The Ethical Stakes of Collaborative Community-Based Social Science Research

Ronald David Glass

This multivocal essay collects brief engagements with complex ethical issues raised in collaborative community-based research (CCBR). The contributors constituted the Urban Research-Based Action Network (URBAN) Ethics Working Group, which I had the honor to organize and chair. ¹ We critically engaged the ethics of CCBR, examining the very possibility of an ethical dialogue among us and the viability of ethics as traditionally understood. The reach of critical and decolonial theories and the long-unanswered challenges raised by feminist and African-centric theories disrupt core principles of institutionalized research ethics, the foundational disciplinary assumptions that separate ethical and epistemological matters, and the well-established university commitments to upholding academic freedom in exchange for disinterested scholarship that remains neutral in the public sphere. These disruptions touch our own sense of self, our understanding of our roles and tasks as engaged scholars, and our ethical responsibilities in our research and professional practices. Scholars who want their research to contribute to the formation of both a more just university and a more just society will be enriched by the dialogue that follows.

The ethical stakes of CCBR encompass far more than the practices highlighted by the research ethics regimes of institutional review boards (IRBs). As many critics have pointed out, IRBs consider the principles of respect, justice, and benevolence largely within biomedical and objectivist models of research, and focus on narrow domains addressed in transactional exchanges (such as to secure informed consent, or to assure anonymity and confidentiality). Concerns about the content, scope, and effects of the IRB ethics regimes, as well as about the role of research in reproducing the status quo of a wide range of social, economic, and political injustices, have led some scholars to position their work in and with aggrieved communities. These engaged scholars deploy research in collaborative struggles for justice.

That is, CCBR within the social sciences has been offered as an ethical, epistemological, and political corrective to traditional research practices. It aims to be in relation with and responsible to specific communities, contexts, places, and peoples. CCBR research agendas (from question definition to methods design, to interpretation and analysis of data, to dissemination of findings) emerge from within affected communities and is intended to support actions directed at making material changes in the unjust conditions of daily life. This research methodology is not committed solely to expanding the archive of the academy and advancing the careers of researchers. Similarly, this research approach seeks to go beyond understanding the damaging effects of injustice (Tuck, 2009), and instead prioritizes knowledge production and mobilization that illuminates the core sustaining practices of aggrieved communities that enable them to resist and redress structurally produced inequities.

However, this framing of CCBR as an ethical corrective to traditional social science is dangerously close to a claim of exceptionalism, to setting up CCBR as an ideal research methodology. Still, the ethical and social justice intentions of CCBR cannot address the complex ethical questions at the core of social science disciplines’ knowledge-production practices themselves, or the questions that arise because universities legitimate knowledge in ways that perpetuate epistemic injustice (Glass & Newman, 2015; Newman & Glass, 2014). Nor can CCBR avoid the ethical entanglements produced by the legacies of the social sciences that are complicit in promulgating “truths” that rationalize the appropriation of land and the formation of racial and gender hierarchies, or that rationalize the K-12 ranking and sorting practices that produce and maintain ideologically tainted identities and inequitable social and economic opportunities.

Given the fraught history that produced IRBs in the first place, the limited reach of the ethics codes of professional associations meant as IRB supplements, and the persistent questions about the ethicality of research practices, a group of University of California scholars organized a system-wide research program initiative in 2009, the Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California (CCREC), that made the elaboration of an ethics for CCBR a strategic project. ² My role as the Director of CCREC, as well as ongoing collaborations with members of the Ethics Working Group, also entered into our engagements with the URBAN efforts to organize an interdisciplinary field of research that was ethical, collaborative, community-based, and oriented toward justice-driven action.

Our Working Group dialogues intentionally did not elide our differences of race, gender, class, age, or language nor did they presume a need or desire to find a unified voice, position, or theoretical framework for addressing the ethics of CCBR. Still, we write from some common ground, as university-affiliated scholar educators committed to the pursuit of justice, and to the critical enactment of the disciplinary practices we inherit and uphold. We are also committed to honest self-reflection about the ethical contradictions and tensions that inhere within our own lives and practices. We write as scholar educators reimagining the praxis of ethical research in the social sciences, without righteousness or certainty, yet resolute in our transformative understandings and aims.

Jennifer Morton leads our discussion with a frank examination of the inter-/intrapersonal, ethical, and epistemic challenges of the Working Group’s interdisciplinary dialogues, and how these provide insight into the ethical dimensions of university researcher and community collaborations. Joyce King reminds us that often we get ensnared in contradictions and dilemmas when ethical issues are framed through the university’s embrace of the Western tradition, but these problems can recede when we draw our conceptual resources from more expansive philosophical roots. She demonstrates how African Kemetic traditions make clear that to be ethical, our research must be responsible and accountable to the knowledge assets and needs of particular aggrieved communities.

Patricia Krueger-Henney cautions social science researchers, whether or not they work collaboratively with aggrieved communities, that ethical and epistemological questions that get framed in binaries constrain how the ethical gets conceptualized and enacted. Krueger-Henney closes with provocative questions that remind us to attend to the ethical significance of the broad web of relations of our work, no matter how we may define or situate it. Michele Moses helps us think more deeply about with whom and how our research is ethically responsible and accountable, and her close focus on a particular case involving the ethical dimensions of data interpretation and analysis makes both the material and interpersonal urgency of these theoretical considerations felt. Dissent, disagreement, privacy issues, refusals, and other charged ethical dynamics are routinely part of collaborative knowledge production.

