Situated knowledges and the spaces of consent

Informed consent has often been presented as a kind of ethical panacea, the best way of guarding against medical and scientific abuses of human rights. However recent empirical research has led bioethicists to question both the feasibility and the value of informed consent procedures. This paper also seeks to critique informed consent, but focuses less on its empirical shortcomings. Instead, this paper questions the assumption that ethics involves engaging in the kind of rational, distanced, objective reflection traditionally considered the basis of both scientific observation and ethical decision making. Drawing on recent insights from ethical geography and geographers studying the biotechnology industry, I wish to argue that ethical reflection is a relational and situated process, less about being distanced and objective, and more about recognizing how our ethical decisions are shaped by our social and material environment.     

Ethics of care across professional and everyday positionalities: The (un)expected impacts of participatory video with young female carers in Slovakia

The paper offers a critical intervention into the debates on research impact, theorising the potential of underpinning research agendas by ethics of care. We explore how a range of vectors of care, both intimate and distant, emerged in collaborative activities between researchers based in the UK and community youth workers and teenage female carers in Slovakia, leading to a series of (un)expected outcomes. We argue that while all research impacts cannot be planned in advance, an ethics of care embedded in relationships within and beyond research settings may form conditions in which outcomes exceeding the initial expectations can be anticipated. To achieve this, we argue for questioning the distinctions between academic and non-academic collaborators, legitimising diverse forms of knowledge, action and impact in institutional policies, and for conceiving research projects from the beginning as “more-than-research” avenues.     

Exploring the ‘ethical everyday’: An ethnography of the ethics of family consumption

Using ethnographic research with six families in the North West of England (2007–2009), this paper opens up the ‘black box’ of everyday ethical consumption by adding colour and form to these everyday experiences. While recent geographical literature has recognised the ethical considerations that are implicit in everyday consumption practices, there is a noticeable void of research that explores and fleshes out the everyday ethical actions of individuals and families as consumers. By exploring the everyday ethics of money, waste and health choices in family consumption practices, this paper makes the case for recognising the ethical nature of everyday practices and choices of consumption. It is argued that rather than consumers subscribing to a given set of ethics in consumption, there are multiple ways of recognising consumption as an ethically-embedded process.     

High-level waste disposal,ethics and thermodynamics

Moral philosophy applied to nuclear waste disposal can be linked to paradigmatic science. Simple thermodynamic principles tell us something about rightness or wrongness of our action. Ethical judgement can be orientated towards the chemical compatibility between waste container and geological repository. A container-repository system as close as possible to thermodynamic equilibrium is ethically acceptable. It aims at unlimited stability, similar to the stability of natural metal deposits within the Earth’s crust. The practicability of the guideline can be demonstrated.     

Reflecting on the risks and ethical dilemmas of digital research

As technology continues to evolve, digital methods are increasingly becoming key components of social and cultural geographers’ research toolkits. This paper explores the risky and uncertain dimensions of digital research by reflecting on an adverse ethical event which occurred in research involving young people and online dialogic diaries. Assemblage thinking is used to conceptually frame the data leakage event, the subsequent disruption of confidentiality, and the wide-ranging affects and effects that followed. Three particular issues which are critical for researchers working with digital methodologies to consider are highlighted: the ethical implications of procedural disruption, institutional responses within the neoliberal university, and researcher wellbeing. We conclude by advocating for researchers to continue to push boundaries with digital research but suggest that this needs to be undertaken in an informed way that takes account of the immanent potential for digital disruption.     

Virtual moralities: The mainstreaming of Fairtrade in Kenyan tea fields

Fairtrade was founded to alleviate poverty and economic injustice through a market-based form of solidarity exchange. Yet with the increasing participation of transnational food corporations in Fairtrade sourcing, new questions are emerging on the extent to which the model offers an alternative to the inimical tendencies of neoliberalism. Drawing on a qualitative research project of Kenyan Fairtrade tea, this paper examines how the process of corporate mainstreaming influences the structure and outcomes of Fairtrade, and specifically the challenges it poses for the realization of Fairtrade’s development aspirations. It argues firstly that whilst tea producers have experienced tangible benefits from Fairtrade’s social premium, these development ‘gifts’ have been conferred through processes marked less by collaboration and consent than by patronage and exclusion. These contradictions are often glossed by the symbolic force of Fairtrade’s key tenets - empowerment, participation, and justice - which simultaneously serve to neutralize critique and mystify the functions that Fairtrade performs for the political economy of development and neoliberalism. Second, building on recent critiques of corporate social responsibility, the paper explores how certain neoliberal rationalities are emboldened through Fairtrade, as a process of mainstreaming installs new metrics of governance (standards, certification, participation) that are at once moral and technocratic, voluntary and coercive, and inclusionary and marginalizing. The paper concludes that these technologies have divested exchange of mutuality, as the totemic features of neoliberal regulation - standards, procedures and protocols - increasingly render north south partnerships ever more virtual and depoliticized.     

Becoming skilled: The cultural and corporeal geographies of teaching and learning Thai Yoga massage

This paper explores the process of learning an embodied knowledge using the work of Dreyfus and Deleuze. Although geographers have begun to acknowledge the role of embodied knowledges in social life, there have been few in-depth case studies of how these skills are learned. This paper offers a case study of Thai Yoga massage (TYM), a ‘complementary and alternative therapy’ which is growing in popularity in the United Kingdom. Having outlined the case study, the paper explores the cultural geographies of the formalisation, documentation and contestation of the set of techniques that have come to cohere in the UK as TYM. The paper then interrogates the messy corporeal geographies of learning a skill, and briefly considers how more advanced practitioners experience their skilled practice.     

Interspecies care and aging in a gorilla 2.0 world

Two key figures analyzed in Donna Haraway’s monograph, Primate Visions: Gender Race and Nature in The World of Modern Science (1989) warrant further analysis in the emerging cyber politics of environmental conservation. These figures are Koko, a female lowland gorilla born in the San Francisco Zoo and her companion Dr. Francine (Penny) Patterson, a developmental psychologist who taught Koko how to communicate with a modified form of American Sign Language (ASL). Nine years after Haraway’s initial analysis, Koko and Patterson became early examples of conservation-related Web 2.0 engagement with their unprecedented inter-species America Online chat room encounter with 7811 member participants. Today, Koko has a Twitter account (@kokotweets), a Facebook page, a YouTube channel and a website where users watch videos of Koko celebrating birthdays and donate to ‘distant’ conservation projects. One project site is a gorilla reserve in Cameroon and another is a former pineapple plantation turned private nature preserve in Maui, Hawai’i. Inspired by recent analytical work in animal geographies and feminist political ecology, this article explores complex landscapes of caring, aging and conservation in a time of proliferating social media engagement from colonized sites of enduring privilege. The article argues that new media adds layers of violence, disciplinary techniques and co-dependence to the aging bodies, caring practices and landscapes that Koko, Patterson and others inhabit in California and in the proposed physical spaces of a repurposed pineapple field in Maui.