Practising ethics by Jane Rendell

1. Michel Foucault, “Morality and Practice of the Self,” The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, translated by Robert Hurley, (New York: Vintage Books, [1984] 1990).  

Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality is a three volume work, comprising La volonté de savoir (1976) or An Introduction (1978); L'usage des plaisirs (1984) or The Use of Pleasure (1985); and Le souci de soi (1984) and The Care of the Self (1986). Originally envisioned as a work on the history of sexuality, the project shifted in the early 1980s, after the publication of the first volume, to focus on practices of confession. The work became a study of “technologies of the self,” exploring the history of self-care in ancient Greece and Rome, with a fourth volume on the early Christianity still possibly destined for publication. In his 11th seminar at the College de France, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, (January – March 1982), Foucault focuses on the relation of “care of the self” (epimeleia heautou) and self-knowledge or “know thyself” (gnothi seauton), in order to better understand the relation between subjectivity and truth. He develops this in his study of self-care in ancient Greece and Rome, paying attention to the practice of parrhesia, of speaking truth to power, delivered in lectures through 1982 and 1983: in the universities of Grenoble (18 May 1982) – “Parrhesia;” Toronto (May – June 1982) – “Care of the Self;” Vermont (Autumn 1982) – “Technologies of the Self;” Berkeley (12 April 1983) –  “Culture of the Self’” Berkeley (10 October – 30 November 1983) – “Discourse and Truth;” as well as the 12th and 13th seminars in Paris, The Government of Self and Others (1983) and finally The Courage of Truth (1984).

It is in the third part of the introduction to The Use of Pleasure, “Morality and Practice of the Self,” that Foucault condenses most succinctly his understanding of ethics as forms of practice. “Morality” for Foucault is both a “prescriptive ensemble,” a set of values and rules of actions that are recommended in the form of a moral rules or codes, and the “real behaviour” enacted by individuals in relation to these rules, whether as forms of confirmation or divergence from the rule. It is the manner in which an individual conducts themselves with respect to moral rules or codes that for Foucault constitutes the “ethical subject,” and he sees this as having four aspects. Foucault calls the ways in which individuals form parts of themselves as the “prime material” of their “moral conduct,” the “determination of the ethical substance,” while the “mode of subjection (mode d'assujettissement)” is a term he uses to refer to the way in which individuals position themselves in relation to the rule or code, and their obligation to put such a rule into practice. These differences in how an individual might carry out or “elaborate” “ethical work” in relation to a rule is for Foucault, “an attempt to transform oneself into the ethical subject of one's behaviour.”

So when moral action is conducted in relation to a rule it is set not only within a specific reality but also in relation to the self. This does not simply mean that the individual needs to develop self-awareness, but that an individual is required to transform themselves in an ethical subject. This is a practice which involves acting on oneself, an askesis, or self-training, that includes processes of monitoring, testing, and improvement. So this third aspect involves the ways in which individuals can perform work on themselves – “elaboration, of ethical work (travail éthique)” – in order to become ethical subjects. This self-forming activity Foucault calls “pratique de soi.”

Finally, the fourth aspect of Foucault’s understand of ethics as a practice is the “telos,”  a term that describes the kind of being an individual aspires to when carrying out this ethical work on the self.

There is …  no moral conduct that does not call for the forming of oneself as an ethical subject; and no forming of the ethical subject without “modes of subjectivation” and an “ascetics” or “practices of the self” that support them.

For Foucault, a genealogy of ethics then, involves studying the actions of specific individuals or groups in relation to moral codes, rules, and values, and considering how relations with the self and developed through self-reflection, self-knowledge, and self-examination. In The Use of Pleasure he does this with respect to Ancient Greece and “the three austerity themes of the code: health, wives or women, and boys.” This involves a history of both ethics and ascetics – “a history of the forms of moral subjectivation and of the practices of self that are meant to ensure it.” And the potential of the four characteristics of ethical practice that he sets out – determination of the ethical substance, mode of subjection, ethical work, and telos – is that they can used as an interpretative lens to study practices of ethics in other historical and cultural contexts.

2. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).

Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself developed out of seminar series at Princeton University in autumn 2001, a lecture series for the Spinoza Lectures for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in spring 2002, and the Adorno Lectures for the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt in autumn 2002. The book is divided into three sections. The first “An Account of Oneself,” takes the reader through a study of scenes of address via Michael Foucault and G. W. F. Hegel, to ask “who are you?” The second, which argues against ethical violence, explores the limits of judgement, and through psychoanalysis, the dialogic relation of “I” and “you.” Finally the third section comprises an examination of responsibility through the work of Jean Laplanche and Emmanuel Levinas on the primacy of the other, Theodor Adorno on becoming human, and Foucault in terms of his critical account of himself.

The overarching question addressed through Giving an Account of Oneself is: “how it might be possible to pose the question of moral philosophy … within a social frame?” (p. 3) a question, which Butler understands not only to refer to those moral questions that emerge in the context of social relations, but also how “the form these questions take changes according to context.” Following Foucault’s interest in how the subject forms itself in relation to moral codes, she understands self-formation as a form of poiesis or making, but also how this poiesis can test the limits of critique.

There is no making of oneself (poiesis) outside of a mode of subjectivation (assujettisement) and, hence, no self-making outside of the norms that orchestrate the possible forms that a subject may take. (p. 17)

For Butler the construction of subjectivity through ethical deliberation is bound up with the operation of critique. She considers how the deliberating subject lives or appropriates sets of “norms,” arguing that “the ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation – or set of relations – to a set of norms.” Butler also notes that: “If the ‘I’ is not at one with moral norms,” this means that “the subject must deliberate upon these norms,” and that part of such a deliberation will “entail a critical understanding” of the social genesis and meaning of those norms. In this sense, in Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler shows how “ethical deliberation is bound up with the operation of critique.” (p. 8) She understands that while the norm does not produce the subject, nor is the subject free to disregard the norm that “inaugurates its reflexibility.” (p. 19) This struggle between being produced by the world, while also working to produce oneself is an action that, for her, takes place always in relation to others. And here Giving an Account of Oneself moves beyond a Foucauldian position to wonder how – if the “postulation” of the subject is not self-grounding, and can never be fully accounted for – it is possible to be responsible for giving an account of oneself.

Butler suggests that certain accounts of Hegel argue that the subject “assimilates” the other, and she explores instead, following Levinas and Hannah Arendt, the possibilities of a subjectivity created by exposure and vulnerability to the other. Butler points to the work of Italian feminist philosopher, Adriana Cavarero, who proposes that we are exposed to the other from the start, and that it is this very exposure, which is the condition for political and social life. For Cavarero, our desire to have our life story narrated by another demonstrates the role of a pre-existing other as foundational to the formation of the subject. Butler suggests that Cavarero turns around the usual progression from the early dyad to social relations, and instead “ground[s] the social in the dyadic encounter.”(p. 32)  While Cavarero gives a philosophical account of how the external other situates the subject, Butler also draws upon psychoanalysis and looks at the role of the “enigmatic signifier” in the formation of subjectivity in the work of Jean Laplanche. For Laplanche it is via impressions of and from the other, that the unconscious is established in the subject. The other without creates another within, one that can never be fully understood – “a foreignness that is ours, without ever belonging to us.”  Butler concludes that to be undone by another is a condition of being human, and that it is precisely “our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human.” (p. 136).

3. Nigel Thrift, “Practising Ethics,” in Michael Pryke, Gillian Rose and Sarah Whatmore eds, Using Social Theory: Thinking through Research (London: Sage Publications, 2011), 105–21.