Sheeva Sabati interrogates the charged dynamics within efforts to institutionalize CCBR, and surfaces ongoing tensions within critical interdisciplinary fields to caution us about the limits of institutionalization. Sabati uses decolonial engagements with the ethics of research to point toward powerful interventions that challenge universities to take broader responsibility and accountability in relation to the full range of social, cultural, and political effects of their disciplinary practices. Troy Richardson stands in the nexus of university and Indigenous histories and knowledge systems and grapples with the ongoing traumas that occur in this ethical and epistemological site, with its entailed returns to previous traumas and its opportunities for critical and transformative understandings. Richardson concludes with the truth that the ethical brings to the fore the burden of being human, and in this sense, the ethics of research calls us toward an understanding of healing. This understanding of healing enables us to more effectively take the burden of being human seriously in the ethical–epistemic intersections of research.

These provocations should not leave us discouraged, but rather should open us up to deeper possibilities for critically engaging with the ethics of our own particular research praxis. As feminist philosopher Maria Lugones (2003) aptly writes, “we risk our ground as we prepare our ground, as we stand on a ground that is a crossing” (p. 33). I invite readers to join us in this space of risk, in a fertile crossing of possibility.

Jennifer Morton

We make moral trade-offs every day. We sacrifice time with our families to advance important career goals. We resign ourselves to intrusive airport security checks to travel safely. In education, these sorts of trade-offs are widespread. More students per classroom cuts down on staffing costs, but increased class size reduces the amount of time a teacher can spend focused on each child. A community might shift funds to provide increased social services by reducing the resources available for students in schools. Some trade-offs clearly exceed the limit of moral acceptability. But, often, we do not even notice we are in a morally compromised position: We fall prey to thoughtless complicity or resigned passivity. It is only when others challenge us to think critically about why we do what we do, how we do it, and where we do it, that our moral limits get tested.

Our Working Group was tasked with thinking through these ethical challenges as they manifest themselves in the work of CCBR; interestingly, working within our group itself became a kind of ethical challenge. Every member of the Working Group came to the table having approached ethical questions for different reasons, in different ways, and in different places. Working together from such a divergent set of starting points was much more difficult and complicated than some of us thought it would be. Our working process itself embodied the difficulty of finding a common ground as our intellectual tools and concepts were steeped in the power hierarchies and academic traditions that had marked and shaped each of us. Our experience working together came to be a microcosm of the larger and more complex ethical challenges that confront researchers who want to work collaboratively with members of the community.

I came to this project as a philosopher trained in an analytical tradition. I am interested in clarifying the ethical and moral questions that underlie much of the empirical social science work done in education. My method is to carve out relevant distinctions and bring to light normative questions that are being overlooked. I write within a philosophical tradition that is best described as Anglo-American. It is a tradition in which women and people of color are appallingly absent. I am both. I also work in a large public university with an incredibly diverse student body. I often experience the gap between the tradition in which I work and my lived experience. However, this Working Group really pushed me to pursue questions about why I was exploring ethical questions in this way, within this tradition, and in the particular academic circle that I inhabit.

At first, the questions I was being asked were difficult for me to grapple with because I did not understand them. The first challenge we confronted, and which CCBR faces, is that of translation. Some of the language in which the Working Group’s questions were framed seemed to me obscure and unhelpfully burdened. The language I used, on the contrary, struck some others in the group as equally burdened by an oppressive tradition and a “clarity” that they perceived as deceptive and distorting. Before we could even get at the ethical dilemmas underlying the tension within the group, we were stuck on figuring out what language to use in asking the relevant questions in a way that would bridge the gulf between our backgrounds and perspectives. Choosing the terms in which we would conduct our dialogue itself became an ethical minefield, which we never completely succeeded in navigating.

What the process did do is give us a window into the deeper underlying tensions that the discussion regarding language was unearthing. How could we collaborate across such different starting points, in particular, when some of us saw those starting points as essentially tied up with nonnegotiable ethical commitments? This is, in a deep sense, the question of collaborative research. Most of us frame and articulate our starting points from within the practice of our academic disciplines. Even when we push those boundaries, we understand them from within a particular shared disciplinary framework. Translating our concerns into a different framework could lead to distortion and, in some cases, to what we regard as an unacceptable ethical compromise.

It is evident that the ethical challenges confronting researchers engaged in this kind of work with nonacademic communities is even more difficult than the one we confronted talking across academic communities in our group. It is the hope of CCBR that those frameworks can be brought together in productive ways. However, this assumes that these frameworks are to some extent commensurable. Perhaps most problematically, it assumes that bringing them together is something we ought to do. One reason for doing so is epistemic—we want knowledge that encompasses more viewpoints. The other is ethical—we want to advance the political or ethical goals that we share with community members. But both of these goals raise questions about our epistemic and ethical limits—whether collaboration results in what we regard as an epistemically distorting or ethically compromised position.

The biggest challenge, and one that confronts collaborative researchers, is that those of us within the academy exist within an institutional and intellectual tradition that has often oppressed and exploited vulnerable communities. Our work, no matter how committed it is to social justice and to advancing the empowerment of those communities, is shackled by the institutional and intellectual constraints of where it is done. CCBR researchers are pushing against the seams of the academy, but are still doing this work as university researchers. This is itself problematic to some communities.

Some members of our Working Group provocatively raised the question of whether even in doing CCBR work researchers were still implicated in the framework against which they were pushing. To my mind, a perhaps more telling question is whether CCBR is the most ethically apt way of pursuing CCBR researchers’ goals: truly collaborative knowledge production, social justice, equity, and so on. Some of us end up pursuing these goals within the academy because we are already in the academy, but that is not a very deep justification; it is simply an explanation of our circumstance. Perhaps, that is as much of an answer as some of us can give.

