On February 17th I attended Mary L. Gray's Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics Colloquium, Mary is a faculty member in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Her talk was entitled You Can't Do That! The Pragmatics and Ethics of Ethnographic Approaches To New Media Research (ppt files). The "You Can't Do That!" is that wonderful phrase all of us that work with minors have heard from an IRB at one time or another. The talk was videotaped, so I will have to find the link and share it here.

ABSTRACT

From the beginning of my research on new media use among queer and questioning rural youth, my Institutional Review Board's (IRB) investments in the appearance of distance, objectivity, and propriety were palpable. Each review of my IRB proposal came back with recommended tweaks to my research design that revealed little knowledge or experience dealing with material realities that define many rural communities. Requested revisions also spoke to the then (arguably current) uncertainty of how to conceptualize and regulate the Internet as a "field site." This discussion offers a detailed review of how my project's methodological approach uses information communication technologies (ICTs) as both tools and sites of ethnographic research. I show how the approach I took connects to and departs from the broader literature on studies of rurality, identity, and research of queer youth sexualities and genders. I move from the particularities of my investigation as it developed in the field to a brief overview of some of the dilemmas ethnographic studies of new media and sexuality face in defining a clear object of study. Earlier studies are examined to show how the implications of framing the unit of analysis as "new" and "sexual" played out in the research design of my investigations. The third and final part of this presentation explores what I call the "plasticity of vulnerability": the construction of youth (among a growing list of subjects) as vulnerable. This construction of youth-as-vulnerable is mapped through an analysis of the IRB approval process for this project. I unravel any presumptions of moral clarity and ethically driven structure to the research protocols built into this study. Instead, I scrutinize the politics and assumptions that led to the ad-hoc tailoring of ethical stipulations, by me and through campus IRB mandate. The IRB's imagining of rural places and queer youth as calling for "special accommodations" played a significant role in the decisions of who to include in this study and how to go about gathering their stories. The IRB process for this research casts an argument for deeper reflection on the critical role negotiations of methods, ethics, and politics play in constructing scientific knowledge about queer and questioning youth.

Posted by prolurkr at March 3, 2006 05:21 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.professional-lurker.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1392

Comments

Post a comment