In this essay written for a collection that explores how the theoretical insights of social science can be used to guide the practice of carrying out research through fieldwork, the cultural geographer Nigel Thrift examines the ethical encounters that occur in fieldwork in three ways. He first explores an ethical fieldwork dilemma through a researcher’s experience with reference to classic ethnographical text. Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977) is an autobiographical publication in which Rabinow reflects on examples of misunderstandings that took place during his doctoral fieldwork in the Magreb, and his subsequent move to establish “commonplaces” between researching and researched subjects. Thrift discusses Rabinow’s text as an example of an early piece of anthropological fieldwork that stages critical reflections concerning the cultural context of research and the colonial history positioning researching and researched subject. It is when Rabinow confronts an informant, Ben Mohammed, in order to address some unspoken cultural tensions which exist between them, due to Rabinow’s status as an outsider, that the relationship shifts and it becomes possible to create a “commonplace” between them.

Thrift then turns to look more theoretically at the work on ethics by Benedictus de Spinoza to explore how “we might use philosophy to begin to think through some of the dilemmas of encounter,” in particular, in this case, how affect and imagination can create possibilities in and through fieldwork encounters. For Thrift, by reading the ethics of the research relationship between Rabinow and Ben Mohammed through Spinoza, it is possible to understand that these two “were able to perform a space of thoughtfulness and imagination.” Thrift suggests that it is through “the kinds of method that can stretch expression” such as those from performance and “three-way psychotherapy (in which the researcher and the researched are moderated by a third party who both acts as a witness and an adjudicator)” that the practice of ethics in fieldwork can be transformed.

In the last part of the paper, Thrift moves to explore the challenges that the current audit culture of university ethics committees poses for this kind of work. He describes the issues around the audit culture of academic ethics in terms of what he calls “delayers in virtue.” He offers a strong critique of this audit culture, through which he posits, academic labour has been opened up to ethical scrutiny or an “audit of virtue.” Thrift outlines how by “stressing correct ethical stances,” enforced by professionals, ethics itself has become a “highly articulated transnational form.” The concentration for this, he writes, is the “Research Ethics Committee,” which he argues is focused on bioethics developed out of two historical contexts –  “the so-called Nuremburg code on ethical research on human beings that was drawn up at the Nuremburg trials following the Second World War as a counter to the numerous atrocities committed by Nazi doctors in the name of science,” as well as “various scandals in US biomedical research in the 1960s and 1970s … such as the discovery in 1972 that doctors in Tuskegee, Alabama, had withheld treatment for syphilis from roughly 400 black men since the 1930s in order to document their symptoms.”

While recognising and respecting the importance of these two contexts, Thrift explains that as a result, the “ubiquitous” ethics committee now aims to screen all medical research for its ethical consequences for “human subjects” in terms of “possible risk, evidence of consent, efficacy of selection of subjects and privacy and confidentiality.” While he agrees that issues of informed consent, deception, privacy, and respect for local cultural values are important, Thrift raises questions about what happens when this “bio-ethical apparatus” is transferred into social sciences, and other disciplines which use qualitative methodologies. He points out, that what counts as ethical practice may in these other disciplines be something be very different, and that the field differs from the closed condition of the hospital or lab for which these rules and regulations are intended to be applied. This situation, Thrift claims, produces a “double ethical compromise,” in which, on the one hand, a normative regime takes responsibility away from the research, while on the other “promot[es] an arrogation of responsibility.” But despite recognising this challenging context and that the social science disciplines might require a different conceptualisation of ethical research practice, Thrift ends with a sense of hope. He suggests that it is in “develop[ing] both spaces and dispositions in the field (such as knowing when to wait for a response, knowing when and when not to foreclose a situation, knowing when to be playful and when to be serious, and so on)” that the ethical possibilities of encounters can be opened out. It is these through situations, he suggests, that both researching and researched subjects learn to trust their judgement, and in this way, by taking on responsibilities, that ethical subjectivities can expand.

4. Hilde Lindemann, An Invitation to Feminist Ethics, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

In this excellent introductory text, Hilde Lindemann gives a clear account of ethics as the scholarly study of morality. She distinguishes between three branches of ethics as an academic discipline: firstly, metaethics, or the study of morality; secondly, normative ethics, or the study of moral theories and concepts, for example, an ethics of care, social contract theory, utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and virtue ethics, as well as key ethical principles, such as integrity, justice, and evil; and thirdly, practical ethics, which include the study of ethical issues as they appear in specific situations or practices, with examples, such as legal ethics, medical ethics, professional ethics, and business ethics.

Lindemann does not position feminist ethics in any of these categories, rather she understands feminist ethics as an approach which crosses all three categories because it is a “way of doing ethics.” She gives examples of how a feminist ethics can be positioned in any of these three branches. Her definition of feminism is neither focused on equality or differences, but rather on power, and “the pattern, widespread across cultures and history, that distributes power assymetrically to favour men over women.” This means, for Lindemann, that the focus of feminist ethics is to understand, criticize, and correct how gender operates within moral and ethical systems, to produce theories about relations of unequal power, and to look at the forms of power required for morality to operate in the first place.

An Invitation to Feminist Ethics is divided into two parts – “Overviews” and “Close-ups.” In “Overviews” Lindemann distinguishes between feminist and nonfeminist ethics; gives an overview of the essential concepts feminist ethicists use, for example, gender neutrality, andocentricism, difference, and oppression; looks at intersectionality from a feminist and ethical perspective, and accounts of personal identities and gender-sensitive theory; provides a feminist critique of universalistic ethical theory; and finally puts forward an overview of feminist moral theory by focusing on an ethics of care and an ethics of responsibility. “Close-ups” explores three cases studies of feminist ethics in action: the first through bioethics, a second via a feminist ethical analysis of violence, and in the third an examination of ethics through a cross-cultural globalised and economic perspective. An Invitation to Feminist Ethics provides not only a feminist critique of normative ethical theory, but also some excellent examples of feminist ethical theory and detailed discussions of how a feminist approach to ethics works in practice.

5. Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically Important Moments’ in Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 10, no. 2 (2004): 261–80.

In this paper, Australian researchers of medical science, Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, examine the relationship between reflexivity and research ethics set within a framework in which they make a distinction between two different “dimensions of ethics in research.” These are procedural ethics or “ethics-committee speak,” and “ethics in practice,” which they argue is located in the everyday life of carrying out the research. This can include apparently tangential unrelated or minor issues which none the less can impact on the ability of the researcher to conduct their research ethically. Guillemin and Gillam focus on what they call the “ethically important moments” that arise during the “doing” of research – “the difficult, often subtle, and usually unpredictable situations that arise in the practice of doing research.” Following Komesaroff (1995), who noted a disjuncture between “between ‘big issue’ bioethics and everyday ethics in clinical practice,”  Guillemin and Gillam use the term “micro-ethics” to refer to the ethical aspects of everyday research practice.

Following an account of the way in which institutional ethical codes have been established for research, mainly for medical research at a national level in the US and Australia, Guillemin and Gillam argue that such ethical procedures have been “imposed on qualitative research from the outside.” They do not see this as a reason to understand procedural ethics as destructive to research, but rather they suggest that this kind of ethics only goes so far. For example, procedural ethics can be helpful initially in providing a checklist for ensuring that when a research project is designed the methods to be used will be “broadly acceptable” from an ethical perspective. Yet when the research is actually being conducted, they note the limits of these procedures, and run through the short comings of a series of ethical principles enshrined in ethics procedures – respect for persons, beneficence, autonomy, and informed consent – to demonstrate these limits.