If we want a deeper answer, the question we need to ask is, “Why do this work within the university at all?” One answer that suggests itself is that because financial, intellectual, and political power for knowledge production disproportionally resides within the university’s walls, the only way to harness power back to communities outside of it is to wrest it from within. This is a familiar line of argument. If we find this line of response unsatisfying, which many do, we should note that the alternative is to do this work outside of the confines of the academy. But this would undermine the very idea and promise at the center of CCBR: namely, that working at the perimeter of the university’s boundaries can allow this work to transcend the limitations of working squarely within those boundaries. If CCBR is to be a viable project, we have to wrestle with the question of how much we can do while still working within an institution that is in many ways ethically compromised, and most importantly, we have to identify the ethical boundaries of this kind of work.

Joyce E. King

Since my first participatory research study—my undergraduate sociology honors thesis engaged Black high school students, teachers, and parents in a collaborative investigation of alienating schooling—I have continued to organize collaborative research-as-pedagogy empirical inquiries informed by the community-minded ethical tenets of the discipline of Black studies and African-centered theorizing (King, 1992; King, Goss, & McArthur, 2014; King & Mitchell, 1995).

As an activist scholar, my research inquiries have served simultaneously as sites of memory (lieux de mémoire) and as forms of pedagogical activism in solidarity with my community (King, 1992). My scholarship embodies both an ethical conviction and an epistemological achievement—I do not see such research as a dilemma or abstract philosophical quandary. Indeed. As a Black scholar, my moral obligation is to produce knowledge with, about, and for the benefit of my people’s constant struggle against what Jacob Carruthers critiqued as the “science of oppression” and the “master’s mentality” it produces. Carruthers, a scholar of Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) texts and African-centered theorizing and methodology, does not reject modern sciences but urges us to understand where “the European scientific project” came from and “what it has done to us and humanity” more generally. He extends this point in his seminal analysis, Intellectual Warfare:

. . . it is necessary that human beings, like the Creator, give life and power and health [to everybody]. . .We should examine everything that we do by that command. If our actions support life and power and health, then they are right. If not, then we ought to stop that line of action. (Carruthers, 1999, p. 294)

My conviction that ethical solidarity with my community is fundamental undergirds African-centered praxis in education and research (King & Swartz, 2016). With roots in African philosophical tenets dating to ancient Kemetic texts, in this praxis “there is only what is right and what is in the interest of harmony in the community” (Asante, 2000, p. 41). Thus, my approach to CCBR is “always already” aligned with my vocation as a Black scholar (Derrida, 1974; Kassam & Tettey, 2003). Both have benefited from the community-minded ethos of Black studies (Mazama, 2003), the African theory of knowledge, and Pan-African liberation ideology (Cabral, 1973; Fanon, 1963; Nkulu-N’Sengha, 2005). Vincent Harding (1974), the late eminent historian and scholar of religion, poses the fundamental question of the vocation of the Black scholar in a special Harvard Educational Review monograph, “Education and Black Struggle: Notes from the Colonized.” Harding framed his response with Mari Evans’s poem, “Speak Truth to the People”:

Speak the truth to the people

Talk sense to the people

Free them with reason

Free them with honesty

Free the people with Love and Courage

and Care for their being

Speak truth to the people

It is not necessary to green the heart

Only to identify the enemy

It is not necessary to blow the mind

Only to free the mind . . .

I am painfully aware that my doctoral students typically are not connected to the Black/Pan-African intellectual tradition—from W. E. B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson to Cheikh Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Amiée Césaire, C. L. R. James, Paul Robeson, and Sylvia Wynter (Ambroise & Bröeck, 2015; Wynter, 2007, 2012) to name a few. Nor are they aware that “collectivism” or Ubuntu (“I am because we are, therefore I am.”) defines African Indigenous philosophical frameworks and values—from ancient Kemet to contemporary Afrocentric education and theorizing—and provides an epistemological alternative to the “science of oppression” (King, 2016; Kunnie, 2006; Swanson, 2009).

Harding (1974) asserts that the Black scholar’s vocation—“our calling”—is to speak truth to the people first “concerning themselves . . to open to the people the lives and struggles of our ancestors” (p. 9). The truth speaking that illuminates “our present condition” is “beyond abdication” to mainstream assimilationist institutional and professional norms that uphold the American myth of inclusion or the “European scientific project’s” claims of a cultural universalism and objectivity. There can be no “talking sense to the people unless the enemy is clearly identified” (p. 14). Yet the enemy is also often within us, given the ways we have been (mis)educated to fit within the system and its episteme. Community knowledge “born of struggle” against epistemic injustice (de Sousa Santos, 2014) and Harding’s call to our vocation remain touchstones for me.

I am reminded of a recent research experience with such truth speaking, this time in ethical solidarity with parents and teachers (King et al., 2014). My doctoral students and I developed an after-school program, the Songhoy Club, for African American middle school students using a pedagogical framework from the “Nile to the Niger to the Neighborhood.” Students learned about their heritage by studying the language and culture of the classical West African Songhoy civilization; they learned about “our condition” and the enemies of Black well-being. The club doubled as a pedagogical lab where we engaged in participatory research conversations with the parents about culturally authentic assessment: What should students know, be able to do, and be like (Rochester Teacher Center, 2007)? We discovered that students were reading Nightjohn (Paulsen, 1993), an adolescent historical fiction (also a Disney film). The narrator, an enslaved girl about 12 years old, opens the novel by announcing that she is waiting for her turn to go to the “slave-breeding shack.” When we learned that 11-year-olds attending our club had read the book in school the year before, we were troubled. This surfaced an ethical question about what and how to teach middle schoolers about the historical facts of the American “slave-breeding industry” (Sublette & Sublette, 2015); we resolved that question using the emancipatory praxis of Afrocentric research-as-pedagogy. Teaching about slavery is fraught with damaging pedagogy and content (King, 1991, 1992; Thornhill, 2016). We convened a research workshop with Songhoy Club parents to discuss the curriculum, analyze the materials, and learn what the parents knew about this aspect of our historical struggle, what they thought about teaching this history, and what they would consider as developmentally and culturally appropriate. The parents articulated clearly what their children’s teachers should know, be able to do, and be like to teach this content in a beneficial way. Thus, the Songhoy Club was also an inquiry site for generating new knowledge with and for the benefit of Black children and their parents about what parents know and believe is best for their children morally, academically, and culturally. This mutual and reciprocal learning also informed our pedagogy as well as the doctoral students’ dissertation research.

