More discussion and more visibility for ongoing discussions of ethics are urgently needed. This has become clear to us through our involvement in various activities around ethics of e-research and of e-social science. With this site, we set into motion a series of new activities and interactions that will involve the preparation of a position paper on ethics of e-research. There are many excellent resources on research ethics, many of which are linked on this site. What distinguishes this site and our activities from other endeavours about ethics?
Research in highly mediated and networked contexts has particular consequences for research ethics, since it redefines the relations between researchers and subjects, between researchers, and between researchers and stakeholders. In addition, there are particular infrastructural issues that exacerbate certain ethical issues. We seek to draw attention to the ways flow, fluidity and preservation of information can shape ethical issues for e-research.
e-Research has ethical implications. The motivations for doing it, the social, cultural, political and economic questions and issues it is seen to address, the greater efficiency it promises in gathering and processing information have ethical as well as knowledge dimensions. e-Research is poised to play an enormous role in our social self-understanding, and this too has ethical implications. We seek to understand the functioning of these internal ethical aspects of e-research internal, that is, to the very rationale for knowledge, to its epistemology and its deployment to bring about social change and to bring about a debate about what it means to be a socially and ethically engaged e-researcher. |