Here Guillemin and Gillam note that while micro-ethics is helpful as a “discursive tool” for “articulating” and “validating” the “kinds of ethical issues that confront researchers on a day-to-day basis,” micro-ethics also has its limits for “addressing and dealing with issues” when they arise. It is here, in the need for “a process and a way of thinking that will actually lead to ethical research practice,” that Guillemin and Gillam locate the “important role for reflexivity.” Guillemin and Gillam describe the ethical dilemmas or concerns that mark an important “ethical dimension” in the decision-making that takes place in day to day research practice in terms of “situations in which there is a stark choice between different options.” They discuss how it is in the process of negotiating these dilemmas, and their relation to institutional ethical procedures, that a degree of reflexivity on the researcher’s part is called for:

Although reflexivity is a familiar concept in the qualitative tradition, we suggest that it has not previously been seen as an ethical notion. We propose that reflexivity is a helpful conceptual tool for understanding both the nature of ethics in qualitative research and how ethical practice in research can be achieved. (pp. 262–3)

Guillemin and Gillam understand research as an “enterprise of knowledge construction,” an active process engaged in producing knowledge, involving “scrutiny, reflection, and interrogation of the data.” According to Guillemin and Gillam, for researchers to practice their research as a reflexive process, is to – and here they follow Mason (1996) – “constantly take stock of their actions and their role in the research process and subject these to the same critical scrutiny as the rest of their “data,” as well as to “actively interpret” rather than “report” their findings. They refer to to Pierre Bourdieu’s summary of the reflexive process and how it comprises the need to take two steps back from the subject of the research – first to ask “what do I know?” and then “how do I know?”

Reflexivity in research is thus a process of critical reflection both on the kind of knowledge produced from research and how that knowledge is generated. (p. 274)

Guillemin and Gillam argue then that reflexivity in research is an ethical notion rather than a way of ensuring rigour.

Adopting a reflexive research process means a continuous process of critical scrutiny and interpretation, not just in relation to the research methods and the data but also to the researcher, participants, and the research context. (p. 275)

They summarise that reflexivity could contribute to ethical research practice in three ways: first, by acknowledging micro-ethics; second, by being sensitive to the “ethically-important moments;” and third, by being able to address and deal with ethical concerns as they arise. Coming from biomedical research, Guillemin and Gillam ask whether there are “theoretical resources within the tradition of qualitative research for dealing with ethical aspects of research practice or whether these resources must be drawn from elsewhere,” and note the lack of conceptual tools for articulating ethical issues and “making sense” of them (p. 265) as well as the need to relate reflexivity to ethical practice in research.

6. Kate MacNeill and Barbara Bolt (eds), The Meeting of Aesthetics and Ethics in the Academy: Challenges for Creative Practice Researchers in Higher Education (London: Routledge, 2020).

This collection of essays comes out of the research project, Developing new approaches to ethics and research integrity training through challenges posed by Creative Practice Research, funded by the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching, located at the University of Melbourne, but involving researchers and artists from across Australia, and the related iDARE website (https://idare.vca.unimelb.edu.au/) project. The book, edited by Kate MacNeill and Barbara Bolt, explores “the  question of what happens when creative practice become research and is subject to institutional research frameworks and protocols including ethical oversights of creative-practice research projects.” The essays in the volume address the challenge, for creative practitioners, in addressing university ethics regulations, and offer different ways to make this possible. In so doing the volume sets itself to navigate a territory between creative-practice research (often called practice-led or practice-based research in the UK) and institutional ethics. The editors provide a helpful introduction to the ways in which creative practice came to be located in the Australian university, as well as how ethics procedures were developed out of medical science-based models.

MacNeill and Bolt set the specifics of the encounter between creative practice research and university ethics procedures in terms of the “strong tension” that exists between models of art on the one hand, and art as research on the other. Given that many artists understand the need for art to retain an edge condition from where it is able to offer a social critique and to “test and trouble society’s ethical and moral boundaries,” MacNeill and Bolt suggest that the need to conform to normative ethical principles, such as beneficence, sits in direct contradiction to the desire to question those principles. Drawing on the distinction Jacques Ranciere makes between an aesthetic practice and an ethical practice, they argue that the aim of conforming to the dominant ethos of the community in which artists are located sits in conflict with questions of aesthetic freedom. MacNeill and Bolt note how art has often been positioned in terms of an “aesthetic alibi,” a principle that gives it exemption from “normal social and legal constraints,” and thus as somehow set apart from everyday life. They highlight how the disjuncture between the context of the university, where art is expected to conform to ethical norms, and the world outside the university, where art can often be granted this special role, can set up a situation which is difficult for creative-practice researchers to negotiate.

MacNeill and Bolt underscore the importance for creative-practice researchers to “develop their own sense of ethics.” They point to the work of Pia Ednie Brown who has drawn attention to Francesco Varela’s notion of “ethical know-how” as providing a helpful framework for thinking through and addressing ethical dilemmas, and for making “judgement calls.” Ethical know-how features as a core conceptual tool for creative-practice researchers dealing with ethical concerns, one that MacNeill and Bolt describe as “situated, improvisational and spontaneous and grounded in immediacy” like creative practice itself. For Ednie Brown this “involves behaving with sensitivity to the particularities of the situation.” The essays in the book all circulate around how it is possible to develop an ethical creative-practice that can operate both in and outside the university setting, starting with those which explore the contexts in which creative-practice research is situated explicitly, followed by those focused on specific case studies.

7. Farhana Sultana, “Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 6, n. 3, 374–85. 

In this paper Farhana Sultana explores “the critical disjunctures between aspects of everyday behaviour in the field and the University’s institutional frameworks that aim to guide/enforce good ethical practice,” set within the context of research conducted in the Global South. Noting that the practice of fieldwork is always “contextual, relational, embodied, and politicized,” Sultana draws on her international fieldwork experience, to argue that such concerns are even more important in the “context of multiple axes of difference, inequalities, and geopolitics.” In addition, she argues that it is even more important to pay attention to issues of reflexivity, positionality, and power relations when undertaking ethical and participatory research. Sultana points to specific tensions that are produced when ethical procedures generated in the Global North are applied to research conducted in the Global South. She suggests that it is “imperative that ethical concerns should permeate the entire process of the research, from conceptualization to dissemination,” particularly because of the histories of colonialism, development, and globalization that researchers need to pay attention to and to negotiate ethically in the field. Acknowledging that an “over-concern about positionality and reflexivity” has “plagued” some critical/feminist scholars, in some cases “paralyzing” some scholars from actually conducting international fieldwork, she discusses how the problem of “representation” further compounds the problem, as research realise that they may end up “speaking for” others, and “writing about” rather than “writing with” their participants.

Sultana provides an excellent overview of how ethical participatory research has been debated and the methodologies adopted by a range of feminist geographers. She explores how these papers have emphasized non-hierarchical intersections, understanding, and mutual learning, and paid close attention to how the ways in which data is gathered can be embedded in unequal power relations between the researcher and researched subject. Sultana notes that while “reflexivity” has been described as “navel-gazing,” she finds that the work of being reflexive about one’s own positionality is not self-indulgent, but allows the opportunity to consider how one is – as a researcher – “inserted in grids of knowledge production,” and so already situated in terms of the making of relations with participants. For Sultana, reflexivity is vital in opening up research to more complex and nuanced understandings of issues, especially in situations where the boundaries between content and process are blurred. She emphasizes the importance of being reflexive right from the start of the research process. Understanding the importance of reflexivity for “situating the research and knowledge production so that ethical commitments can be maintained,” Sultana notes how when reflexive research is conducted, “ethics are then shifted away from the strict codes of institutional paperwork, towards moral and mutual relations with a commitment to conducting ethical and respectful research that minimizes harm.” Having set out the importance of reflexivity for ethical research practice from a conceptual perspective, Sultana’s paper then goes on to explore how this works in practice by focusing on an example of her own research. Here she examines the gendered/classed implications of access to water, with specific reference to the implications of a drinking water crisis from arsenic contamination of groundwater sources in rural Bangladesh.