The Songhoy Club is one CCBR-as-pedagogy space in which my students and I study and apply in our research the community-minded ethical tenets of Black studies and African epistemology. As Carruthers (1999) has suggested, we are replacing the “science of oppression” with a “methodology and metaphysics that restores the world and gives light to everybody” (p. 294). No dilemmas or quandaries here. Indeed.

Patricia Krueger-Henney

In these ongoing times of anti-Black racism and state-sanctioned White supremacy (Salaita, 2016), many critical social sciences researchers are intentional about finding a “right way” of doing research that can contribute to social change. They intend their studies to lessen the pathologizing of targeted communities as “damaged” (Tuck, 2009), and they often conduct research outside the academic industrial complex to maximize community-centered input. They recognize that multiple sociopolitical crises in systemically underresourced communities have guided critical research designs that make visible profit-driven interests behind institutionalized forms of violence and oppression (Buras, Randels, & Salaamya, 2010; Klein, 2008). Some researchers want to go further to insure that the ways they collect, analyze, manage, and disseminate data are informed by critical, more inclusive, participatory, and public-centered logics.

CCBRs are frequently identified as knowing how to assemble ethically grounded research that traces structures and patterns of socioeconomic disparities in spaces and places of everyday life from the “grounds up” (Charmaz, 2014). Nonetheless, I plead the following caution: Placing research ethics along the fault lines that separate “right” from “wrong” disables broader considerations about what constitutes ethics and ethicalities in academic research.

My experience has been that too often terms such as “collaborative” and “community-based” function much like tropes rather than more deeply informing critical ethics talk in many areas of the social sciences. More serious engagement would encourage researchers to build less hierarchical relationships with their research participants, to make transparent all inquiry steps and protocols, and to transgress traditional ontological binaries that separate the individual researcher who “knows” and the so-called participating “nonexpert human subject.” Mutually respectful research relationships are the imagined guide between communities and universities, and it is in this light that CCBRs could be read as believing their scholarship as the only ethically “right” way to do research.

Other times, I notice a kind of arrogance among CCBRs, such as in the paradigm battles pitting quantitative and qualitative study designs against one another (Feuer, Towne, & Shavelson, 2002). Quantitative studies tend to have a “bad rep” among critical qualitative researchers because they often position the researcher as a neutral outsider who produces expert knowledge with what is extracted from the communities she or he studied and then accumulates accolades for rigorous research. Furthermore, scholars who excavate colonial and White settler traditions in social sciences research highlight physical and emotional injuries many communities endured when coerced into research participation (Battiste, 2016; Chilisa, 2011). Research survivors also note that study participants often did not have access to the data collected from them and were kept uninformed about whether or not the research “done to them” left permanent damage to their bodies or their lives (Skloot, 2011). Current ethics talk among CCBRs often fails to come to grips with these histories and ongoing practices, at times leaving them in silence, or externalizing them as violence and coercion, doing research the “wrong” way.

These and other methodological atrocities committed by individual-centered research projects, whether quantitative or qualitative, both make visible and normalize inquiry traditions that fortify linear research ethics codes that see conduct as “right versus wrong.” It thus can seem that CCBR wins the ethics battle easily, and its victory appears justified, unavoidable, and common-sense as its research logics can be read as having less dispossessing power. CCBR appears to be the “more ethical” alternative for social sciences research.

This “right versus wrong” duality continues to be the preferred intellectual space from which social science researchers name and debate the controversies around research ethics and ethicalities, thus continuing to severely limit ethical research pedagogies and praxes whether or not one buys into CCBR. The dichotomizing master narrative of ethical duality produces epistemological limitations, and ossifies the ontological violence of academic research. It also perpetuates unequal and oppressive research relationships between the university and communities.

Although inviting community members into academic research projects is meant to help research ostensibly break free from its settler colonial origins (Patel, 2015; Smith, 1999), CCBR scholars are also guilty of strengthening the right–wrong binary. But I argue that it is essential to remember that even ethical codes of conduct that guide CCBR remain hinged onto brutal knowledge-production practices for as long as their critical and socially liberating methods stay away from naming structures of racist and heteronormative patriarchy (Harding, 1998).

Moreover, claims of being “collaborative” and “community-based” can seemingly exonerate community-engaging and participatory researchers from having to question the extent to which their academic labor is mining knowledge from communal spaces and appropriating it for sole authorship of their research findings. CCBR, similar to a cataract lens, also can cloud epistemological perceptiveness and disable recognition of the destructive forces behind linear and binary logics. Let us be clear, choosing to step into the position of researcher asserts that other people’s social realities are researchable! There is a need to investigate multiple forms of ethics and the sociopolitical forces behind them.

I conclude by raising a series of questions elided by research binaries of right/wrong and good/bad and silenced by dominant codes of ethics and notions of ethicality: What questions must we ask to weaken the single narrative of ethical research codes of conduct? Why do examinations of “ethics” and “ethicality” circulate back to already existing discourses of ethics? What social order is maintained by not cutting the umbilical cord between critical ethics talk and what we already know about doing “ethical” research? Who benefits from this ethics talk? What unfamiliar ethical grounds are we maintaining in our blind spots as a result of not letting go of what we already know? What other types of ethics talk are advantageous and to whom? Which ethics fail to materialize and why?

