Hi Ben, can you summarise your research focus and talk about the ethical considerations that are most prominent in your work?

I'm a communication designer, and where traditional graphic designers might think about identity in terms of logos and branding, my research focuses more on the community, networks and infrastructures that we use to navigate and negotiate identity.

Being a designer is a much more entangled, global, networked role than it used to be. The way I’m investigating this is through what I call ‘sticking together’, which is both a process of making things by assembling parts such as collage, and building community as a way of exploring what designers can do.

For example, I'm collaborating with Dr Beccy Watson in the Carnegie School of Sport – along with Dr Carol Osborne and Emily Ankers in our Collage Collective – to research the identity and gendered representation of women climbers in the history of climbing. We've been using collage to visualise the roles of those women in the history of leisure, and thinking about community, through a process of sticking together.

For me, ethics is inherent in living, and integral to the practice of research. I find research that engages with community the most rewarding. And in this kind of research, we use a lot of participatory methods which are often built on top of explicitly ethical questions. So, it's not an add on, which it can sometimes feel like when you're told to fill in a form. But really, that thinking's there all along.

So, I see the bureaucratic layer of research ethics as a process and a system capturing a small snapshot of that much longer and continuous responsibility and process.

How central is ethical decision-making to your research practice, especially in arts-based projects?

Every research project is building a responsibility to, and relationship with, those it impacts including the general public. So, for me, even getting your research ethics information worded effectively is important. As an academic researcher, you’re not only part of your university and its reputational identity, you’re also contributing to the standing of academic research as a whole, and the trust that the public has in research.

Ethics encompasses many of the day-to-day aspects of my research – such as ensuring that if I’m working with somebody as a research participant, I’m allowing them to consent to that research, allowing them to withdraw, and thinking about what it means to hold in confidence the things that they tell you.

As an artist researcher, it could feel like the research ethics might only be addressed at the end. For example, if you're planning to make a theatre performance, then you might not consider some of that as research at the beginning. But I think artists are particularly attuned to questions of ethics. A lot of art practice is driven by trying to address issues of responsibility or ethics. So, I think artists are often ahead in their confidence to engage with the difficult ethical aspects of research.

I also think that the decisions around what research does or doesn't get funded, what does or doesn't get researched, how impact is shared, where the communities have voices - these things are also important parts of the research ethics process. And art and design are particularly engaged with that, and well equipped to do that kind of research.

Can you share an example of how you plan for and embed ethical considerations into your research projects?

In my recent research collaboration, Queer Joy as a Digital Good, we brought together a multi-disciplinary academic team to look at digital and physical spaces in which queer joy can thrive, and how these are aligned with digital good - however you might define that term. It was a broad project, combining systematic data collection and arts-based workshops, which have some different ethical considerations.

• We pre-registered the study, to show what we were setting out to test with the survey.
• In producing a survey to be shared online, we considered how to reach our target audience of queer, online social media users and how to collect that data and carefully hold it in a way that allowed a large set of people to respond, with some sensitive data.
• We archived our survey as anonymised open data so that future researchers might build further on it.
• With a small group of people meeting for the arts workshops, we had to think about our responsibilities to the research participants. Planning for the day meant thinking about how to make people comfortable with taking part in the research, which was, again, collaging as a way of sticking together with our ideas.
• It was important to us to pay participants a living wage, make sure their travel was covered, and to ensure that the consent process was properly documented and meaningful. We were asking people to talk quite intimately about what it means to them to communicate online. When people are sharing in quite a care-focussed workshop, they might forget that we're documenting what they say, and we're going to reflect on it later in a much more public forum, like a paper. So, we were careful to communicate that to participants.
• Because we were using art methods, we also wanted people to be able to claim their work. We built in an option for people to either claim ownership of the collaging that they were making, and put their name to it, or to anonymise their work.

Although looking at templates and best practice is a great place to start, the little bit of work that you need to do in planning your ethics process requires thinking about the specifics of your participants, what consent means, what the method entails, and how anonymous they're going to be. There isn’t one set of rules; but you need to make it clear to participants what they're getting into and what the longer-term implications of that are.

