Project 3: Exercise 3 – Risk Assessments and Ethics

31/05/26

Again – and sorry to bang on about this – considering risks and ethics for a project when there has been no allowance within the unit (to this point) for establishing a guiding idea or question for a project is a bit back-to-front. Perhaps this project is not supposed to be approached in a linear fashion?! As with the previous exercises, I will make initial notes, then return and refine as the foundations of the project develop.

The following are based on an assumption that my project will adopt a phenomenological/ ethnographic framing and will be centred around a collaboration with my hometown of Hastings and St Leonards

Area of Consideration	Notes
Research Ethics and Positionality	Researcher positionality: My presence will shape what I observe. I will need to reflect honestly on my own subjectivity, background and assumptions and how that influences the work Ethical Approval: My research may require institutional ethics review if it involves human participants or sensitive environments Tension between dual roles: Simultaneously artist, researcher and potentially participant could create complex ethical issues around objectivity, disclosure and power
Informed Consent and Participation	Meaningful Consent: Any participants and collaborators that I do involve must understand what they are agreeing to, but how there experiences, words and presence may be interpreted, transformed and exhibited as art. I will need to develop release forms as well as offering people the option of having their contribution removed from my work if they so wish Consent for Artistic Interpretation: Translating ethnographic research material into a creative output will go beyond standard research consent. Participants will not be able to anticipate how I will interpret their input aesthetically or conceptually. I will need effective means for communicating my intent as well as the aforementioned release and right-to-refuse documentation Ongoing consent: I cannot view consent as a one-time agreement with the ethnographic approach I want to take. I will need to renegotiate it as work evolves Right to Withdraw: As I have mentioned above, participants and collaborators need to be able to remove themselves from the process as well as any contributions they have made. There is an onus on me to keep an audit trail of each participants contribution
Representation and Voice	Who Speaks and How: Creative practice based on an ethnographic approach risk aestheticising other’s experiences to serve my own vision rather than honouring the participants truth: something I need to guard against Extractive research: By taking input from a community (e.g cultural knowledge, stories, images etc) and returning only an artwork, I will be raising serious ethical questions Risk of Misrepresentation: Phenomenological misrepresentation is inherently subjective. I need to be conscious that how I render someone else’s lived experience may not resonate as true to them. This is not something to be mitigated, rather the focus should be on continual consultation to ensure that ‘true’ is always retained Collaborative Authorship: I need to establish if participants should be co-creators or co-authors or subjects. When this is done needs to also be considered e.g. – at the beginning, a blanket decision – this may not be acceptable to subsequent participant prospects, who may then refuse to contribute due to the standpoint
Public Space as Research Site	Observation in Public Spaces: Ethnographic observation in public spaces sits in a grey area: people won’t have provided informed consent to being research participants, yet public space is legitimately observable Disruption: Both research and artistic activities can influence/ alter the very phenomena I am trying to study (the Observer Effect). This raises both methodological and ethical concerns/li> Unofficial/ Marginalised Uses of Spaces: If my fieldwork encounters informal communities such as rough sleepers, protesters etc, heightened ethical care will need to be taken in regards to their vulnerability
Environmental Positioning	More-than-Human Ethics: Adopting a phenomenological lens will need to be extended to non-human experience and agency (animals, ecosystem, weather). How do I position the environment in the project – as a backdrop, subject or co-participant? Disturbance: If I engage in repeated visits to locations, I need to be aware that observational and documentary practice can affect ecological and social environments – fragile or not Embodied Knowledge: Phenomenology values bodily, sensory and affective knowledge. It is important that I consider and monitor how I am ethically capturing and translating this information without flattening it down into data
Translation and Dissemination	Ethics of Aesthicisation: Transforming lived experience in all its dimensions into art objects or work for a gallery can commodify or depoliticise what was meaningful and situated Audience and Context:It matters ethically where the work is shown. Audiences may be socially and geographically removed from the insights depicted Paying Back: What does the project return to the communities or the spaces involved? Do I need to consider alternative display formats for the end result?
Integrity of the Methodology	Thick Description vs. Artistic License: Adopting an ethnographic approach will demand that I remain faithful to context, whilst a fine art practice demands creative freedom. I need to be transparent about where and how I move between these diametrically opposed processes – this is an ethical and methodological obligation Reflexivity as Practice: I need to build ongoing critical reflection into the project structure as a visible, living part of the artistic process Participant Validation: Where collaborators/ participants do come on board, I need to consider checking, continually, my output with them to ensure that it is true to their experiences