What are the ethical consequences of not acknowledging that academic knowledge production is an extended manifestation of White settler colonialism? How do conversations about ethics change when justice-driven CCBR scholars decide to walk away from standardized ethics talk? What sacrifices are researchers willing to make in the name of reimagining and reinventing ethical codes of conduct for social justice research? How can ethics talk conjure passion, stamina, and mobilization among scholars for creating codes of ethics for social justice?

To whom are we ethical? Who is implicated in our research actions other than the university and ourselves? Who and what is our research responsible for?

Michele S. Moses

Ethical questions are central to all social science and humanities-oriented research, and this of course includes CCBR (Brydon-Miller, 2012; Walsh, Hewson, Shier, & Morales, 2008). To illustrate some of these questions, I examine the specific complex relationships and tensions that emerged between academic researchers and community organization staff members within a recent collaborative project, focusing herein on the ethical dimensions of data interpretation and analysis.

How can university-based researchers sustain democratic approaches to research and ethical relationships between the researchers and the community organizations with which they collaborate? How do competing knowledge claims complicate these matters? My research team and I collected and analyzed data in collaboration with the staff of an educational outreach program aiming to mitigate educational inequalities and expand opportunities to low-income students, most of whom are also students of color, recent immigrants, and emergent bilingual students. This organization had requested assistance in assessing whether it was meeting its aims. During the 2-year study, we relied on three key principles of democratic theory and collaborative research—inclusion, dialogue, and deliberation—to develop the research design (Gutmann & Thompson, 1996; House & Howe, 1999, 2000; Young, 2000). Our approach was cooperative, and the research team and staff formed close relationships, regularly sending email updates and meeting face-to-face; however, the organization preferred a limited role in the research itself, so the project was not fully “community-based participatory research” (Minkler, 2005).

The research team shared plans for data analysis and identified emerging themes within the data in draft findings reports. The sociopolitical context of education reform, ostensibly far removed from the program offices, seemed to influence staff members’ reactions to our initial qualitative findings. As we encountered resistance to some of the themes emerging from the data, we needed to balance our analytic resources with the expertise of staff members. For example, we noticed that in interviews the staff repeatedly stated that a major program aim was to close achievement gaps, and several staff members explained that their program provided low-income students with experiences and knowledge that middle-class students regularly got. In the first (of the four) draft findings report, we identified achievement gaps as a dominant theme and wrote further that the data revealed “an emphasis on middle-class socioeconomic values and practices” (Moses, Leonardi, Wiley, & Milbourn, 2013, p. 4). For instance, one senior staff member said that a program goal is “getting [program] students side-by-side their [nonprogram] peers” and “teaching them middle-class culture” to “help students succeed within that middle-class culture” (Moses et al., 2013, p. 9). At our meeting to discuss the draft report, that staff member worried that some of our quotes of her were not an “accurate reflection of what I think. . .” and she felt “uncomfortable with the theme of saying that the kids kind of need to learn a middle-class culture.” She went on to say, “I know I said that, but on paper I am uncomfortable with it” (Moses Field Notes, June 12, 2013).

This situation presented the university researchers with a challenging ethical issue. We wanted to honor what our community partner felt was a more “accurate” reflection of her beliefs, and we also wanted to honor our commitment to providing evidence-based findings that could help the staff improve their work with students who often bump up against institutions and systems that disadvantage them and discount their cultures and the assets within their communities (Yosso, 2005). Zembylas (2015) notes that “ethical violence” can result from causing discomfort in an effort to challenge “normative practices that sustain social inequities” (p. 163). Although this violence can (and should) be minimized, it likely cannot be avoided completely when research has social justice aims. We wanted to minimize any symbolic violence to our community collaborators, and yet we wanted to provide the organization with the data for which they had partnered with us.

We also noticed that young adult volunteers working with program students from new immigrant communities would predominantly conceptualize educational barriers as residing within the students’ families. When our fourth draft findings report highlighted and named this perspective as deficit-oriented, our interpretation faced immediate resistance. My research notes from that meeting recorded that the volunteer coordinator “was ‘irritated’ by the report—couldn’t put a finger on why” (Moses Field Notes, May 14, 2014) . Although staff members recognized that young adult volunteers sometimes characterized the students and families in problematic ways, they did not believe the volunteers had said and done what we had observed. The lead staff member insisted we had taken the volunteers’ words and actions out of context.

My research team and I were taken aback by the staff members’ reaction to the idea that their volunteers had deficit perspectives on the students and their families. All along the way we had shared our field notes and interview transcripts and codes with them. How was it that we university researchers saw something in the data that those closest to the program did not see in the same way? We should have expected that program leaders would feel protective of volunteers, and indeed, the volunteer coordinator explained to us that she thought of the young adult volunteers as a secondary population served by the program. We also should have expected “insider-outsider tensions,” (Minkler, 2004, p. 688) characterized by differing interpretations of data and how to proceed within the organization. So, we questioned our own interpretations, and wondered if our community partners would dismiss or take up our findings and suggestions.

More key questions emerged: How do we engage ethically with community partners who may sometimes be resistant to university researchers’ interpretations of data and work to understand and negotiate the resistance? When there is dissent over our equity-oriented interpretations of our community partners’ equity-oriented practices, how do we balance the simultaneous aims of strengthening the organization’s equity practices and of honoring the (dissenting) voices? Attention to these issues is essential if we as education researchers are to understand how to go about meaningful, ethical collaborative practices with/in community organizations (Su, 2010).

