TY - JOUR
T1 - Getting inside ethical review: anxious bureaucracies of revelation, anticipation and virtue
AU - Douglas-Jones, Rachel
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - This article is concerned with strategies to bolster ethical review against insinuations that it might not be well done. My discussion traces doubts about the competences of ethics review committees in low and middle income settings to ask how a real ethical review is known, and for whom it must be evidenced. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork amongst committees participating in the Forum of Ethics Review Committees of Asia and the Western Pacific, an organization started in 2000 to support grass-roots regional networking and capacity building, I describe three mechanisms by which a ‘real’ review can be identified, and pre-emptively distinguished from a ‘pseudo’ review. I argue that each strategy is premised on articulating a different facet of ethical interiority. By contextualizing ethical review within histories of debates about global health research ethics, and a growth in regional responses to build local capacity, I explore how geographies of competence motivate responses to anxieties about whether and how ethical review can be made real.
AB - This article is concerned with strategies to bolster ethical review against insinuations that it might not be well done. My discussion traces doubts about the competences of ethics review committees in low and middle income settings to ask how a real ethical review is known, and for whom it must be evidenced. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork amongst committees participating in the Forum of Ethics Review Committees of Asia and the Western Pacific, an organization started in 2000 to support grass-roots regional networking and capacity building, I describe three mechanisms by which a ‘real’ review can be identified, and pre-emptively distinguished from a ‘pseudo’ review. I argue that each strategy is premised on articulating a different facet of ethical interiority. By contextualizing ethical review within histories of debates about global health research ethics, and a growth in regional responses to build local capacity, I explore how geographies of competence motivate responses to anxieties about whether and how ethical review can be made real.
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2019.1591615
DO - https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2019.1591615
M3 - Journal article
SN - 0958-1596
VL - 29
SP - 448
EP - 459
JO - Critical Public Health
JF - Critical Public Health
IS - 4
ER -