Crafting Ethics Out of Confinement

This chapter experiments with craft, reflexivity and conversation to articulate an ethical praxis for qualitative research. It emerges from a series of participatory seminars, attended online by a fluctuating and diverse gathering of scholars and students, during which we explored immanent, playful and purposeful approaches to making research processes more just. We pushed against normative institutional membranes that, in our experience, encourage narrow constructions of ethical research. We focused attention on complexity, humility, vulnerability, uncertainty, kindness, transparency, empathy, power and reflexivity in each one’s own becoming as an ethical researcher. This writing suggests that ethical research praxis not only disregards disciplinary categories, it transgresses academic codes and structures: it calls on researchers to reflect on their whole selves and to bring their whole selves as they engage with research partners who are themselves wholly complex persons.