Researching Ethically across Cultures

Issues of knowledge, power and voice

Anna Robinson-Pant, Nidhi Singal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317217114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Whether an individual doctoral study or a large-scale multidisciplinary project, researchers working across cultures face particular challenges around power, identity, and voice, as they encounter ethical dilemmas which extend beyond the micro-level of the researcher-researched relationship. In using a cross-cultural perspective on how to conceptualise research problems, collect data, and disseminate findings in an ethical manner, they also engage with the geopolitics of academic writing, language inequalities, and knowledge construction within a globalised economy. It is increasingly recognised that existing ethical codes and paradigms either do not sufficiently address such issues or tend to be rather restrictive and insensitive to multiple and complex cultural and contextual differences.

This book extends our understanding of the ethical issues and dilemmas faced by researchers in comparative and international education. It asks what the relevance of postcolonial theory is for understanding research ethics in comparative and international education; whether Western ethical practices in qualitative social research are incompatible with cultures outside the West; how a 'situated' approach can be developed for exploring research ethics across cultures and institutions; and how 'informed consent' can be negotiated when the process appears to contradict community values and practices. In sharing experiences from a wide range of cultural and institutional contexts, the authors offer both theoretical resources and practical guidance for conducting research ethically across cultures. This book was originally published as a special issue of Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education.

Towards a postcolonial research ethics in comparative and international education

Leon Tikly and Tim Bond

Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

The article considers the relevance of postcolonial theory for understanding research ethics in comparative and international education (CIE). An understanding of postcolonial theory is outlined, which forms a basis for setting out a postcolonial research ethics in CIE. It is argued that postcolonial theory makes a distinctive contribution to understanding of research ethics in CIE by providing a critique of dominant approaches; an understanding of the postcolonial condition in education as a context for research ethics; an appreciation of postcolonial research ethics as emancipatory; and a view of postcolonial research ethics as being situated and dialogic in nature.

Introduction

Although there has been a proliferation of critical literature on research ethics in educational and social research, only limited attention has been given to a consideration of the place of research ethics in comparative and international education (CIE). For example, recent influential texts on research in CIE (see for example Crossley, Watson, and Bray 2003; Phillips and Schweisfurth 2007; Cowan and Kazamias 2009) barely make reference to research ethics. This is surprising given the attention that has traditionally been given to issues of researching across cultures within CIE, the complex ethical issues that this raises and the deep-seated nature of power and inequality implicit in researching in postcolonial settings. Further, there has been only a limited attempt to apply insights from postcolonial theory to research ethics in education (see for example, Smith 1999; Chilisa 2009)¹. This is despite the growth in literature that has applied postcolonial theory to a broader understanding of education in the postcolonial world (see for example, Tikly 1999; Crossley and Tikly 2004; Hickling-Hudson, Matthews, and Woods 2004; Coloma 2009).

The aim of this article is to critically consider the possibilities of postcolonial theory for understanding research ethics in CIE and to outline the basis for a postcolonial approach to research ethics. The article starts by outlining a view of postcolonial theory and of the postcolonial condition as the basis for deconstructing dominant approaches to research ethics, whilst the second part of the article explores in more depth the implications of postcolonialism for research ethics.

Postcolonial theory, ethics and social justice

This section provides a broad view of postcolonial theory by summarising key ideas elaborated elsewhere (Tikly 1999, 2001, 2004, 2011a). However, postcolonial theory is not singular or coherent. This account is therefore necessarily partial, by presenting a particular ‘take’ on postcolonial theory and on the postcolonial condition in order to advance an understanding of research ethics later in the article.

Postcolonial theory emerged in its current form in the cultural turn of the social sciences, although it draws on a longer tradition of critical, anti-colonial writing and theorising (Young 2001). Developed in the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, it operates as a ‘critical idiom’ (Loomba 2005) for interrogating the discursive basis of Western rule. The value of postcolonial scholarship for CIE is that through focusing on the discursive basis of education in former colonising and colonised countries, it allows the cultural effects of a Western education on non-Western cultures to be analysed in depth.

However, this focus on the cultural and discursive level does not imply that the material (including the economic and political) dimensions on the postcolonial condition are insignificant or lack ethical implications. Nor is it being implied that there is nothing ‘outside of the text’, as some forms of poststructuralism suggest. Rather, as argued elsewhere (Tikly 2001, 2004, 2011b), education in the postcolonial world is shaped by a range of economic and political forces at a number of scales, including the local, national, regional and global, alongside other characteristics of contemporary globalisation, including climate change and the spread of global diseases such as HIV/AIDS. These more material aspects provide a powerful rationale for a consideration of research ethics as they ‘articulate’ with the cultural/discursive level (Morley and Chen 1996). It is through discourse that the material world is interpreted and understood and unequal power relationships are legitimated. Thus ethical discourses are more than simply words or language. They legitimise social practices that have material effects.

