Queering the Relationship Between Research, Researcher and Research Participant: Procedural Ethics, Relational Ethics, and Inverted Hierarchies

Authors

Val Meneau, University of Salzburg, AustriaFollow

Abstract

Ethics committees (ECs) typically base their decisions on established assumptions about the impact of the research process, the researcher and the participant on each other, which my doctoral research project failed to meet. This paper discusses the challenging clash between my experiences as a queer scholar doing fieldwork and the expectations of my EC. I argue that queer feminist ethnography complicates the established assumptions concerning the impact of the research process, researcher, and participant on each other. In doing so, I argue that we need models of this relationship that allow us to capture its complexity, for example in the case of research projects where the researcher is more insider than outsider, or where they remain part of the scene after the research has finished. This is important because these assumptions cause ECs to negatively impact on queer feminist qualitative research projects by silencing marginalised groups and challenging the legitimacy of scholars who are part of them; at the same time, a more complex understanding of the impact of this relationship on the research would lead to more meaningful research outcomes and community building.

Keywords

qualitative research, relational ethics, vulnerability, social science, ethics committees, gender studies

Author Bio(s)

Val Meneau (they/them) is currently a research associate at the University of Vienna, Austria. They completed their Ph.D. with distinction in dance studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria, with a dissertation entitled DanceSport’s Economy of Desire – a Dispositive Analysis of the Heteronormative Gender Binary in Latin Competitive Dancing, for which they have received a scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and two awards, from the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Research and the University of Salzburg. They have held positions at the Institute of Sociology in Graz and the Institute of Dance Studies in Salzburg and have presented on body and sexual politics in DanceSport at many conferences in gender, queer, and critical dance studies. Val has worked with the Austrian Task Force on the adaptation of heteronormative competition regulations to include same-sex couples and is committed to scholarly outreach within the community. Please direct correspondence to valmeneau@outlook.com

Publication Date

11-24-2024

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2024.6807

Recommended APA Citation

Meneau, V. (2024). Queering the relationship between research, researcher and research participant: Procedural ethics, relational ethics, and inverted hierarchies. The Qualitative Report, 29(10), 2564-2581. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2024.6807

ORCID ID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9133-8087