8. Lee Ann Fujii, “Research Ethics 101: Dilemmas and Responsibilities,” Political Science and Politics 45, n. 4 (October 2012): 717–23.

In this paper, the late political scientist Lee Ann Fujii discusses how “over-concern about positionality and reflexivity appear to have paralyzed some scholars into avoiding fieldwork,” while fears of research “perpetuating neo-colonial representations,” as well as (mis)representation and (in)authenticity, “have led to a general withdrawal from fieldwork in the Global South.” She commences the paper by noting how the emphasis on “procedural ethics” in the political sciences has “led to a neglect of how researchers should consider and study participants” from the design to the publication stage, and calls for a sustained discussion of research ethics across the field. Fujii argues that “ethics should matter to everyone,” not just those who conduct fieldwork; that “ethics is an ongoing responsibility,” not just a checklist; and that ethics matters in all kinds of political science research because political science involves “human subjects.” She notes that over concern with procedural ethics has led to, or “perhaps even enabled – a neglect of ‘ethics in practice.’”

Fujii’s concern is that if researchers do not pay attention to ethical concerns then they may end up causing harm –social, physical, and psychological – to research participants and collaborators, especially when dealing with sensitive issues and working in conflict zones. Fujii draws attention to the three guiding principles for research used in the US – “respect for persons,” “beneficence,” and “justice” – all of which she describes as sound. However, at the same time, she finds these principles problematic because they cannot always be translated into research, and as such, they run the risk of ending up as meaningless acts of compliance if participants do not understand the processes to which they are consenting. And more importantly the principles may often sit in conflict with participant ethics. Drawing on her own research experiences with “vulnerable populations,” when examining political violence in rural Rwanda, she goes on to discuss a set of common ethical dilemmas in terms of power, proximity, and publication.

9. Liz Bondi, “Empathy and identification: conceptual resources for feminist Fieldwork,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 2, n. 1 (2003): 64–76.

In this paper feminist geographer and psychoanalyst Liz Bondi introduces “psychoanalytic conceptualisations of identification and empathy as ways of thinking about fieldwork interactions,” arguing that they both have key relevance for reflecting on relationships between researchers and those that they research. She notes that these concepts have special relevance for feminist geography in “relation to debates about power and positionality in qualitative fieldwork.” I would argue that their relevance extends to fieldwork in many other social science disciplines as well as, and that due to the relational qualities of participatory research in the humanities and practice-led disciplines, understandings of identification and empathy are vital for researchers to grasp.

Bondi focuses on the potential for confusion when the boundaries between the researcher and researched subject – self and other – become blurred. She draws on object relations psychoanalysis to consider how identification operates in interpersonal relationships through unconscious processes of introjection and projection, and discusses empathy as a concept understood in psychoanalysis in terms of how unconscious material can be transferred from one person to another via processes of “receiving, processing, and making available.” Bondi argues that “empathy is mobilised in many research relationships,” and that conceptualising it through psychoanalysis can be helpful for understanding more clearly what is occurring in the dynamic of the relation at an emotional level. Bondi sees empathy as “entailing an oscillation between observation and participation which creates psychic space or room to manoeuvre,” and “that it provides a way of understanding other people’s experiences in the context of both similarities and differences between researchers and research subjects.”

10. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

When Sara Ahmed resigned from Goldsmith’s College London in 2016 due to alleged issues of sexual harassment at the university that she argued she not had the support to tackle adequately, it drew the attention of feminists around the world. Her book Living a Feminist Life, a development of her influential blog, feminist killjoy, has been a rigorous reminder that the work of feminists in opposing sexual, racial, and class discrimination is far from over. Through the figure of the “feminist killjoy,” Ahmed’s book makes theory out of her own life story and those “sweaty concepts” that have emerged from her experiences. In so doing, she offers tools and a manifesto for other feminists seeking to challenge forms of domination.

Ahmed references the work of women of colour writers such as Audre Lourde, bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldúa who also position themselves and reflect upon their personal experiences in relation to structural systems of oppression, and whose writing works to draw theoretical insight out of everyday life. I understand the writing of these women to show the role that writing one’s life can play in self-making – in renegotiating the relation one has, as Michel Foucault or Judith Butler would have it, to social norms. In her other philosophical writing, Ahmed both draws on life experience to illustrate conceptual points, and develops theoretical arguments out of affective engagements, but this book is perhaps the most explicit example of the role of “life-writing” in her work to date, and makes for interesting reading in relation to the blog itself. Where the feminist killjoy blog is often quite a raw account, almost confessional in its sharing of events as they unfold, Living a Feminist Life, delivers fascinating insights that have benefitted from a slower gestation, allowing the reader to contemplate the way in which both written works “give an account of oneself” in differing ways, and together provide a practice of ethics.

Ethical issues in the context of global inequalities by Yael Padan

1. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples / Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Zed Books/University of Otago Press, 1999. 

This is a powerful analysis of the imperial and colonial roots of western knowledge production through research conducted in indigenous communities. Tuhiwai Smith highlights the contradictory understanding of what constitutes knowledge, what needs to be known and whose knowledge is valued, as she critically examines western research through the eyes of the colonised. In her call to decolonise the academy, Tuhiwai Smith lists 25 key words and terms, describing indigenous research projects. These projects highlight alternative research methodologies alongside more established ones, which together suggest what decolonised ethics of research might look like: claiming, testimonies, story-telling, celebrating survival, remembering, indigenising and indigenist processes, intervening, revitalising and regenerating, connecting, reading, writing and theory making, representing, gendering, protecting, creating, negotiating, discovering the beauty of our knowledge, and sharing. 

2. Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford University Press, 2006. 

In this book, Held discusses the ethics of care as a moral theory or normative approach that is relevant to relations at the personal as well as at the political and global scales. She explores the feminist roots of the ethics of care, and analyses the meaning of ‘care’ and of a caring person. She reviews care ethics in relation to other approaches to ethics, such as Kantian morality and utilitarianism, which assume a universal moral code, and virtue ethics, which focus on virtues of individuals. Unlike these approaches, care ethics highlight the centrality of relationalities and emphasise caring relations that go beyond individual traits. Held argues that care is central to society, and that market thinking and logic must be resisted when developing public policies concerning care, since caring relations in many ways contradict market values and liberal individualistic views. Held further explores social connectedness in relation to issues of global inequality. She discusses civil society in terms of caring relations, and its importance in fostering global international civility.

3. Tronto, Joan C. ‘Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics.’ Ethics and Social Welfare: Gender Justice, vol. 6, no. 3, 2012, pp. 303–16. 

Tronto discusses global justice, and the difficulties of holding people in high income countries responsible for harm done in low income countries, from the point of view of care ethics. She suggests that responsibility be understood relationally, rather than as a commitment which grows out of moral principles. She argues that because responsibility often involves power inequalities, ‘responsibility relationships’ are created which extend beyond national boundaries. Individuals in the global north may not intend to cause harm elsewhere, or may not be aware of the consequences of their actions and of the legacy of colonialism, but they are nevertheless responsible for harm caused by their states, corporations and other institutions. Tronto argues that a relational account allows individuals and institutions to consider these harms in terms of their participation in political life, and to understand the various levels of global responsibility as relationships of care and commitments.

4. Young, Iris Marion. ‘Responsibility and Global Justice: a Social Connection Model.’ Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 23, no. 1, 2006, pp. 102–30. 