Sheeva Sabati

Many scholars illuminate the possibilities of CCBR through their deeply grounded community partnerships. Exemplars in this work include projects that mobilize participatory, broad-scale data collection toward iterative policy wins (e.g., Waheed et al., 2015), research collaborations with young people as grassroots education and activism praxes (e.g., Cammarota, 2007; Ginwright & James, 2002), and research publications that carefully engage the complexities of representation (e.g., Fine & Torre, 2006; Nagar, 2006). Such projects embody epistemological critiques of traditional modes of social science research and also mobilize knowledge-production processes toward more socially just realities. Similarly, the series of URBAN conferences that brought us together to help solidify CCBR as a field of study might itself be understood as an important maneuver toward more ethical research. This institutional-level work is particularly urgent for students and educators coping with neoliberal reforms that accelerate the privatization of higher education (Bousquet, 2010; Newfield, 2008) and underscore the settler colonial entanglements of U.S.-based universities (Wilder, 2013).

Yet the project of institutionalizing a field of study and solidifying a knowledge formation within the academy is by no means ethically neutral, even and especially when animated by “social justice” promises. What are the theoretical and political anchors that animate different visions of “social justice” and that guide the ethical commitments of various communities of practice? How do these parameters shape negotiations of not only the ethical values that should guide research, but of the forms of justice we are working toward?

To consider CCBR as a field of study, it requires that we consider how we define CCBR as a community of practice. This itself is an ethical question. Too much openness about what can be considered CCBR—who practices it, how they practice it, with whom it is practiced, and for what ends—risks positioning this research in ways that continue to support inclusionary projects that flatten and incorporate ethically salient material differences. These differences—the who, how, with whom, and for what—matter; the engagement of these differences is precisely how we might begin to understand “ethics” within research, as what differentiates one epistemic position from another.

Although CCBR reflects a democratizing stance toward processes of knowledge production, community collaboration does not in and of itself transform our research practices. For example, CCBR does not offer a theoretical framework that historicizes the colonial entanglements of social science research (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012) and might even distract researchers from analyzing how their projects reify colonial logics or relationships. Scholars Eve Tuck and Monique Guishard (2013) examine how the “overemphasis of the specialness of PAR” functions to obscure “the racist-classist-paternalistic language, practices, and group dynamics of positivistic research and bioethics” that may still persist within collaborative forms of inquiry (p. 15). To counter the empty signifier of PAR, they articulate a specific approach to participatory research that is guided by a decolonial ethics, rather than an ethics of research merely based on participation. That is, they unpack how status quo research, even participatory research, may uphold racialized, settler colonial logics and relationships. As a starting point then, it is crucial to explicitly surface the theoretical frameworks embodied in our work and not take for granted what terms signify. Through such nuance we can begin to understand, trouble, and mobilize not only contrasting forms of knowledge production and ethics but also potentially competing struggles for justice.

By nuancing the question of what the terms of CCBR mean, we might think about how the naming of a field has ethical significance in both its openness and in its specificity. What are the root causes of the ethical quandaries of research that CCBR methodologies surface? (How) does building a field around CCBR (fail to) address them?

Numerous genealogies of anticolonial scholarship interrogate the ways in which academic knowledge production is entangled in the historical and present-day practices and effects of (settler) colonialisms (Lowe, 1996; Lugones, 2007; Quijano, 2007; Wynter, 2003). Indeed, students and scholars alike have long challenged the overrepresentation of Western genealogies of thought in the humanities and social sciences that then create various “critical” knowledge formations as sites of contestation within the academy (Ferguson, 2012). The student movements of the 1960s and 1970s called out the traditional academic disciplines for systematically producing and replicating social hierarchies along lines of race, gender, sexuality, language, and nationality within both scholarship and the university structure itself. These activists fought and won important struggles to establish new fields of study, such as Black studies, ethnic studies, Chicano/a studies, women and gender studies, and to establish many related institutionally specific formations.

Despite the substantial ethical shifts and political gains, some scholars have since argued that the institutionalization of these critical fields diverted the transformative potential of their connected political movements (Ferguson, 2012; Lowe, 1996). Furthermore, the critical knowledge formations remove the ethical responsibility of universities to address racialization, gender inequities, and histories of colonialism within the broader curriculum, and reify social critique as the primary form of redress to material harms, all while upholding the status of a prominent institution of social stratification—the university (Chiang, 2009; Mitchell, 2015).

In this way, we might think about how institutionalization mirrors a logic of inclusion or equity. In the case of CCBR, we might question how the university is simultaneously called upon as a means for achieving social justice and yet remains complicit in producing those same injustices. To merely define CCBR in terms of increased access into existing institutional structures cannot be adequate for efforts seeking either to understand the conditions that produce and maintain injustice or to disrupt them. I am not suggesting that we should give up on spaces such as universities or projects such as institutionalization. These possibilities and tensions are co-imbricated, and are part of the complicated work of transforming social realities. Yet, “equity” cannot adequately serve as the end point of our analytic lenses within institutions as they already exist, or as a long-term vision of “social change.” Rather than seeking to build social justice through inclusionary projects, we must dismantle the systems that produce these injustices.

If CCBR purports to disrupt the ways in which knowledge is traditionally produced within the academy, might collaborative researchers have an ethical responsibility to engage the colonial histories and materialities that condition knowledge production within the university? How might this lead to a responsibility to call out the deep imbrication between academic disciplines, institutions, and coloniality? Such questions are crucial to thinking about the understandings of “social justice” and the theoretical anchors of collaborative research. Without a commitment and strategy to unsettle the university as we know it, even the field formation of CCBR risks reinscribing the very structures and logics that legitimate the social violences that this approach to research espouses to disrupt. I hope to provoke conversation, ongoing reflection, and action: What might it mean to build a field that is critical of the very space, academic context, and conditions it is also trying to gain access to?

