IRBs and the turn to indigenous research ethics

Abstract

I want to read the controversies and scandals surrounding Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) within a critical pedagogical, discourse. Ethics are pedagogies of practice. IRBs are institutional apparatuses that regulate a particular form of ethical conduct, a form that may be no longer workable in a transdisciplinary, global, and postcolonial world. I seek a progressive performative cultural politics that enacts a performance ethics based on feminist, communitarian assumptions. I will attempt to align these assumptions with the call by First and Fourth World scholars for an indigenous research ethic (Smith, 1999; Bishop, 1998; Rains, Archibald, & Deyhle, 2000). This allows me to criticize the dominant biomedical and ethical model that operates in many North American universities today. I conclude with a preliminary outline of an indigenous, feminist, communitarian research ethic. This ethic has two implications. It would replace the current utilitarian ethical model that IRBs utilize. It argues for a two-track, or three-track IRB model within the contemporary university setting.

Citation

Denzin, N.K. (2008), "IRBs and the turn to indigenous research ethics", Jegatheesan, B. (Ed.) Access, a Zone of Comprehension, and Intrusion (Advances in Program Evaluation, Vol. 12), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 97-123. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1474-7863(08)12006-3