In this article Young discusses global injustice caused by harmful transnational structural processes. These processes are characterised in many cases by collective results that were unintended, and have negative consequences. Young argues that these global social processes connect individuals across political borders, and therefore they entail obligations of justice. She uses the global production of clothes as a case for demonstrating and discussing the ethical responsibilities of consumers from the global north who partake in the formation of unjust structural processes by purchasing clothes that were produced in the global south under conditions of oppression. These consumers therefore have an ethical obligation to resolve these injustices. Young argues that her model of social connection is preferable to the more conventional ‘liability model,’ which seeks to find who is to be blamed and who is guilty for injustice. While this model is useful for legal action against institutions or governments, it is unproductive in relation to individuals who unintentionally contribute to global injustice. Through her social connection model, Young argues that this type of responsibility derives not from legal culpability but rather ‘from belonging together with others in a system of interdependent processes’ (p. 119) which we must work collectively to change.

5. Kalinga, Chisomo. ‘Caught between a Rock and a Hard Place: Navigating Global Research Partnerships in the Global South as an Indigenous Researcher.’ Journal of African Cultural Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 2019, pp. 270–72. 

In this short article Kalinga raises crucial issues that emerge in global collaborative research projects funded and led by partners from the global north. Although such collaborations involve local partner researchers, Kalinga describes the complex relationships that she has experienced as an African scholar in such frameworks, both with local communities and research participants, and with academic research partners from the global north. She stresses that long and complicated trust-building processes with communities often contradict with the limited time frames of output-driven projects, which place undulating pressures on local or indigenous researchers. Power inequalities within project teams are coupled with the lack of familiarity of researchers from the global north with local languages, cultural and social norms, resulting not only in compromised research findings but also in ignoring the reservations voiced by local research partners. Kalinga rejects the necessity to advance research projects at the expense of building relationship of trust and respect with local communities, and calls for rethinking global research partnerships in light of these problems. 

6. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Routledge, 2014. 

This inspiring book challenges western-centric understandings of the world by arguing that ‘cognitive justice’ must be reached before global social justice can be achieved. By challenging western cognitive domination, de Sousa Santos argues that transformation is not possible without an ‘epistemological break,’ a process of recognising and appreciating epistemic diversity and multiple knowledges. Such a process will allow for what he calls ‘postabyssal thinking,’ which valorises non-western forms of knowledge whose suppression lies in the core of social exclusion.  

In the second and third chapters, de Sousa Santos uses the format of a manifesto to present on one hand an ‘imagined voices of social movements,’ countered on the other hand by a ‘minifesto for intellectual-activists.’ This counterpoint mode is both evocative and provocative, highlighting the limitations of intellectual scholarship which is likely to reach critical scholars that have been trained in western intellectual traditions. 

7. Visweswaran, Kamala.  Fictions of Feminist Ethnography.  University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 

In this book, Visweswaran critically examines dominant ethnography and reflects on feminist ethnographic practices. Readers interested in research ethics, and particularly in addressing the epistemological consequences of power asymmetries, will greatly benefit from Chapter 6: ‘Feminist Ethnography as Failure.’ In this chapter Visweswaran describes an experience of a research interview that went wrong because of cultural misunderstanding and different expectations. Visweswaran suggests that such instances of ‘failure’ testify to a cognitive and epistemological crisis, but also provide an opportunity to recognise and acknowledge failure in order to allow for new kinds of positionings. She calls for engaging in ‘homework’ rather than ‘fieldwork’ as a means for decolonising anthropology. This type of ‘homework,’ she argues, is crucial for an epistemological terrain which reverses the idea of the anthropological journey, and redirects scrutiny towards the practices that construct the politics of location. 

8. Last, Angela. ‘Internationalisation and Interdisciplinarity: Sharing across Boundaries?’ In Decolonising the University, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, 201–23. Pluto Press, 2018. 

This is a chapter in an edited book which calls for decolonising the world's universities through the radical transformations of colonial structures that inform higher education. In this chapter Angela Last discusses the diversification of the curriculum. She points out that this process is, on one hand, a critical move towards ending racial exclusion, but on the other hand, it is part of the process of globalisation and internationalisation of universities, which is in turn tied to global economic market forces that also dictate international collaborative research projects. Last discusses these two contrasting approaches, and their implications on areas such as edited multi-author publications, international research collaborations, research across disciplines, and designing the curriculum. In all these contexts, she questions the possibilities of shared knowledge production in unequal contexts. She points out the problematic tendency of western researchers to regard theory as their territory, thus creating or enhancing competition and power relations. She suggests refusal as an alternative way of defining more ethical relationships, proposing that in this context refusal is care, and that ‘care-ful refusal’ can open ways towards sharing across boundaries.     

Built environment ethics by David Roberts

1. Who Builds Your Architecture? (Kadambari Baxi, Jordan Carver, Laura Diamond, Tiffany Rattray, Lindsey Wikstrom and Mabel O. Wilson), A Critical Field Guide (2017).

WBYA? is a coalition of architects, activists and educators who locate architecture within the atomised and dispersed transnational networks of the construction industry, connecting design and consulting practices to the workers who build them. They explain:

Since the 1970s, the liberalization of economies has propelled the movement of capital and labor to new markets around the world. These globalized connections of production have spawned economic lifelines, as families and home nations depend upon the remittances sent back by legions of migrant workers. As the number of workers seeking employment in other parts of the world has increased exponentially, so has their exploitation and abuse through predatory recruitment networks and unsavory employers seeking to maximize profit by reducing wages and expanding work hours. The construction industry has taken advantage of these labor trends by contracting seasonal and short-term workforces from abroad—a labor procurement practice ideal for the one-time-only, site-specific nature of building projects. Migrant construction workers often face unscrupulous conduct by recruitment firms, subcontractors, and local authorities—each jockeying to extract a bigger cut of the workers’ salaries.

Persistent problems with the recruitment process include exorbitant fees exacted from workers to secure a position abroad, as well as fraudulent representation of the type of work and level of compensation. On poorly managed job sites, migrant workers can be repeatedly exposed to dangerous working conditions. Construction companies and subcontractors seeking to limit expenditures often house thousands of men in poorly maintained, substandard accommodation that lacks basic amenities for food preparation and delivery, proper hygiene, and reliable climate control in regions with scorching temperatures.

A Critical Field Guide introduces these entangled issues through a series of tools, from a global labour lexicon explaining contracts and laws to case studies revealing migrant worker conditions. The Field Guide provides an outline to how architects can advocate and act to better the conditions of workers employed in building their designs including: expanded site surveys that observe poor labour practices, architectural drawings and documents to improve construction practices, a roster of all workers involved in constructing a building, a boycott of abusive contractors or subcontracts, and a refusal of commissions that might lead to unfair and exploitive labour practices.

2. D. Soyini Madison, “Introduction to Critical Ethnography: Theory and Method,” in Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2005).

“My blood was boiling” recalls anthropologist D Soyini Madison in the introduction to Critical Ethnography, as she reflects on watching a well-intentioned documentary addressing women’s human rights in Ghana, where Madison lived and conducted fieldwork working with and learning from local human rights activists that had been entirely overlooked in this film. Presenting and representing the lives and stories of Others, Madison reminds us, is always “a complicated and contentious undertaking.” To illustrate what is at stake, she invites researchers committed to addressing processes of unfairness and injustice to consider five central questions:

1.     How do we reflect upon and evaluate our own purpose, intentions, and frames of analysis as researchers?
2.     How do we predict consequences or evaluate our own potential to do harm?
3.     How do we create and maintain a dialogue of collaboration in our research projects between ourselves and Others?
4.     How is the specificity of the local story relevant to the broader meanings and operations of the human condition?
5.     How—in what location or through what intervention—will our work make the greatest contribution to equity, freedom, and justice?

