This article examines the developments that have motivated this special issue on Qualitative Research Ethics in the Big Data Era. The article offers a broad overview of many pressing challenges and opportunities that the Big Data era raises particularly for qualitative research. Big Data has introduced to the social sciences new data sources, new research methods, new researchers, and new forms of data storage that have immediate and potential effects on the ethics and practice of qualitative research. Drawing from a literature review and insights gathered at a National Science Foundation-funded workshop in 2016, we present five principles for qualitative researchers and their institutions to consider in navigating these emerging research landscapes. These principles include (a) valuing methodological diversity; (b) encouraging research that accounts for and retains context, specificity, and marginalized and overlooked populations; (c) pushing beyond legal concerns to address often messy ethical dilemmas; (d) attending to regional and disciplinary differences; and (e) considering the entire lifecycle of research, including the data afterlife in archives or in open-data facilities.
In March 2007, when Cryptosporidium contaminated water supplies in Galway City, Ireland, political authorities responded quickly to upgrade water treatments plants. This response framed the crisis as a solely technical problem of infrastructural decay, obscuring legacies of urban and agricultural (over)development. In this paper, we examine dominant responses to infrastructural contamination that depoliticize and re-inscribe divisions among bodies, nature, infrastructure, rural and urban. The temporality of the Galway outbreak and the speedy response by the state is not replicated throughout Ireland. In parts of rural Roscommon, the neighbouring county to Galway, microbiological risks to the drinking water supply have been left unattended for more than eight years. The interplay of social, political, economic, and ecological factors produces uneven exposures to health risks that are situated within and mediated through water infrastructure. Drawing on postcolonial insights, the unevenness of infrastructural provision across Ireland does not just tell a story of exclusion and othering, but also provides space for different infrastructural projects to unfold. While the response to contamination within the public water supply replayed well-known technical fixes, the work of the National Federation of Group Water Schemes, the representative body of community managed water systems in rural Ireland, illustrates a different form of infrastructural practice that negotiates legacies of institutional abandonment and acknowledges the wider hydro-social cycle as part of, rather than ancillary to, water infrastructure. By blending political ecologies of health and postcolonial approaches to infrastructure, we analyse the unevenness of responses to infrastructural contamination and trace its relationship to legacies of uneven development and imaginaries of urban and rural Ireland.
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