In your experience, how do ethical approaches in arts-based research differ from those in STEM or more traditional research fields?

I've studied and undertaken research in both arts and physics so have experience on both sides, and in between. In terms of research ethics, in physics, you may be working with novel materials with no human participants, but the learning you produce could have implications that affect others, for example in medical sensing or drug development. Fundamental research often turns up in places you’re not expecting it until you do it. And this can all be true for the arts as well.

Where you're not necessarily thinking about human participants, the bureaucratic layer of ethics may not apply as much as in something like psychology for example, where an experimental technique is applied to human participants, this is where processes of informed consent and data protection are maybe the most clear cut and rigorously set out.

In science subjects, there can also be deep ethical considerations around what the research you’re doing makes possible. In physics, researchers have long been ethically responsible for, and implicated in, the potential development and horror of weapons and nuclear capability for example. So, part of the research ethics process is to remind us to reflect and act on the longer-term implications of the research that we're doing.

In arts practice, where you’re making something, you may not always see the people you’re working with as research participants. They might be people in the audience of a performance rather than being experimented on. But there may be some part of that process that is research. As arts practitioners, we're often thinking about the broader ethical implications beyond research ethics, into ethics and society. And so, the arts can speak to questions that some lab-based scientists maybe don't necessarily think of.

Are there any resources, frameworks, training or communities that have helped you to develop and refine your ethical practice?

Engaging in the university’s research ethics policy and procedures themselves has been a good framework and structure for starting my ethical thinking. Looking at a template of a consent form, for example, or thinking about whether you have a power dynamic with the research participants that may need spelling out specifically – all of these questions, templates and forms are the scaffolding that allows you to think in an ordered process, and I find that really useful.

Personally, a lot of my perspective on research ethics comes from the theorist Karen Barad, who writes explicitly about how you cannot separate ethics from the other parts of your work and the world you are part of. You can’t choose whether or not to do ethics. Their book, Meeting the Universe Halfway, has been a really important framework for me.

Some disciplines have established ethical frameworks that come from their own communities of practice, for example psychology or the NHS. You can find carefully written resources, which I often turn to. For example, in the arts, when we're thinking about doing research with children participants, by turning to places like psychology, we can learn best practice, for example about seeking consent.

What are the key ethical questions you would recommend researchers think about when they first begin planning a new study?

Our ethics policy and procedures are very clear that you cannot start collecting data until you have considered the research ethics that will underpin that process. They say there's no way to go back later on and seek forgiveness. It can sometimes be complicated to define where the research starts. But what we're really talking about is working with human participants – our responsibilities to the living world around us – and where we begin to encounter the possibility of research ethics risk.

For me, the things to consider at the start are procedural. So, as you begin to think about how you're going to conduct the research, that brings with it a set of methodological considerations. And those methods bring conventions around good research ethics. So, you don't have to do all of your research ethics thinking all in one go - you can follow the method planning, and it will guide you to think about things like consent, and how you're going to treat people with care.

The wider implications of our research are harder to document, but do come up a lot in my conversations with colleagues. When we’re presenting at conferences, or considering the longer-term implications of our research, this is a less bureaucratic process but still an integral part of the ethical considerations that we need to think about from before the start and after the end. The processes and templates that exist are helpful to step through procedurally and see what other people have done previously, and your research community and field engage ethics more widely so that you’re not having to make all these considerations yourself – you can follow existing good practice, while also shaping this practice for the future.

LBU colleagues and students can find more information guidance and templates around research ethics on our Research and Enterprise staff website; and Student Information website.

LBU Research Voices is a blog series that celebrates the experiences, journeys, and expertise of our LBU research community. Through this series, we explore the knowledge our researchers have gained, not just from their work, but from their lived experiences, career paths, and the communities they engage with. By sharing their stories, we hope to inspire learning, reflection, and connection across our LBU research culture.

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