Madison sets out two essential considerations, Positionality and Dialogue/Otherness. In terms of the former, Madison encourages us to take “ethical responsibility for our own subjectivity and political perspective:”

Positionality is vital because it forces us to acknowledge our own power, privilege, and biases just as we are denouncing the power structures that surround our subjects. A concern for positionality is sometimes understood as “reflexive ethnography”: it is a “turning back” on ourselves (Davis, 1999). When we turn back, we are accountable for own research paradigms, our own positions of authority, and our own moral responsibility relative to representation and interpretation.

Madison urges researchers to contextualise our positionality in all situations, “thereby making it accessible, transparent, and vulnerable to judgment and evaluation.” This relates to the second consideration:

Dialogue emphasizes the living communion of a felt-sensing, embodied interplay and engagement between human beings. Dialogue keeps the meanings between and the conversations with the researcher and the Other open and ongoing. The conversation with the Other that is brought forth through dialogue reveals itself as a lively, changing being through time and no longer an artifact captured in the ethnographer’s monologue or written transcript—fixed in time and forever stagnant.

3. Huda Tayob, Suzi Hall and Thandi Loewenson, Race, Space and Architecture: An Open-access Curriculum (2020).

This transdisciplinary, polyvocal open access curriculum, initiated by Huda Tayob and Suzanne Hall and developed into an online platform with Thandi Loewenson and images by Fred Swart, addresses how understandings of race-making might be extended through imagined and constructed forms of architecture. 

Buildings, highways, suburbs and townships are constitutive of how individuals become positioned in a vast spectre of racial segregation, tangible in the shape of space and the materiality of concrete and corrugated iron. In this curriculum architecture is a way of imagining, building and validating a world. Architecture is bricks and mortar; the interior arrangements of culture in the positioning of thresholds, openings and objects; and the accumulation of these built forms and practices into social forms of association and dis-association. Architecture is also professionalised, existing as a highly mediated form of knowledge-making that interacts with speculators, planning authorities and local communities for its pay checks, compliance and legitimation. It lays claim to the physical and experimental possibilities of imagining that is frequently communicated through the visual formats of drawings, models, exhibitions and buildings.

At the project’s core is an understanding of racialisation as a process of violent displacement - of person, of land, of future - simultaneously with an emplacement through citizenship status, territory, built objects and knowledge forms. Our curriculum recognises a lineage of racialised hierarchies endemic to capitalist systems and cultural life that extend from colonialism to coloniality, slavery to incarceration, liberalism to subordination, and sovereignty to populism. We question both the subject of ‘race’ and the subject of architecture: how individuals are rendered as labourer, domestic worker, or immigrant in legal and cultural terms, with how the architectures of camp, compound and detention centre solidify the symbolic and lived forms of these positions. Yet within, around and beyond these structures of racial capital, is the substance of transgression. It conveys how struggles for social justice are galvanised through space in the convening powers of the margins, and in the arrangements of material and practices that together stake a place. Dance halls, streets, and spiritual interiors are counter architectures in which different circuits of connection, processes of validation and alternative ways of inhabiting the world are established.

The curriculum poses three key questions: “What are the spatial contours of capitalism that produce racial hierarchy and injustice?,” “What are the inventive repertoires of refusal, resistance and re-making that are neither reduced to nor exhausted by racial capitalism, and how are they spatialised?,” and “How is ‘race’ configured differently across space, and how can a more expansive understanding of entangled world space broaden our imagination for teaching ​and learning?” To address these, it is organised into six frames: centralising, circulating,  domesticating,  extracting,  immobilising, and incarcerating that “allow us to identify specific process of power and racialisation and the spaces and built forms in and through which they are sustained and transgressed.” Each frame brings together of constellation of references in the form of academic articles alongside drawing, fiction, biography, poetry, and film that unsettle “the disciplinary conventions of what architecture is,” “help to reveal the textures and formal dimensions of race-making as it unfolds in space and architecture,” and “illuminate different ways of imagining human connection and disconnection, providing a vocabulary of different ways of thinking, learning and acting.” The project continues to develop through its multimedia online platform, incorporating posters, recordings from contributors and students, invited contributions and original commissioned pieces.

4. Matrix, Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment (London: Pluto Press, 1984).

In this groundbreaking work, the feminist architectural collective Matrix provide an excoriating critique of the design and planning of the built environment in which “sexist assumptions about family life and the role of women have been built into the design of our homes and cities.” Through a series of essays, Making Space exposes and educates on these assumptions of gender and sexuality that impact women’s lives from domestic to public spaces, making these issues and related technical drawings accessible to a lay audience. As the introduction states:

We feel that radical building design and research start from personal concerns, from a growing awareness that our man-made surroundings are not neutral, that there is some sort of contradiction between the lived experience of many women and the particular physical patterns that our built surroundings make… Buildings do not control our lives. They reflect the dominant values in our society, political and architectural views, people’s demands and the constraints of finance, but we can live in them in different ways from those originally intended. Buildings only affect us insomuch as they contain ideas about women, about our “proper place,” about what is private and what is public activity, about which things should be kept separate and which put together.

Making Space also shares alternative forms of feminist architectural practice, from examples of collective solutions to the problems of childcare, laundry and cooking, to meaningful partnerships between the architect and client throughout the design process that Matrix Feminist Design Cooperative practiced in their built projects from terraced housing to women’s centres.

5. Thomas Fisher, Ethics for Architects: 50 Dilemmas of Professional Practice (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010).

In Ethics for Architects, Thomas Fisher introduces 50 case studies based on real-life situations, working through the most appropriate response: “The empathetic projection of how a decision will affect others over time remains one of the great values architects bring to problems, and applying that ability to ethical dilemmas offers a way to think about ethics across a wide range of social, spatial, and temporal scales.”

The book in structured according to the six canons of the American Institute of Architects’ Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, from general obligations to that of the public, client, profession, colleagues, and the environment. In the case studies, Fisher grapples particularly with decisions that involve personal risk and pose the greatest ethical challenges, drawing from four main approaches to Western ethics: what it means to be a good person (virtue ethics) or to have a good society (contract ethics), and what is the right action in terms of the individual (duty ethics) or the group (utilitarian ethics) which Fisher relates to the four phases of architectural projects: “pursuing and attaining the commission, assembling the team and signing the contract, developing the design and contract documents, and administering the construction and close-out of the project.”

The book concludes with a challenge to practitioners working in uncertain times: “In a depressed economy, ethics may seem extraneous: something nice to do once we pay the bills. But the opposite is true. During difficult times, questions at the heart of ethics, such as what constitutes a good life, become uppermost in people’s minds. Economic downturns, for all of the pain they bring, also overturn unsustainable assumptions and disrupt unrealistic aspirations, leading people to ask what really matters and wonder what they really want.”

6. Nick Axel, Andrew Herscher, Nikolaus Hirsch and Ana María León, The Settler Colonial Present, e-flux (2021).

The Settler Colonial Present is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Settler Colonial City Project, a research collective focused on the collaborative production of knowledge about cities on Turtle Island/Abya Yala/The Americas as spaces of ongoing settler colonialism, Indigenous survivance, and struggles for decolonization. The editorial explains:

Architecture, with its deep implications in property and capital derived from settler colonial processes, condenses the tensions, contradictions, disavowals, and betrayals of settler colonialism. And yet, discourse on settler colonialism has been largely absent from the architectural discipline. This absence is productive in settler colonial contexts—it allows the discipline to most effectively serve the interests of capital and its emissaries. Indeed, in its hegemonic professional and pedagogic forms, architecture was and remains a product, instrument, and memorial of settler colonialism. Attempts to “decolonize the curriculum” that omit these constitutive relations are complicit with them.

