GOVERNING
RESEARCH ETHICS
In 1974, the United States passed the National Research Act. This Act presaged the creation of institutionalised ethical review in the US, and later, around the world. Despite the global proliferation of these regulations, and a shared dedication across natural and social sciences to ethical research, knowledge about research ethics regulations remains highly fragmented and country-specific. Moreover, study of research ethics as a set of regulations and institutions on one hand, and norms on the other, has largely centred on biomedical research. The result is that there is limited understanding of ethical rules as a global and transnational regulatory system—especially in terms of how they relate to social science research conducted over more than one country.Â
To remedy this gap, this project studies the transnational politics of regulations for ethical research with human subjects. It focuses in particular on if and how ethical regulations have made their way to the social sciences in different country contexts, and how this stands to shape social scientific knowledge production. It pays particular attention to how these regulations stand to shape studies of and on the Global South, as this is a particularly poorly understood area. Due to the complex nature of ethics, it is a rich case to study transnational norm diffusion and the emergence of transnational regulatory regimes in a highly fragmented and globalised world.
We have also founded the Ethics Governance Network for scholars studying these and related topics. Visit our page here.