Much postcolonial theory has elaborated the ‘postcolonial condition’, that is, a global shift in the cultural, political and economic arrangements that arise from the experiences of European colonialism, both in former colonised and in colonising countries. There has been much debate about the meaning of the term and particularly the use of suffix ‘post’ given that some countries continue to be colonised and that many formerly colonised countries retain large inequalities between postcolonial elites and the majority of the population. It is also important not to present a homogenous and essentialised understanding of the postcolonial condition as it includes a plurality of development paths and dynamic cultural contexts. Crucially, colonised and formerly colonised groups continue to struggle against its effects. Furthermore, the postcolonial condition is also characterised by the emergence of a ‘new imperialism’ (Harvey 2003; Tikly 2004) by which is meant the economic, political, military and cultural hegemony of the USA and its Western allies within contemporary globalisation². For all of these reasons, it is more helpful to consider postcolonialism as a general process of disengagement of formerly colonised countries from European colonialism and classical imperialism and their reinsertion into the flows and networks that characterise contemporary globalisation³.

The view of postcolonialism as a process has implications for the way that colonialism is understood and narrativised. In keeping with postmodern and, in particular, poststructuralist emphases, postcolonial theory provides a critique of the ‘metanarratives’ of the European enlightenment. Writers such as Foucault and Derrida have proved particularly influential. This re-narrativisation reconceptualises colonialism, not as a sub-plot of some ‘grander’ (European) narrative, but as a violent process central to the development of globalisation.

This decentring of European thought is highly significant to any consideration of ethics. Western ethics comprise different ethical imperatives, including those arising from religious and more secular humanist traditions with differential influence in colonial and postcolonial settings. However, within the European enlightenment a particular universalist view of ethics has predominated and has subordinated other Western and, especially, non-Western ethical traditions. This has been linked to a trajectory of Western humanist thought, which has taken as its normative point of reference the white, affluent European male subject. Although claiming to be ‘universal’, key writers in the field of moral philosophy were influenced by notions of biological and cultural difference and hierarchy such that non-Western cultures were assumed to lack sufficient capacity for reason for inclusion within a universal ethic (Goldberg 1993; Manzo 1997). Moral philosophy and Western humanism have also been premised on a notion of ethical rationalism (Christians 2007) that separates reason from emotion and means from ends. It is through the coupling of an instrumentalist view of science and progress to a process of othering of non-Western cultures that Western humanism has been complicit not only in colonialism but in other barbarisms of the modernist era, including slavery, war and genocide, all in the cause of ‘progress’. The incisive critique of enlightenment ethics by postcolonial, poststructuralist and feminist scholars raises the question as to whether any post-enlightenment universal ethic is possible.

Foucault and his followers argue that there have been significant shifts in Western humanist influence in the development of globalisation in the post-World War II period, linked to the development of a new neo-liberal governmentality (the overall art or rationality of government in Western liberal democracies). This shift has seen a growing emphasis on homo economicus as the subject of ethical discourse, that is, the individual economic agent unfettered by the state, free to pursue his or her own economic interests. This individualistic model contrasts with the models of economic/social actors posited in many non-Western traditions. In this way, development economics with their associated ethics show a distinct cultural bias from their inception (Escobar 1995; Tikly 2003a, 2004).

Writing within a postcolonial perspective, the ideas of the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos are particularly helpful for framing a discussion about research ethics and are therefore considered in some detail. Santos has identified mechanisms by which Western knowledge claims the power to exclude other approaches to understanding the world as though they were ‘non-existent’. These include: the assertion of modern science and high culture as the sole criteria for truth and aesthetic quality; a Western, linear view of time, development and progress; the classification and naturalisation of differences that are used to legitimise hierarchies; universalising assumptions of Western knowledge and ethics that exclude local contexts and realities; and a ‘logic of productivity’ in which economic growth becomes the sole criterion through which development and progress are evaluated. These logics combine in a production of absence or non-existence as ignorant, backward, inferior, local or particular, and unproductive or sterile (Santos 2012, 52–53), each imbued with ethical deficit.

Linked to the decentring of modernist metanarratives has been an ‘epistemic shift’. This involved going beyond the old ‘binary oppositions’ of ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’, ‘First’ and ‘Third’ world and ‘Black’ and ‘White’ and the development of more contingent and complex views of colonial culture, politics and identities, achieved, for example, by: focusing on the ‘unstable’, ‘hybrid’ and ‘fractured’ nature of colonial and postcolonial identities (Bhabha 1984, 1996); the complex interplay of colonialism, patriarchy and caste in the formation of different subject positions amongst the colonised (Spivak 1988); and processes of transcultural ‘mixing’ and exchange, alongside the complexities of diasporic identification (see Gilroy 1993, for example). The formation of exiled and refugee communities has contributed to this process. The fluidity and historicity of cultures and of cultural relations are paramount in this approach, thus challenging views of cultures as hermetically sealed, essentialised and static entities. This is important for our purposes because it complicates and liquefies the relationship between ethics and any particular cultural or intellectual tradition. It requires ethics to open to the influence of other ethical traditions and how different views on ethics, even within one cultural tradition, may draw on traditional as well as modern and postmodern ethical values and outlooks.

