Fight, Flight, or Remain Silent? Juggling Multiple Accountabilities throughout the Formative Stage of a Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative

Abstract

This paper describes the experiences of a research team as they navigated uncertain ethical and political terrain throughout the formative stage of a public housing redevelopment project. Specifically, we discuss the challenges related to balancing multiple accountabilities and the tensions among the various roles and responsibilities that emanated from different accountabilities. Due to contractual obligations to our funding source, established relations with community partners, and an ethical imperative to align with those holding the least power, we grappled with embodying multiple and often conflicting roles. Without oversight provided by our university institutional review board or a clear ethical framework for community psychology research and action, our team was left to negotiate the challenges that emerged through critical reflection and financial considerations. Throughout the case example presented in this paper, we highlight our difficulty in ethical decision-making with respect to the principles of obligation, disclosure, consent, commitment, and professionalism. Community psychologists often straddle the realms of academia, community partnerships, and conscious engagement with little guidance in navigating often conflicting roles and value systems. We present our narrative to highlight the complexity of scholar-activism in the context of community psychology and the necessity for developing ethical standards and guidelines tailored to meet the unique needs of community psychologists.

Complicating Narratives: Defining and Deconstructing Ethical Challenges in Community Psychology

“…Large, multistakeholder projects that bring together community residents, government, and/or nongovernmental service programs to create community‐level change are complex, long‐term endeavors, ripe for political conflict as power brokers in these settings often resist efforts to disrupt the status quo. Kesten, Perez, Marques, Evans and Sulma (2017*) chronicle their struggles working with a public housing revitalization project in which they had been contracted by a government housing office to document resident engagement efforts. As the project unfolded, Kesten and her colleagues became increasingly concerned about the lack of authentic community engagement and wondered whether they should “fight, [take] flight, or remain silent.” Any of these options could be ethically justified, and Kesten and her colleagues explain how their contractual obligations necessitated that they keep their heads down and finish the work at hand, an uneasy decision but one that in the long run may have kept options open for continued progress with this community.…”

The Potentially Damaging Effects of Developmental Aid and Voluntourism on Cultural Capital and Well-Being

“…The role of ethics in community development, community psychology, and community well-being has recently received attention in research and practice discourses (e.g., Bradley et al 2018;Kesten et al 2017;Musikanski et al 2020); however, more attention could be paid to how ethics link to well-being intentions, processes, and outcomes. Ethics and ethical frames help us define concepts and understand how concepts are operationalized by their processes and impacts (e.g., Dart et al 2010).…”

Partnering With Oppressive Institutions for Social Change: Roles, Ethics, and a Framework for Practicing Accountability

“…There is a clear need to consider ethical dilemmas, particularly the risk for collusion with oppression, in undertaking within‐setting change strategies with hierarchy‐enhancing institutions. As mentioned at the outset of this paper, community psychologists working in a variety of settings with powerful institutional stakeholders have described ethical tensions in their work and have also highlighted the need for more open discussion in our field of navigating these tensions (Campbell & Fehler‐Cabral, 2017; Campbell & Morris, 2017b; Javdani et al, 2017; Kesten et al, 2017; Silva, 2017). In the next section, I review case studies that describe the challenges of working with hierarchy‐enhancing institutions and how community psychologists have chosen to respond to such challenges.…”

“…Identifying moments of anger at injustice can help community psychologists immediately recognize oppression in action (Langhout, 2015). However, narratives from partnerships with hierarchy‐enhancing institutions reveal that in some cases, identifying collusion may involve a growing sense of discomfort about the partnership rather than a flash point of outrage (e.g., Kesten et al, 2017). In this section, I describe how researchers realized they might be upholding institutions’ oppressive practices and then describe the various actions (or inaction) taken by the researchers in response.…”

“…Recently, the field of community psychology has begun to reflect more specifically on the ethics of working with oppressive institutions and ways in which the traditional ethical principles of psychology may not be sufficient for addressing challenges that arise. In a special section of the American Journal of Community Psychology ( AJCP ) on ethical dilemmas in the field (Campbell & Morris, 2017b), several papers focused on conducting research in partnership with powerful institutions or stakeholders (Campbell & Fehler‐Cabral, 2017; Javdani, Singh, & Sichel, 2017; Kesten, Perez, Marques, Evans, & Sulma, 2017; Silva, 2017). Community psychologists have also written about the difficult value conflicts and emotions we can face as a result of working closely with stakeholders who hold values that are antithetical to our own or who engage in oppressive practices (e.g., Campbell, 2017).…”