Troy Richardson

My comments start with a phrase from Gayatri Spivak (1999) that gestures toward the difficulty of the task to which our Working Group dedicated itself—thinking through the relation between ethics and epistemology in research contexts. In a passage where Spivak is interrogating the “native informant” within the works of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, she writes of ethical responsibility as “a burden of being human” (Spivak, 1999, pp. 4-5). My discussion here will plumb the meaning of Spivak’s discussion of ethics as burden for generative guidance for researchers working in or with communities with which they also identify in a range of ways. For those of us who identify with those with whom we conduct research on pressing topics—women who research sexism, Indigenous scholars interrogating dispossession, for example—we may too rarely pause to reflect on the residue of the “native informant” or its variants as the time and space of the ethico-epistemic.

Taken as a wry comment, Spivak (1999) seems to be highlighting her own situation as an Indian woman encountering the Vedic and other minoritized intellectual and philosophical traditions of India in Kant, Hegel, and Marx. How does she experience the “native informant” who assisted in such research, making available to them this body of work? Is it a case in which the native informant, despite all attempts otherwise, is held up as the “primitive” foil to the civilizational projects of reason, law, freedom, and indeed education? The “native informant” located more broadly in the tradition of anthropological and ethnographic research has similarly served the interests of a research community, despite any efforts to engage as intellectual equals. Rather such engagements tended toward the nonnative researchers’ primary concern for access to difference. If this is a fair reading of Spivak, one interpretation of ethical responsibility as a “burden of being human” for the “native informant” is the burden of being caught in the legacies of this philosophical overdetermination. That is, the research context served as the site through which the Native becomes a human, assuming greater and lesser forms of assimilation to the Kantian, Hegelian, or Marxist formulation. For Spivak, the native informant as researcher bears a complex responsibility to both interrogate and employ this burden of the colonial/modern authorship of humanitas. Could her notion of burden be understood phenomenologically as the inescapable time and space of the ethico-epistemic situation of research as the colonial/modern moment of native navigations of humanitas?

Spivak (1999) then may be saying, given these legacies of research in the making human of the native other, these colonial residues crisscross the site of “native researcher” in such a way that the ethico-epistemic situation is one burdened with responsibility as well as trauma. In this reading, trauma complexly organizes the emergent possibilities for the ethico-epistemic orientation of the native researcher. Would it be too difficult to pose the question of the ethico-epistemic researcher as continually emerging in the revisitation of trauma? If so, Spivak’s phrasing, “ethical responsibility as the burden of being human” can be interpreted as the weight of responsibility for an ethico-epistemic self in a continuing return to sites of trauma. Part of the trauma is, I am suggesting, the historical residue of research as the uneven moments of inhabiting humanitas.

Recognizing the difficulty of responding to this burden and trauma, Spivak (1999) goes on to criticize two responses that she sees as taking place among contemporary researchers she characterizes as Third Worldist academics. First, Spivak criticizes a too easy reactionary vanguardism, by which she means those academics who assert and/or describe their communities through the language of a utopic past and whose work seeks to restore that society to that past. A reactionary stance is formulated through the belief in a mythologized, precolonial past that was better than modernity. Linked together with the term vanguardism, which is to say counterhegemonic, Spivak is rejecting the academic posture of revolutionary as irresponsible. For Spivak (1999), a critical view of history involves a rigorous interrogation of, for example, gender relations that can easily call into question claims for precolonial utopias or their use as a basis for a revolutionary project.

Spivak (1999) can also be read as equally discouraged and opposed to Third Worldist (and by extension “Native”) researchers who enact victimry. Indigenous scholar Gerald Vizenor (1994) has discussed victimry as any argument that draws upon representations of Native Americans as the “absolute victims of modernity” (p. 145). This too is in the family of reactionary academic stances, but Vizenor should not be understood as saying that Native peoples have not been and do not continue to be victimized. Victimry, as Scott Lyons (2010) points out, “risks ethnic fundamentalism” (p. 98). Spivak seems to be arguing against resistance as reactionary and for resistance as responsibility to this complexly formulated native humanity as it has historically (and perhaps still) emerges in and through sites of research. For me, these reactionary stances are due in part to the crisscrossing of trauma in the very site of research. Spivak (1999) is not using the terms or language of healing in her interrogation of the time/space of the ethico-epistemic researcher, but I think she can be read as alluding to possible moments of well-being for her “native informant/researcher.” For her, it is clear that the reactionary vanguard or victimry stances not only foster willful misreadings of history but indicate something like an inappropriate, yet perhaps understandable response to trauma.

Recalling these discussions I began to consider the ways in which trauma crisscrosses the time/space of the “native researcher” and how to reconsider or reframe the question of the ethico-epistemic. Staying within the conversations of our Working Group and this revisitation of Spivak, I wondered how useful it could be to engage with the historian Dominick LaCapra.

LaCapra (1984) can be understood as recognizing trauma as an ethico-epistemic situation important to trajectories of historical research such as Holocaust or genocide studies. I am not suggesting here that all research, educational, or otherwise, is engaged with sites of trauma. But I am trying to engage with the question of the researcher as an ethico-epistemic formulation in a research site already informed by—but not exclusively defined by—trauma. On one hand, the researcher is assimilated to the “Native” to humanitas through the norms of Western-derived philosophical and social scientific concepts and modes of research. On the other, the CCBR scholar works in contexts of and driven by the actual “content” of communities that continually experience dispossession, racism, sexism, and so on.

