Abstract
As engaged researchers involved in a critical health intervention programme aimed at addressing a number of menstruation-related challenges, we find ourselves being called on to work as activists. Our ability to work alongside community members as activists ensures the success of our public health intervention. However, the fluidity in our understanding of our roles and responsibilities often leaves us in an ethical grey zone relating to consent, anonymity, and confidentiality because of our dual roles as researchers and activists. The boundaries between our relationships with the participants and ourselves as researchers assume relational rather than transactional qualities. Similarly, we have encountered ethical challenges relating to participation and power dynamics which warrant special attention not typically given in traditional ethics review protocols.
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Notes
- 1.
Ethical clearance for this work was obtained through Rhodes University’s Research Ethics Review Committee (RPERC) in the Psychology Department on 21 May 2013 (PSY2013/12), from the Rhodes University Ethical Standards Committee on 1 December 2013 (2013Q3-5), and from the Department of Education on the 11 March 2014.
- 2.
Our target, upon collaborating with our research partners, grew from our community to the province. This was as a result of deciding that the data would be used to put together policy briefs for the Departments of Basic Education and Health .
- 3.
- 4.
There are interesting questions to explore relating to researchers as the agents of power, as the individual with the authority to ‘give power’ to the marginalised and voiceless.
- 5.
Across the NGO and research team, we represented a broad spectrum of cultural and racial groups.
- 6.
This, we believe, is a concern that pervades activism itself. There is a significant tension in feminist activism, for example, between listening to the lived experiences of girls and women, and telling girls and women about their lived experiences. In all cases, the ‘telling’ comes from a particular standpoint that is itself imbued with the values, norms, and beliefs that may contrast with or even contradict the values, norms, and beliefs of those who are being ‘told to’. For more on the concerns surrounding positionality (and in particular ‘Western’ biases), see Farhana Sultana (2007) ‘Reflexivity , Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 6(3), 374–385.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the work of our community partners in this critical health intervention. They stood alongside us as champions of this project, activists as researchers in their own right. We would also like to thank the other members of our research team from Rhodes University who spent many hours working on, in, and for this project. We have learnt a great deal from the interdisciplinary collaborations in this project, and we are grateful to all the team members who helped us navigate new terrain. We would like to acknowledge and thank the Rotary Club, the Rotary Ann’s, The Circle of Sisterhood, and Days for Girls for funding and support in this project.
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Paphitis, S.A., Kelland, L. (2018). In the Red: Between Research, Activism, and Community Development in a Menstruation Public Health Intervention. In: Macleod, C., Marx, J., Mnyaka, P., Treharne, G. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Ethics in Critical Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74721-7_13
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