I’m attending a workshop on Research Ethics on Friday. To prepare, participants were asked to work through some pre-recorded mini-lectures (up 20 minutes each) and some readings. Also, we had to complete two written assignments: post our own answers to a set of questions on the online learning platform, and add a comment to another participant’s post.

Because I once again completely overdid it for the first part of the assignment, I figured I’d share it with you.

(1) Which field of study is your PhD?

My PhD research is in the field of Human-Computer Interaction and Accessibility. I research which kinds of technologies neurodivergent people (specifically dyslexic people, autistic people, people with ADHD) use in the context of work, and how their quality of life and user experiences may be improved. For example, some hardware might just not work well for autistic people due to their tactile or haptic sensitivity; using Active Noise Canceling headphones with their preferred music on can help people with ADHD focus on their work.

The approach I am taking is informed by an intersectional understanding of discrimination: rather than simply “adding” up, different kinds of discrimination in combination create new kinds of discrimination; and I am pursuing a disability justice approach. This means that I want to broadcast/boost the voices of disabled people, see disability as something value-neutral (not to be fixed or “eradicated”), and am working towards collective access and collective liberation (if this sounds interesting to you, you can access “Ten Principles of Disability Justice” by Patricia Berne, With the support of Aurora Levins Morales and David Langstaff, and on behalf of Sins Invalid, via JSTOR (link)).

(2) Which research ethos does your working group or your broader research community follow? Is it PLACE? Or CUDOS? Or a mix of both?

If these abbreviations don’t mean anything to you,  PLACE stands for Proprietary, Local, Authoritarian, Comissioned, Expert work (coined by John Ziman); and CUDOS stands for Communiality, Universalism, Disinteredness, Organized skepticism (coined by Robert K. Merton).

To me, it seems that both CUDOS and PLACE are aimed at and based in research that does not account for or think about the people who are involved in or affected by whatever research is being done. Both are aimed at purely technological/natural sciences research, which I’m not even sure whether it exists (after all, humans are always involved, as co-researchers, collaborators, working in some kind of support role, etc).

The ethos we are following in Human-Computer Interaction, or more specifically, in the research group here at KIT, is covered by neither CUDOS nor PLACE. Even a mix of both can not describe how we define good scientific practice for us.

I think we do follow Communality, Organized Skepticism, and also, partially, Universalism. At the same time, our research is highly Local. Strictly speaking, our research is also Authoritarian, as somebody else does formulate the problem(s) we are trying to solve – but we follow a participative research methodology, which actually is rather anti-authoritarian, and anti-hierarchical: we want to work with our participants, we want to figure out together which of their problems we should tackle, and then create (better) solutions together. But also, we are Invested/Interested, and work with Experts, centering lived experiences.

Some points why I think both models (CUDOS and PLACE) are incomplete:
Universalism does not exist. In today’s societies, not everyone can research, and not everyone’s research is seen as having the same value based on methodology alone. Geography, language, and even methodology do make a difference. Some sub-fields in Human-Computer Interaction use (and sometimes misappropriates) a lot of sociological methods, and get reviewed by people from other sub-fields in HCI, who do not understand the methodologies as well – and wrongly devalue the outputs of such research. Publications from the Global South are barely cited. Publications that are not written/presented in English face the same issue. If this sounds interesting to you, please read “Braving Citational Justice within HCI” by Kumar and Karusala on Medium.com

I posit that, as a researcher in HCI, Disinterestedness is wrong. After all, the goal of Human-Computer Interaction is to improve usability and utility of computer applications for humans. Also, the quote shown on the slides in this context is interesting to discuss: Hitchens is cited saying, “I have no ideology. I’m rationalist.” – in my opinion, “being rationalist” is also an ideal to aspire to, at least for some. It is the understanding that being “rational” is for some reason better than being “emotional” (dichotomies are always very interesting).

Finally, proprietary research… I see where patents can have positive effects. I can see many more cases where they do not. Health research is one great example, with prices for some medications being so high that patients cannot pay for them, or patents being so expensive that poor countries cannot produce them on their own terms. Patents on medical research are quite literally killing people (Op-Ed by Michael Schull in the BMJ, published 2000 (link); recent publication by Joshua M. Pearce on Springer (link)).

Finally, the question was, what set of rules should researchers follow?

On ethical grounds, I think it would be wise to follow the Golden Rule:

Do unto others as you would like to be done to.
(As this has come up a lot during human history, it is hard to ascribe a single source. Wikipedia has compiled quite the collection (link). )

This should have been a 350 word comment. With intro and outro, it’s now at more than 900. Whoops.