Settler colonialism is therefore not simply one topic to add to the architectural curriculum—in settler colonial societies, settler colonialism arguably defines every part of the architectural curriculum, and even what counts as a curriculum itself. Approached in relation to the settler colonialism that it advances, legitimizes, and celebrates, then, architecture opens onto new registrations of the settler colonial present and decolonizations of its histories and possible futures.

The contributions explore “architecture’s constitutive relationship to settler colonialism in the Americas, reflecting on spatial violence in Anishinaabe, Karajá, Kumeyaay, Ramapough, Mapuche, Aymara, and Ohlone territories, as well as the ways in which the peoples of these lands have resisted and contested this violence.”

7. Jos Boys, “Disordinary Architecture Project: A Handy Guide for Doing Disability Differently in Architecture and Urban Design” Funambulist: Spaces of Ableism (2018).

The Spaces of Ableism issue of the Funambulist was dedicated to “the fight against ableism,” positioning disability not as an anatomic, biological, or neurological condition but, rather, a political one. Jos Boys’ contribution, on behalf of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, is the manual ‘A Handy Guide for Doing Disability Differently in Architecture and Urban Design’. 

The DisOrdinary Architecture Project starts from the belief that improving the design of built space is not just about ‘adding’ disabled people to existing environments to better meet their “needs.” It is about exposing and challenging underlying attitudes, assumptions and practices that frame disabled people in particular and limited ways, both in everyday life and through the education and practice of architectural and urban design. So, rather than providing yet more inclusive or universal design principles we begin by challenging ableist attitudes and practices. We hope this can open up alternative kinds of inventive interventions towards, not just better inclusive design “solutions,” but also better understandings of how the ‘normal’ is constructed in everyday life, and how it can be critically and creatively contested, underpinned by a commitment to social and spatial justice for all.

Most crucially, we have to ask why disability has somehow remained stuck in a non-historical, atheoretical and seriously underexplored category in relationship to building and urban design practices. It is invisible in both avant-garde and mainstream architectural theories and discourses, just as it has been a persistent absence in critical and cultural theory more generally. Perhaps this illustrates just how deeply disability remains widely avoided, compared to other disadvantaged identities. It seems that we assume “disability” to be unable to bring any kind of criticality or creativity to the practice of architecture.

The seven steps of the manual each move through an assumed problem, the actual problem and a proposition to act differently. In doing so, they aim to reveal unnoticed attitudes that non-disabled people may have, and guide on how to consider disability and difference as creative design generators and powerful critical tools for investigating what constitutes “normality.”

8. Jeremy Till, ‘Architecture is not architecture is not architecture is not architecture’, RIBA Research Symposium, 2009, and Architecture Depends (Boston: MIT Press, 2009).

In his paper to the Royal Institute of British Architects Research Symposium and subsequent monograph Architecture Depends, Jeremy Till implores architects to embrace and engage with the contingencies upon which architecture is dependent – from a building’s users, political ideals and budgets to climactic conditions, messy reality and waste.

The paper and chapter ‘Imperfect Ethics’ critique the professional codes of the ARB and RIBA as identifying few values or standards of behaviour beyond “the short-term protection and the duty of care to the client” and contractual relationships with other professionals. This “self-defining circle,” Till continues, “turns its back on something rather important, which is architecture’s outside, all those events, forces and contingencies that are beyond the direct control and definition of the profession… [It is] to do with the consequences rather than the object of architecture.” To expose these inadequacies, Till calls on philosopher Zygmunt Bauman’s understanding of ethics: “To assume an ethical stance means to ‘assume responsibility for the other.’ Bauman’s other is a multitude. It is much wider than the client, it is all those people who brief, build, occupy, view, review, remake and inhabit architecture. The need to recognise ethics of architecture’s outside becomes the necessity for changing practices.”

As such, Till advocates for architects to seek “transformative agency” rather than problem solving, where “architecture’s dependency, far from being its weakness, becomes an opportunity, with the architect acting as open-minded listener and fleet-footed interpreter, collaborating in the realisation of other peoples unpolished visions.”

9. Built environment ethics textbooks

There is an array of excellent textbooks devoted to ethics in the built environment. Authors approach ethical questions from an array of different philosophical positions, but common among them is the conviction that experience alone does not lead to learning. This requires setting aside dedicated time for reflection. Terry Williamson, Antony Radford and Helen Bennetts describe the process of making and managing the built environment as an active negotiation between “ethical theory, the environmental, social and building contexts, and personal and stakeholder evaluations.” This process of going backwards and forwards between an ethical theory and personal action is described by philosopher John Rawls as “reflective equilibrium,” seeking to reach an acceptable balance, and by Donald Schön as “reflective practice,” seeking to gain insight into the underlying assumptions and priorities which inform everyday actions.

Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1983).

Barry Wasserman, Patrick Sullivan and Gregory Palermo (ed.), Ethics and the practice of architecture (New York, NY: Wiley, 2000)

Tom Spector, The ethical architect: the dilemma of contemporary practice (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001)

Terry Williamson, Antony Radford and Helen Bennetts, Understanding Sustainable Architecture (London: Spon Press, 2003).

Warwick Fox, A Theory of General Ethics: Human Relationships, Nature, and the Built Environment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007).

Nicholas Ray (ed.), Architecture and its ethical dilemmas (London: Routledge, 2005)

Paul Morrell, Collaboration for Change: The Edge Commission Report on the Future of Professionalism (London: The Edge., 2015).

Mohsen Mostafavi, Ethics of the Urban: The City and the Spaces of the Political (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2016).

Simon Foxell. Professionalism for the Built Environment (London: Routledge, 2018).

Publications from the Practising Ethics project

1. Jane Rendell, “Critical Spatial Practice as Parrhesia,” special issue of MaHKUscript, Journal of Fine Art Research 1, no. 2 (2016).

In Art and Architecture: A Place Between (Rendell, 2006) I introduced the term “critical spatial practice” to define modes of self-reflective artistic and architectural practice which seek to question and to transform the social conditions of the sites into which they intervene. Through the process of writing the book I came to understand that my own position between art, architecture and critical theory was constantly changing and influenced the interpretative accounts I was able to offer. I concluded Art and Architecture by arguing that the writing of criticism is itself a form of situated practice, one that is critical and spatial. I came to call this practice “site-writing.” (Rendell, 2011) This essay is one such “site-writing” which situates my own current academic work as a form of “critical spatial practice” more generally, and “parrhesia,” following the work of Michel Foucault, (Foucault, 1983) more specifically. As I started to write these sites I found it useful to consider the distinction Hannah Arendt draws between labour, work and action in The Human Condition, (Arendt, 1958) in which, labour corresponds to the biological life of humans and animals, work to the artificial processes of artefact fabrication; and where action – and its connection to speech – is the central political activity. I realized that the actions of speech that I had taken in various sites – at home and at work – were interventions into existing institutional structures, performed to critique and activate them, and could be described as forms of ‘critical spatial practice’.

2. Jane Rendell, “Giving An Account Of Oneself, Architecturally,” special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture 15, no. 3 (2016).

