Researchers At Risk

This book explores the phenomenon of researchers at risk: that is, the experiences of scholars whose research topics require them to engage with diverse kind of dangers, uncertainties or vulnerabilities. This risk may derive from working with variously marginalised individuals or groups, or from being members of such groups themselves. At other times, the risk relates to particular economic or environmental conditions, or political forces influencing the specific research fields in which they operate. This book argues for the need to reconceptualise – and thereby to reimagine – the phenomenon of researchers’ risks, particularly when those risks are perceived to affect, and even to threaten the researchers. Drawing on a diverse and global range case studies including Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Balūchistān, Cyprus, and Germany, the chapters call for the need to identify effective strategies for engaging proactively with these risks to address precarity, jeopardy and uncertainty.

Risk assessment has become a dominant public policy tool for making choices, based on limited resources, to protect public health and the environment. It has been instrumental to the mission of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as other federal agencies in evaluating public health concerns, informing regulatory and technological decisions, prioritizing research needs and funding, and in developing approaches for cost-benefit analysis. However, risk assessment is at a crossroads. Despite advances in the field, risk assessment faces a number of significant challenges including lengthy delays in making complex decisions; lack of data leading to significant uncertainty in risk assessments; and many chemicals in the marketplace that have not been evaluated and emerging agents requiring assessment. Science and Decisions makes practical scientific and technical recommendations to address these challenges. This book is a complement to the widely used 1983 National Academies book, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government (also known as the Red Book). The earlier book established a framework for the concepts and conduct of risk assessment that has been adopted by numerous expert committees, regulatory agencies, and public health institutions. The new book embeds these concepts within a broader framework for risk-based decision-making. Together, these are essential references for those working in the regulatory and public health fields.

In recent decades, advances in biomedical research have helped save or lengthen the lives of children around the world. With improved therapies, child and adolescent mortality rates have decreased significantly in the last half century. Despite these advances, pediatricians and others argue that children have not shared equally with adults in biomedical advances. Even though we want children to benefit from the dramatic and accelerating rate of progress in medical care that has been fueled by scientific research, we do not want to place children at risk of being harmed by participating in clinical studies. Ethical Conduct of Clinical Research Involving Children considers the necessities and challenges of this type of research and reviews the ethical and legal standards for conducting it. It also considers problems with the interpretation and application of these standards and conduct, concluding that while children should not be excluded from potentially beneficial clinical studies, some research that is ethically permissible for adults is not acceptable for children, who usually do not have the legal capacity or maturity to make informed decisions about research participation. The book looks at the need for appropriate pediatric expertise at all stages of the design, review, and conduct of a research project to effectively implement policies to protect children. It argues persuasively that a robust system for protecting human research participants in general is a necessary foundation for protecting child research participants in particular.

The nature of qualitative inquiry means that researchers constantly have to deal with the unexpected, and all too often this means coping with the presence of danger or risk. This innovative and lively analysis of danger in various qualitative research settings is drawn from researchers' reflexive accounts of their own encounters with 'danger'. An original take on the ever-popular topic of the ethics of research, this pioneering book expands the common sense use of the term to encompass not just physical danger, but emotional, ethical and professional danger too, with the authors paying special attention to the gendered forms of danger implicit in the research process. From the physical danger of researching the night club 'bouncer' scene to the ethical dangers of participant observation in an old people's home, these international contributions provide researchers and students with thought provoking insights into the importance of a well chosen research design.

This book explores the phenomenon of researchers at risk: that is, the experiences of scholars whose research topics require them to engage with diverse kind of dangers, uncertainties or vulnerabilities. This risk may derive from working with variously marginalised individuals or groups, or from being members of such groups themselves. At other times, the risk relates to particular economic or environmental conditions, or political forces influencing the specific research fields in which they operate. This book argues for the need to reconceptualise – and thereby to reimagine – the phenomenon of researchers’ risks, particularly when those risks are perceived to affect, and even to threaten the researchers. Drawing on a diverse and global range case studies including Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Balūchistān, Cyprus, and Germany, the chapters call for the need to identify effective strategies for engaging proactively with these risks to address precarity, jeopardy and uncertainty.

The public is generally enthusiastic about the latest science and technology, but sometimes research threatens the physical safety or ethical norms of society. When this happens, scientists and engineers can find themselves unprepared in the midst of an intense science policy debate. In the absence of convincing evidence, technological optimists and skeptics struggle to find common values on which to build consensus. The best way to avoid these situations is to sidestep the instigating controversy by using a broad risk-benefit assessment as a risk exploration tool to help scientists and engineers design experiments and technologies that accomplish intended goals while avoiding physical or moral dangers. Dangerous Science explores the intersection of science policy and risk analysis to detail failures in current science policy practices and what can be done to help minimize the negative impacts of science and technology on society.

This open access book offers a synthetic reflection on the authors’ fieldwork experiences in seven countries within the framework of ‘Authoritarianism in a Global Age’, a major comparative research project. It responds to the demand for increased attention to methodological rigor and transparency in qualitative research, and seeks to advance and practically support field research in authoritarian contexts. Without reducing the conundrums of authoritarian field research to a simple how-to guide, the book systematically reflects and reports on the authors’ combined experiences in (i) getting access to the field, (ii) assessing risk, (iii) navigating ‘red lines’, (iv) building relations with local collaborators and respondents, (v) handling the psychological pressures on field researchers, and (vi) balancing transparency and prudence in publishing research. It offers unique insights into this particularly challenging area of field research, makes explicit how the authors handled methodological challenges and ethical dilemmas, and offers recommendations where appropriate.

Risk Research: Practices, Politics and Ethics offers a collection of essays, written by a wide variety of international researchers in risk research, about what it means to do risk research, and about how – and with what effects – risk research is practiced, articulated and exploited. This approach is based upon the core assumption that: to make a difference in the study of risk, we must move beyond what we usually do, challenging the core assumptions, scientific, economic and social, about how we study, frame, exploit and govern risk. Hence, through a series of essays, the book aims to challenge the current ways in which risk-problems are approached and presented, both conceptually by academics and through the framings that are encoded in the technologies and socio-political and institutional practices used to manage risk. In addressing these questions, the book does not attempt to offer a model of how risk research 'should' be done. Rather, the book provides, through illustration, a challenge to the ways in which risk research is framed as 'problem-solving.' The book's ultimate objective aims to increase critical debate between different disciplines, approaches, concepts and problems.