Ethics Review: A Student's Tale

Abstract

Fusing emotion and cognition and my lives in and outside the academy, I tell the tale of my first encounter with ethics review. This is memory work, re-crafting scraps of writing I did over the course of almost two years to weave a story that recreates the context in which I sought answers to questions around research ethics. My focus is on how these circumstances created conflict with a model of ethical conduct enshrined in a formalised ethics review process which, I contend, undermined my ethical intentions. I conclude by arguing for a move away from a standardised view of ethics within a politicised audit culture and towards the integration of ethics with human action and conceptions of 'the good'.