Different monsters: Traversing the uneasy dialectic of institutional and relational ethics

This paper presents a comic-strip to tell the story of an experience where we, the researchers, struggled to reconcile our institution’s ethical requirements with the need to build respectful and reciprocal relationships with research participants, the essence of ethical practice. The core images of our comic-strip derive from Wallace and Lovell’s monoprint, “Monstrous Breaches” (Lovell & Wallace, in press). We respond to the artists’ invitation to re-work their monoprint in order to better understand the “monsters” or dangers of our research world. We contend that traversing the spaces between institutional and relational ethics is itself a process that is often fraught with ethical dangers, “monsters” that researchers and institutions often overlook at our peril. Critical interpretation and analysis of the comic-strip elicits three “monsters” that can be encountered in this space: 1) the deficit model that assigns “vulnerability” to all Aboriginal research participants and the implications of this; 2) the neo-paternalist assumption that participants share the institution’s values and goals, resulting in measures that impinge on rather than protect participants’ needs, and; 3) the friction between an institutional discourse that is built on certainty, replicability, and legalistic concepts of safety in contrast to a relational discourse that recognises uncertainly, responsiveness and interpersonal concepts of safety. 77 Learning Communities | Special Issue: Ethical relationships, ethical research in Aboriginal contexts | Number 23 – November 2018 Figure 1. Al and Lisa’s collaged comic strip, ‘Different Monsters’, 2017. 78 Different monsters: Traversing the uneasy dialectic of institutional and relational ethics | Al Strangeways and Lisa Papatraianou