Onto-Epistemicide and the Research Ethics Board: Toward a Reflexive Ethics

Abstract

This article posits that current priorities of many research ethics boards make them a self-undermining entity in that they perpetuate the erasure of certain knowledges and with them the bodies subjectivities and subjects that live them. Through obscuring the history, geography and onto-epistemology of the assumptions underpinning ethical review these boards reproduce dominant Eurocentric and postpositivist assumptions about what is and isn’t valid or worthy research. Employing Santos’s notion of epistemicide and joining it with Barad’s ethico-onto-epistem-ology we explore how the instruments of “Ethics” act as a mechanism for reinforcing what Massey labels a dominant “geography of productions of knowledge”