and in 2010 began expanding their mission to include oral history collections of other genocides. In 2015, in cooperation with the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG), a pilot project began collecting testimonies from Guatemala. More information can be found at their website, http://sfi.usc.edu/.

8. There are two reports: one from the commission for historical clarification (CEH) and the other from the Catholic Church “Never Again” Recuperation of Historical Memory (REMHI).

9. Necropolitics and biopolitics refers to the idea or concept of exercising sovereignty as the capacity to control aspects of the material treatment and disposition of human bodies, including – in necropolitics – the capacity to dictate who is going to live or die. Achille Mbembe (2003) coined “necropolitics,” placing this concept in relation to the earlier notion of the subjugation of bodies under biopower developed by Michel Foucault (Foucault and Ewald 2003).

10. Such was the case for Hallett’s research on Salvadoran migrants’ experiences of the detention and deportation system. She was required by IRB mechanisms to justify her methods at greater length, to demonstrate how subjects would be protected from harms that could result from research. However, despite qualifying as a “full review” the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process was an exercise in “procedural ethics,” a checklist approach that serves as a prophylactic moment protecting the researcher and the university. The required steps appeared primarily oriented to forestalling the potential liability of the researcher and the university for harms visited on subjects, while adopting the process of participatory accompaniment led to a more rigorous yet straightforward set of standards for Hallett: holding off on publishing anything about a particular family’s story until they were released from detention, and checking in verbally with each and every subject before including their stories in any particular article or mentioning their case in specific public media appearances. This was not always necessarily a long or complicated process, as it could involve a simple check-in via text or instant message, or in other cases may require a longer conversation to describe the outlet, the potential audience, and asking specific questions such as “what do you want people to know right now about Central American migration?” .

11. The National Association of Practicing Anthropologists states in its codes: “to our resource persons or research subjects we owe full and timely disclosure of the objectives, methods and sponsorship of our activities” (Fluehr-Lobban 1994, 2, 1994, 4).

12. Elsewhere, Rothberg (2009) has explained that to be circulated testimonies must meet three criteria: first, they must document history, secondly, they should evoke self-reflective representations, and third, they involve the need to go to the public sphere with a risk of entering into commodity circulation.

13. The term “epistemic murk” was famously coined by Michael Taussig – a leading figure in the anthropology of violence whose embrace of poststructuralist and postmodernist approaches has been both popular and criticised – in his 1991 book Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man.

14. Violence and genocides studies have pointed to the construction of the Other as a key component in allowing violence (Hinton 2002, 2016; Mbembe and Mentjes 2003).