[Last modified: December, 2 2024 12:19 PM]
Our group was assigned scenario #6 Indigenous Identities and Disempowerment. The project was very ambitious but thorny from an ethical perspective.
The student would probably have to go through a high-risk research proposal with the ethical committee as the proposed research involves some vulnerable participants (Indigenous and migrant people) and sensitive topics (gang and police violence, poverty, migration, and political views). It is not specified in the text, but the fact that some of the participants might be “illegal” migrants might put them in an even more vulnerable position.
The student offers no reflection on the power relations that might be at play when working with their participants. We did not know the student’s background (whether they were Indigenous, Brazilian, or “outsider”) and their positionality might have a huge impact on their relations. For instance, if the student managed to get a researcher visa for this project and had to work with people who already live in Brazil but are not “legally” entitled to do so and do not own a visa themselves, how is that going to impact their interactions? Furthermore, the student does not give any information on how they are going to store the data collected. Again, if some of the participants are undocumented migrants, the student would be dealing with very sensitive data that might put the lives of their participants at risk. Above all, despite the very interesting topic, the student fails to delineate how the research is going to be helpful for the community they are working with. On top of the vulnerabilities of their participants, the student might put their life in danger given the environment where the fieldwork would take place and the aforementioned police and gang violence. Therefore, a careful risk assessment should be evaluated when examining the proposal.
Depending on the student’s positionality, reframing the focus might help circumnavigate the many ethical issues that this project raises. For instance, instead of asking for explicit political opinions on Bolsonaro’s politics, the student might focus on the daily lives of the participants in the favelas (or specific aspects of their daily lives) that would surely be affected by anti-human rights governmental decisions, but without putting them on the spot (again, a vulnerable situation that might be exacerbated by their possible “illegality”). However, if the students are an “outsider” to the community in any way, reframing the focus might not be enough. An alternative would be to focus the research on activists and Indigenous associations (possibly still vulnerable people, but who also congregate within an institutional framework) only, for which less ethical concerns might be involved.