Privacy for whom?: a feminist intervention in online research practice (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
In this article, the authors consider how their engaged practices of feminist ethics have come up against specific dominant normatives. Privileging the experiences of women of color, they question the embodied relationship they have with their research participants, and offer their methodological approaches for addressing ethical challenges that have surfaced through conducting their research in both digital and non-digital spaces and places. Collectively, they collaborate to develop newfound strategies and methodologies for negotiating the often mundane, micro-level moments of friction that prevents intersectional phronesis. Overall, they pitch ethical research practices for digital and non-digital research with diverse subjects of different races, backgrounds, and cultures such that voice(s) are not compromised during research.
Feminist Research in online spaces
Gender, Place and Culture.
Online spaces with user-generated content (e.g. weblogs, online social networks, listservs, YouTube, the comments sections of news sites, etc.) may constitute the next frontier in qualitative human subjects research, as they offer seemingly 'unrestricted access to infinite amounts and types of data…worldwide access to a larger and more diverse participants pool and ease of data collection that can save time and cut costs' (Keller and Lee 2003, 211). Yet these data are not treated as products of human subjects research, an epistemological and ethical stance that we argue merits closer scrutiny, particularly from feminists. This imaginary of online spaces as vast tracts of untapped data is at odds with our own experiences of these spaces as virtual yet still material extensions of our everyday lives that shape our research subjectivities, the kinds of questions we ask, and our relationships to both data and online subjects. While online research has grown tremendously in human geography (Madge 2007), our understanding of the particular epistemological, methodological, and ethical challenges, and the political implications of these emerging research practices, has not kept pace.
Email communication as a technology of oppression: Attenuating identity in online research
2000
This paper considers the impact of online communication, especially in the arena of email interviewing, on the reconstruction of participants' voices and identities in environments that potentially provoke a sense of powerlessness and oppression. We argue that the form of the communication, devoid of face to face contact, non-verbal communication and the inflections of people's physical voices, challenges participants, and therefore oppresses them, to find ways of engaging authentically with their interlocutors. In this struggle, despite the constraints of the system, participants try to project their normal lived selves. However fears about the system, e.g. how far it may be an insecure environment which will impugn their privacy, leads participants to be wary about being self-revelatory to online researchers until they have evidence of the values and identities of those researchers, in some cases gleaning those from fleeting direct personal or telephonic contact or from information sources that are accessible to them. We draw on evidence from two small scale studies of practitioners in Higher Education, to assert that participants in these qualitative research projects, in their struggle to make meaning of their experiences, learnt to assert power to influence the shape the project, a temporary community of which they had membership, and overcome their initial senses of peripherality, oppression and powerlessness.
The Changing Meaning of Privacy, Identity and Contemporary Feminist Philosophy
Minds and Machines, 2011
This paper draws upon contemporary feminist philosophy in order to consider the changing meaning of privacy and its relationship to identity, both online and offline. For example, privacy is now viewed by European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as a right, which when breached can harm us by undermining our ability to maintain social relations. I briefly outline the meaning of privacy in common law and under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in order to show the relevance of contemporary feminist thought, in particular the image of selfhood that stresses its relationality. I argue that the meaning of privacy is in the process of altering as a result of a number of contingent factors including both changes in technology, particularly computer mediated communication (CMC), and changes in the status of women. This latter point can be illustrated by the feminist critique of the traditional reluctance of the liberal state to interfere with violence and injustice within the ''privacy'' of the home. In asking the question: ''how is the meaning of ''privacy'' changing?'' I consider not only contemporary legal case law but also Thomas Nagel's influential philosophical analysis of privacy. Nagel's position is useful because of the detail with which he outlines what privacy used to mean, whilst bemoaning its passing. I agree with his view that its meaning is changing but am critical of his perspective. In particular, I challenge his claim regarding the traditional ''neutrality of language'' and consider it in the context of online identity.
