Ethical Friction

This chapter describes a music program in the Richmond, Virginia, city jail and the ethical ambiguities arising from the author’s overlapping roles as organizer and observer. The author examines the vague boundaries between applied and academic ethnomusicology, voluntarism and work, and personal and institutional ethical standards. An ethnomusicological approach to music in jails and prisons exposes ethical frictions between policies, methodologies, and codes espoused by IRB (or other ethics review) boards, ethnomusicologists, their interlocutors, and academic societies. The tension between the author’s status as a volunteer and ethnographer raises a number of questions: How is ethical knowledge differently defined? Which definitions have more authority and how is that authority established? Where are the epistemological and ethical boundaries between academic and applied ethnomusicology? How is ethnographic knowledge connected to social change? An examination of the ethnomusicology’s relationship to IRBs reveals ongoing ethical ambiguities, especially regarding research on “vulnerable populations.” The author examines the ways in which IRBs might impede the production of public knowledge that would serve the ethical demands of social justice.