[Air-L] Research ethical issues for panel at AoIR16?

[Charles Ess]

Dear AoIRists,

Recognizing that it's getting a bit tight in terms of the March 1 deadline
for proposal submissions - nonetheless, I would ask for suggestions and
expresssions of interest for contributions to a panel proposal
provisionally titled "Contemporary Internet research ethics: o.k. in the
grey?"
The idea is first of all to go forward from last year's panel, which
highlighted several deeply challenging ethical problems in contemporary
Internet research: death-casting (Yukari Seko), nakedness and contextual
ethics (Katrin Tiidenberg), issues in online counseling (Camilla Granholm),
and studying closed FB groups for parents grieving the deaths of their
children (Ylva Hård af Segerstad, Dick Kasperowski).
These contributions were then commented on by Mark Johns and Annette
Markham, who deftly helped weave them in with comparable / larger themes
and issues.  The open discussion then took up these and additional issues -
including the then fresh discussion on the AoIR list of the ethics of using
(my pararphase) sensitive / personal data without informed consent or other
usual protections, following their "leaking" into publicly accessible
venues (sometimes called "grey data").
My hopes for the panel are to update findings and reflections on these
specific cases and to extend both examples of such challenging cases,
coupled with careful ethical analyses from diverse ethical and cultural
traditions - including attention to how we might best wrestle with such
ethically grey areas.
"O.k. in the grey" is both a reminder of the questions of "grey data", but
also goes back to an especially astute student comment in an applied ethics
class (now many, many moons ago) as her summary of what we were learning
and practicing: namely, how to come to somewhat more comfortable grips with
multiple possible approaches and resolutions, along with the correlative
intrinsic ambiguities and uncertainties, in our efforts to respond to
ethical challenges that must be resolved one way or another.

Further, part of the upshot of the discussion was the clear need to
continue to explore such cases - both for their own sake and for the sake
of an eventual 3.0 version of the AoIR ethics guidelines for Internet
research.
As many of you know, version 2.0 was published in 2012, led by Annette
Markham and Elizabeth Buchanan, following two years' (if not more) work by
the AoIR ethics committee. As some of you may not know, the ethics
committee has been dissolved. There were many sound and good reasons for
this: but especially in the absence of a given group of persons formally
assigned responsibilities for such discussions, I also hope that the
proposed panel will help keep alive our shared reflections and dialogues on
some of the most pressing matters of Internet research ethics.

Please send me off-list any suggestions, etc.  I will be especially
grateful for brief descriptions of a case that you and/or a group of
researchers would be interested in and able to present as part of such a
panel for general reflection and discussion.  Ditto for nominations,
including self-nominations, for panel commentators.

Many thanks in advance and much looking forward,
- charles ess

Professor in Media Studies
Department of Media and Communication
University of Oslo
<http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html>
<http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html>

Director, Centre for Research in Media Innovations (CeRMI)
Editor, The Journal of Media Innovations
<https://www.journals.uio.no/index.php/TJMI/>
<https://www.journals.uio.no/index.php/TJMI/>

Postboks 1093
Blindern 0317
Oslo, Norway
c.m.ess at media.uio.no