Rethinking research ethics review boards: From micro-ethics to epistemic (in)justices
Abstract
This paper critically interrogates the role of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) as ‘research ethics’ within the context of contemporary university-based social science research. While IRBs are ostensibly tasked with safeguarding ethical standards and participant welfare, I posit that they often reduce ethics to a perfunctory exercise as a move to innocence, serving as mechanisms that perpetuate colonial practices and epistemic injustices. Building on critical literature and drawing on autoethnographic reflections from a specific research project, I accordingly re-conceptualise ethics review boards as constituted by and constitutive of the coloniality of modern knowledge production. Consequently, I argue for a reconceptualization of ethical research – one that transcends Eurocentric paradigms – emphasizing the necessity of critically bringing the decolonial turn into ethics broadly, and a rethinking of institutionalized university ethics specifically