This mixture of ethical sources and influences has underpinned the struggle against Western colonialism and imperialism and inspired contemporary postcolonial thought. Young (2001) provides a detailed account of the development of anti-colonial thought that highlights the interplay between indigenous intellectual traditions and aspects of Western thought in anti-colonial writing (see also Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s [1989] collection of essays, The Empire Writes Back).

Gandhi (1910), for example, criticised Western modernity with its reliance on violence as inherently ‘evil’ and counter-posed it with ancient Indian civilisation and the non-violent tradition, which he characterised as ‘holy’. He combined Indian ethics with aspects of Western thought from the ideas of Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreu and Emerson. Steve Biko’s conception of black consciousness contrasted an African humanism based on collectivity and a spirit of Ubuntu (togetherness) with the individualism of ‘White’ (European) civilisation. Black consciousness was also influenced by Christian ethics (as reinterpreted by Black theologians). Similarly, ideas of African socialism (Nkrumah, Kaunda, Diop) and of self-reliance (Nyerere) combined an inherently communal African ethic with a reading of Western Marxism and an analysis of the class-based nature of African societies. These combinations of different traditions not only challenge the colonised/coloniser binary but also generate the richness and diversity of ethics in anti-colonial thought.

This early wave of postcolonial literature, written in national struggles for liberation, contains a nascent alternative view of humanism, often developed in antithesis to Western humanism. This has provided a point of departure for some postcolonialists from Eurocentric postmodernist and poststructuralist thought (Parry 1995) that seeks only to deconstruct the effects of knowledge/power and involves self-consciously building on previous anti-colonial discourses to conceptualise alternatives based on emancipatory visions of social justice. We will argue that this shift provides a starting point for reconceptualising a postcolonial research ethics.

There remains a tension, however, within postcolonial theory between the deconstructive aspect, which focuses on a deep suspicion of Western humanism, and the more ‘reconstructive’ aspects, which focus on developing alternatives to colonial rule and elaborating visions of social justice. Some of these tensions are evoked by the reality that many attempts at ‘reconstruction’ in the post-independence periods have not only served to perpetuate inequality but, in some instances, have been associated with acts of cruelty, war and genocide in the name of ‘progress’ that echo excesses committed under colonialism. These tensions may be amplified by the continuing hegemony of Western forms of knowledge and views of ethics as part of a new global discourse of ‘development’ (Escobar 1995). The persistence of these tensions raises important philosophical questions about whether it is possible to conceive of any epistemological basis on which a postcolonial and emancipatory ethics can be based.

One possible starting point is Santos’ view of developing an epistemology of the South. For Santos (2012), this involves several moves. Firstly, it involves replacing a sociology of absences (above) with a ‘sociology of emergences’ so that the ‘emptiness of the future according to linear time (an emptiness that may be all or nothing) becomes a future of plural and concrete possibilities, utopian and realist at one time, and constructed in the present by means of activities of care’ (54). Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, Santos describes the sociology of emergences as the inquiry into alternatives that are contained in the horizon of concrete possibilities. It acts both on possibilities (potentiality) and on capacities (potency). It has an ethical core that is linked to a vision of what ought to be. As it involves an anticipatory consciousness, it must – unlike Western rationalist thought – also necessarily involve a theory of emotions.

Linked to this is a concept of the ecology of knowledges (Santos 2007). This starts with the assumption that all practices and human relations not only imply more than one form of knowledge but also concomitantly imply ignorance. Santos notes the excessive over-reliance on practices based on scientific knowledge in modern capitalist society but without pressing for outright rejection of scientific ‘rationalist’ knowledge. Santos sees the ‘remedy’ to the supposed superiority of scientific discourse as lying in greater cognitive justice in which the majority of the population are granted access to hegemonic, scientific knowledge and then using this in counter-hegemonic ways. This also involves recognising alternative forms of knowledge and promoting interdependence between scientific and non-scientific knowledges.

For Santos (2012), t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Researching ethically across cultures: issues of ­knowledge, power and voice
• 1. Towards a postcolonial research ethics in comparative and ­international ­education
• 2. Research ethics in comparative and international education: ­reflections from anthropology and health
• 3. Informed consent in educational research in the South: ­tensions and ­accommodations
• 4. Challenges to anonymity and representation in educational ­qualitative research in a small community: a reflection on my research ­journey
• 5. Working together for critical research ethics
• 6. The politics of ethics in diverse cultural settings: colonising the centre stage
• Reflective endpiece
• Index