Queering the Relationship Between Research, Researcher and Research Participant: Procedural Ethics, Relational Ethics, and Inverted Hierarchies

Ethics committees (ECs) typically base their decisions on established assumptions about the impact of the research process, the researcher and the participant on each other, which my doctoral research project failed to meet. This paper discusses the challenging clash between my experiences as a queer scholar doing fieldwork and the expectations of my EC. I argue that queer feminist ethnography complicates the established assumptions concerning the impact of the research process, researcher, and participant on each other. In doing so, I argue that we need models of this relationship that allow us to capture its complexity, for example in the case of research projects where the researcher is more insider than outsider, or where they remain part of the scene after the research has finished. This is important because these assumptions cause ECs to negatively impact on queer feminist qualitative research projects by silencing marginalised groups and challenging the legitimacy of scholars who are part of them; at the same time, a more complex understanding of the impact of this relationship on the research would lead to more meaningful research outcomes and community building. Keywords: qualitative research, relational ethics, vulnerability, social science, ethics committees, gender studies