Feminist Research Ethics and Student Privacy in the Age of AI
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2020
This article examines university researchers' capture of student images on US college campuses for training facial recognition technology, and situates this project within universities' broader historical alignment with militarism and racial injustice. It argues that feminist STS ethics provides a framework for not only challenging the ways that university research inquiry actively contributes to oppressive power structures, but also for reimagining university research ethics for a greater engagement with questions of justice. The article identifies the limitations of dominant institutional ethics and privacy rights discourses for centering justice considerations, and instead outlines an intersectional feminist approach to university research ethics that reimagines the relationship between research processes, power, and social impacts.
In this article, I reflect on the potentials of using online qualitative data collection methods to elicit narratives from adolescent participants who have experienced victimization within their friendships. Specifically, this article examines the impact of anonymity on participants’ self-disclosure, while also considering the potential limitations of online qualitative research, namely, building rapport amongst participants and the researcher, participant authenticity, and participant safety. It is the hope that other novice researchers will benefit from these methodological and ethical reflections of using online qualitative data collection methods for research on sensitive topics.
Materialising Autonomy: A feminist technoscience perspective on patients and online privacy
Ideas that privacy is bad for women or that privacy is dead are based on a conception of privacy as an inherent attribute of an autonomous human being. Feminist scholars have put forward a relational understanding of autonomy, in which social relations shape autonomy. This paper proposes an extension on this relational perspective of autonomy in a study of patients and online privacy. Four personal vignettes, based on in-depth interviews with four chronically ill patients, bring out the mediating role of technology in the enactment of autonomy. The boundaries between public/private and autonomy/dependency are actively redrawn in and through the use of technology. Autonomy, this paper argues, is better understood as a material-discursive practice, in which matter and meaning are produced.
Searching for a Room of One's Own in Cyberspace: Datafication and the Global Feminisation of Privacy
In Swati Punia, Shashank Mohan, Jhalak M. Kakkar, and Vrinda Bhandari (Eds.). Emerging Trends in Data Governance. New Delhi: Centre for Communication Governance., 2022
Since its conceptualisation, the construction of privacy has been deeply gendered, as women and gender and sexual minorities are often at the receiving end of forms of privacy that are subordinating, rather than equalising. In this essay, I argue that, as a result of pervasive datafication, we are now witnessing a generalisation of such problematic interpretations of privacy, to include and affect everybody. Although datafication is fundamentally reconfiguring our bodies and our lives, a comprehensive rethink of what it means to substantially protect privacy in this context remains lacking. As a consequence, the watered-down, inferior version of privacy that women and sexual and gender minorities historically have been faced with is now extended to all: we are effectively witnessing a global feminisation of privacy. This essay first examines in what ways dominant understandings of privacy have been gendered and how such gendering has been reflected in Indian jurisprudence in particular, through a fundamental curtailment of the decisional autonomy of women and gender and sexual minorities and of their ability to engage in self-determination. It then argues that, in the age of datafication, this predicament now presents itself to all of us, as a result of three trends in particular: the specific ways in which consent and anonymity are mobilised by surveillance capitalism (and government) as key tools to drive the datafication of our lives; the resulting reconfiguration of the public and the private; and the portrayal and treatment of data as by default disembodied and deterritorialised. It is these three trends that lie at the heart of the global feminisation of privacy.
Research Ethics, Vulnerability, and Trust on the Internet
Second International Handbook of Internet Research, 2018
This chapter addresses the impossible situations, decisions, and what-if imagi- naries researchers are faced with daily, especially if undertaking qualitative and/or internet research and/or with vulnerable populations and/or on sensitive topics. It aligns with voices arguing that standardized procedural research ethics are inad- equate, and builds on existing work in situational, practice based and feminist ethics to suggest a care based ethical practice. The key to this care based practice of research ethics lies in a particular kind of relationality. This relationality, in turn, is fed by trust, and germinates empathy. The chapter works through the concepts and the phenomena of significant relations, trust, and empathy by drawing examples from my ethnographic research with a community of people, who post (semi)naked selfies of their bodies online (constituting a qualitative, internet research study of a sensitive topic, and thus arguably with a vulnerable population). I describe some of my choices and actions that seem to have worked well to build trusting, emphatic and ethical research relationships, and finish the chapter by offering some suggestions and questions that might help those trying to practice an ethics of care.