LaCapra’s (1984) thoughtful considerations on transference may be helpful for native researchers and CCBR scholars more broadly in navigating this site and analyzing the reactionary modes of scholarship that Spivak (1999) and Vizenor (1994) critique. LaCapra (1984) writes,

I use “transference” in the modified psychoanalytic sense of a repetition-displacement of the past into the present as it necessarily bears on the future. “Transference” is bound up with a notion of time not as simple continuity or discontinuity but as repetition with variation or change—at times traumatically disruptive change. Transference causes fear of possession by the past and loss of control over both it and oneself. It simultaneously brings the temptation to assert full control over the “object” of study through ideologically suspect procedures that may be related to the phenomenon Freud discussed as “narcissism.” (p. 296)

A more traditional conceptualization of transference defines it as an inappropriate redirection of an emotion, usually negative, from one person or situation to another. This is often discussed in terms of the repetition and overlaying of difficult childhood events onto inappropriate contexts. But here, in the context of the ethico-epistemic moment of the native informant and colonial/modern research, LaCapra (1994) can further warn against reactionary vanguardism in terms of the effort to assert full control or mastery over the disrupted time and space of the self. For example, the dissonance of inheriting the site of research as an inauguration of the native (informant) into humanitas—the very site of the native informant, Spivak (1999) seems to say, contends with a fear of a loss of control as researcher by a perceived overdetermination of history. To respond with a reactionary project and thus assert full control of the past, present, and future through suspect thinking is, on LaCapra’s reading, narcissistic.

As I noted above, by deploying the term responsibility, Spivak can be read as offering a way forward that shows fidelity to the difficulty of the task. This responsibility occurs by taking seriously the burden of inheriting a research past that denied humanity to natives, or at best grudgingly to a few, other than propertied, heterosexual, Christian males. Responsibility as an unflinching, rigorous fidelity to this repetition or past in the present of research would acknowledge and work through the crisscrossed nature of associated trauma as best as possible. The ethico-epistemic is then not mastered or arrived at via the assertion of full control. This means something like being attentive to moments of transference in research situations not only as the possibility of redirecting negative responses in research sites and the ethico-epistemic situation, but also as the basis for suspect forms of scholarship that may be invested in researcher narcissism.

Spivak’s ethical burden is then also a critical embrace of research not as reactionary vanguardism but a reinterpretation of Western intellectual traditions in the space of one’s training within humanitas as researcher and native informant. Finally, bringing Vizenor’s (1994) notion of survivance as more than mere survival or persistence into conversation with burden as responsibility and critical attention to transference, it seems important to emphasize a project of well-being for researchers in returning to research sites crisscrossed by trauma. Between Spivak, LaCapra, and Vizenor, the time/space of research is an ethico-epistemic matrix crossed by trauma that calls for a responsible and committed working through of the residues of colonialism with others; a working through that is not mastery over, but a working with.

Ronald David Glass

The ethical stakes of CCBR in the social sciences are high. From critical perspectives, the ethics of research reaches far beyond the realms typically marked out by IRB review processes and their ethical and epistemological biases and limits. Rarely do typical courses meant to prepare researchers for their professional lives address these issues. The critical and engaged perspectives offered here reveal that the ethics of research opens up a “ground that is a crossing” (Lugones, 2003) that, like all crossroads, is a risky place of opportunities and dangers. The opportunities beckon toward putting the power of research to work in the interests of aggrieved communities and justice for all, joining critical traditions that persist. The dangers are real and evident in the actual fraught relationships, suspect methodologies and epistemologies, and limited effects of our most ethical efforts; the historical constraints of our disciplines and institutions remain. In the crossroads, the truths are less certain, the traumas hauntingly enduring and deep. Lugones recognized the risks in the fertility of the “ground that is a crossing,” and this creative intersection has animated many engaged scholars pursuing CCBR just as it has the discussions of the Working Group.

Mary Louise Pratt (1991) recognized that these “contact zones”— in the context of what scholars later described as “coloniality” (e.g., Quijano, 2007)— necessarily also embodied multiple forms of violence and injustice, and were legitimized in the dominant culture by the state and church institutions, including colleges and universities. So, as CCBR seeks to build a community of practice that embraces the ethical as a mode of engaging trauma and healing, it will require researchers to abandon notions of ethics as a purified or righteous position, or a destination in and of itself. From the dialogue you have read, I would argue that in the crossings and contact zones of the ethics of research, we find our ground in questions and ways of being that are both urgent and abiding. This gives us a way to both move and remain centered, to make the ethics of research an ongoing praxis.

I believe the members of the Ethics Working Group make such a praxis central to their own work. We are interested in building an inter/national discussion of the ethics of research in relation to these deeper layers whose questions disrupt traditional university understandings of the ethical and epistemic intersections of social science research. We are interested in building “communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in which researchers seek to hear and respond respectfully and with critical care to the voices, truths, and visions of communities long marginalized in the dominant world as well as in research. These are matters that must become deeply woven into our community life as researchers committed to engagement with communities of residents and citizens long aggrieved.

We believe that all researchers, CCBR or otherwise, have a responsibility to ethically interrogate what they and their institutions and disciplines have inherited, and continue to embody, deservedly or not. The praxis of the ethics of research calls for each of us to bear the ethical and epistemic burdens of our humanity, however traumatized, broken, and ignorant we may be and necessarily are. It also calls for each of us to bear the burdens of our choices, of our creative options. This work must be done together; ultimately, this is what drew us together into this particular dialogue. In the midst of disagreements and agreements, we agree that an inter/national dialogue is important for extending opportunities for CCBR work in colleges, universities, and communities.

The struggle to make the truths of long-aggrieved communities matter in the public sphere has entered a particularly imperiled time. As a Working Group, we remain committed to working with our communities to conduct research that mobilizes knowledge so that it can speak with ethical, epistemic, and political force. We also remain committed to opening wider spaces for this work in disciplines, professional associations, colleges, and universities. We invite the readers into this work with us.