In January 2013 I questioned my employer, UCL’s, decision to accept $10 million of funding from the Anglo-Australian multinational mining and petroleum company BHP Billiton to create an International Energy Policy Institute in Adelaide, and the Institute for Sustainable Resources in London at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. At the time, I was Vice Dean of Research and my questions started a process of ethical deliberation or ethical practice which is figured here as a “site-writing” (Rendell, 2011). Following the work of Michel Foucault on bios and logos (Foucault, 1983) and Judith Butler on ‘giving an account of oneself” (Butler, 2005) is articulated through two registers: bios – a set of diary entries noting personal anxieties and hopes related to my institutional role at UCL, and logos – an attempt to relate these issues to the development of my own intellectual work and concepts concerning ethics and critique generated by others.

3. David Roberts, Reflect Critically and Act Fearlessly: A Survey of Ethical Codes, Guidance and Access in Built Environment Practice (Bartlett Ethics Commission, 2019).

This paper sets out for the first time a comprehensive study of the ethical dimensions of the built environment professions. Its constructive critique is principally oriented to professional bodies for architecture, analysing the codes of conduct and practical guidance of the ARB and RIBA against sixty-four other UK and international built environment professions ranging across construction, design, energy, engineering, heritage, planning, project management, surveying, sustainability and transport.

The paper argues that, perhaps more than other professions, the process of conceiving, making, using and transforming the built environment is aligned to ecological, social and material conditions. Practitioners need to be aware of increasing resource scarcity, inequality, and power imbalances as they can hardly dissociate the success of their work from the solution they bring to those problems. Built environment practice therefore demands an ethical standpoint. There is no point where practitioners can absent themselves from it. But the decisions they take will always have a cost personally, professionally or publicly. Professional bodies consequently have a vital role to play in supporting practitioners to approach and act on these knotty dilemmas from an informed and empowered position.

It concludes with a set of recommendations: To address contemporary challenges, codes of conduct should empower practitioners to reflect critically and act fearlessly. To identify, analyse and respond effectively to the specific ethical dilemmas raised by their work, professional bodies should provide free guidance tools to practitioners. To involve the public and contribute to informed public debate, institutions should strive to remove all barriers to discussions and resources.

4. Yael Padan, “Researching Architecture and Urban Inequality: Toward Engaged Ethics,” Lorens Holm and Cameron McEwan (eds) special issue of Architecture and Culture, Architecture and Collective Life, (2020).

This paper reflects on approaches to conducting “ethical research” on architecture and urban (in)equality in cities in the global south. It focuses on two themes: the formalization of institutional ethics procedures and protocols for conducting such research, and the need to move away from ethical frameworks that emerge from western structures for knowledge production. The paper will question whether ethical principles are universal or specific, and how they affect the possibility of knowledge co-production and its potential to generate pathways to urban equality. These questions arise from the history of contemporary research ethics procedures, which are rooted in the social norms of western modernity that views researchers and research participants as “autonomous individuals.” The paper will suggest that exploring the relation of the individual to the collective and understanding social existence as relationality, is fundamental in formulating an alternative type of ethics methodology.

5. Jane Rendell, ‘Hotspots and Touchstones: From Critical to Ethical Spatial Practice’,  Lorens Holm and Cameron McEwan (eds) special issue on Architecture and Culture, Architecture and Collective Life, (2020).

This essay starts with an event – what I have come to call “an ethical hotspot” – a moment in which my value systems were challenged and I found myself unable to continue to act as before, until I undertook some critical reflection. One of my current research collaborators, Yael Padan, pointed me to a paper in which researchers Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam describe what they call “ethically important moments,” which for them mark the “ethical dimension” of decision-making around the day to day dilemmas of research practice. (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004) For Guillemin and Gillam negotiating these dilemmas and their relation to institutional ethical procedures requires a degree of reflexivity on the part of the researcher. In this essay, I start by describing the ethical hot-spot that occurred in my life and then discuss how, by reflecting on these issues and the actions that I developed out of them, it might be possible to develop modes of ethical practice that I call – following Foucault – basanic (Foucault, 1983).

6. David Roberts, “Why Now: The Ethical Act of Architectural Declaration,”  Lorens Holm and Cameron McEwan (eds) special issue on Architecture and Culture, Architecture and Collective Life, (2020).

2019 was the year of the declaration – from Culture Declares to Architects Declare to Architecture Education Declares – a landmark moment when architects pledged to confront climate emergency. In this paper I step back to reflect on the ethical dimensions of public declarations in architecture, from the institutional to individual, to consider their role in negotiating ethical concerns. This is explored through three paths: reviewing the ethical know-what of contemporary codes of conduct of built environment professional bodies, examining the ethical know-how required to negotiate ethical dilemmas in practice, and reconsidering the history of architectural manifestoes that explicate an ethical why-now. I draw from the work of Jane Rendell’s Bartlett Ethics Commission and draw inspiration from Sumayya Vally and Huda Tayob et al.’s An Inventory of Feminist Upheaval to illustrate how, at a time of climate breakdown and systemic social injustices, architects must practice collectivity and intersectionality to unsettle conventions and complacencies.

7. Yael Padan, Vanesa Castán Broto, Jane Rendell, and David Roberts, “A ‘minifesta’ as the promise of collective voice,” Axon Journal 10, no. 2, (2020).

This polyvocal paper describes the collective writing of a manifesto for urban equality by an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers who met in Kampala, Uganda, in November 2019. It explains the methodologies that inspired the process of writing, reflects on the contradictions that permeate the generation of collective voices, and discusses the relationship between collective voice and situated knowledge. In doing so, it proposes a move from grand manifestos to situated minifestas, arguing for minor literature in the generation of feminist, subaltern knowledge.

8. David Roberts, Jane Rendell, Yael Padan, Ariana Markowitz, and Emmanuel Osuteye, “Practising ethics: guides for built environment research,” Journal of Architecture 27, no. 5-6, (2022).

Practising Ethics Guides are part of an open-access educational tool for emerging and established built environment practitioners to teach themselves and others how to identify ethical dilemmas that may arise in research and practice, negotiate their ethical responsibilities, and rehearse strategies to navigate unpredictable ethical issues with care and creativity. The guides are the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between two long-term projects that explore ethical protocols for built environment practitioners and strengthen pathways to urban equality, paying particular attention to the western-centric bias of ethical values which privilege the individual over the communal or collective. Together, this research explores the relationship between universals and specifics through a framework that encourages a situated mode of ethical practice, which situates the relation between universal principles and particular processes in specific contexts. The guides help navigate this relationship by using generative questions as prompts for practitioners to reflect on potential ethical considerations and by setting out guidelines that contextualise concerns and suggest potential actions. Practising Ethics Guides are designed as an accessible point of reference at all stages of a project – from planning research and con- ducting activities in the field to producing and communicating outputs. Rather than a regulatory hurdle, they consider ethics as an opportunity to enrich architectural practice through reflexive curiosity and critical investigation. 

9. Catalina Ortiz, Yael Padan, Belen Desmaison, Vanesa Castan Broto, Teddy Kisembo, Judith Mbabazi, Paul Mukwaya, Hafisa Namuli, Shuaib Lwasa and Jane Rendell, “Affective Infrastructures of Knowledge Co-Production,” in special issue of Urban Transcripts, ‘Emotions and the City,’ ed. Nina Margies, (December 2022).

The notion of affective infrastructures, in the context of knowledge co-production, refers to the unspoken relations that sustain trajectories of joint research endeavours. The ongoing dialogue between sociological theories of affect and postcolonial analyses of urban infrastructures has generated interest in material-communication exchanges that escape or exceed language-based communication. Affect refers to the relations between bodies and things that exceed narrative description and that concatenate feelings and experiences. Sara Ahmed defines affect as ‘what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connections between ideas, values, and objects,’ central to the daily drama of contingency. Affect is thus also central to the socio-material assemblages that sustain urban life, what we refer to as infrastructure.