Are research data a common resource?

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Toward a Posthumanist Ethics of Qualitative Research in a Big Data Era

I would like to thank Leland Glenna for inviting me to contribute to the international expert workshop on ‘Qualitative Research Ethics in the Big-Data Era’, held in December 2016, Washington D.C., and to the US National Science Foundation for funding my participation. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and constructive feedback on an earlier version of this article, and to Arielle Hesse for editorial assistance. Final thanks go to Karolina Kazimierczak for ongoing productive conversations about posthumanist philosophies.Peer reviewedPostprin

Are Research Data a 'Common' Resource?

This article explores the implicit philosophical framework that underpins, and provides the moral and political justification for, the move towards treating data as a so-called common resource. It begins by tracing the emergence of the idea of viewing data as an open access common resource. It then outlines the regulatory, policy and legislative mechanisms that have been instituted to encourage and ensure that researchers comply with data sharing requirements, and that are institutionalising new ownership regimes away from research data being treated de facto as private property towards it becoming public property. It also spells out the case being made for treating data as a public good, including scientific, moral, economic and political arguments. The article then moves on to suggest that positioning data as a common resource is dependent on a Cartesian and representational understanding of data, their production, and their use in the making of knowledge, drawing in particular on the work of Karen Barad. Barad’s critique of classical Cartesian and Newtonian metaphysical assumptions helps to reveal the positionality of the assumed universalism of treating research data as a given and a priori common resource. The final section of the article considers what treating data as a common resource and public good, and the exclusion of the labour and relations of data producers that it depends on, does ontologically, epistemologically, morally and politically. In particular, it suggests that emerging regulatory, policy, legislative and discursive practices reinforce, institutionalise and legitimise power differentials and inequalities precisely along the lines that feminist scholars have been contesting for over four decades

Postnatal depression: a relational perspective

Current research conceptualizes postnatal depression as individual pathology or as a socio-political problem. By adopting a relational perspective, this thesis bridges the theoretical divides between individualistic and social explanatory frameworks, and between psychology and sociology. The self is seen to be essentially relational, and postnatal depression understood in terms of interrelationships between an active self, others and society. In-depth interviews were conducted with 40 mothers of young children living in Britain, recruited through community sources. Mothers defined their own psychological state following childbirth: 17 found motherhood unproblematic; five had difficult experiences which they distinguished from 'postnatal depression'; 18 experienced, what they defined as, 'postnatal depression', after the birth of their first, second or third child. These 18 mothers are the central focus of the study. The data were analysed using Brown and Gilligan's (1992) 'voice-centred relational method'. Key methodological and theoretical concerns include: listening to mothers on their own terms; considering the interpretations and meanings mothers attribute to their experiences; theorizing similarities, and differences, amongst mothers; exploring changes within individual mothers over time. Postnatal depression was characterized by, and resulted from, a psychological process of relational disconnection, in which mothers felt alienated from themselves and others. During the depressipn, they believed their moral worth and social acceptability depended on complying with cultural expectations of motherhood. The 12 first-time mothers felt under pressure to conform to normative definitions of the 'good', selfless mother. All 18 mothers felt under pressure to conform to a cultural ethic of individuality and self-sufficiency. In order to protect their own integrity, and preserve their relationships, mothers actively withdrew their needs and feelings from relationships with their children, partners, relatives, friends, other mothers with young children, and health professionals. This social withdrawal was distinct to, and occurred irrespective of, physical isolation and unsupportive relationships. Although the mothers conformed, they also questioned cultural norms which construct the needs of self and other as separate, competing forces. During the depression, their resistance was a silent one. The move out of depression was accompanied by shifts in the mothers' moral beliefs about themselves, others and society. They felt it morally acceptable to attend to their own needs and those of others. Relationships with other mothers were critical to these moral re-evaluations. They enabled them to openly question normative constructions of motherhood, providing them with the possibility of a voiced resistance. Policy implications of this research are considered in terms of prevention and intervention programmes for depressed mothers.Financial support was provided by the Medical Research Council and Emmanuel College, Cambridge

‘The past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold’ : a posthumanist performative approach to qualitative longitudinal research

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Creating a space for young women's voices: Using participatory 'video drama' in Uganda

This article draws upon research that explored the experiences of young women in relation to sexual health in Uganda with a view to enhancing gender-sensitive strategies. We have coined the phrase ‘participatory video drama’ to describe the exploratory methodology that the young women participants in our research used to present stories about their lives. The aim of this article is to suggest that ‘participatory video’ (PV) and ‘participatory video drama’ (PVD) are innovative methodological tools to utilise when working with participants who experience voicelessness in their everyday lives. We contribute to an emerging body of work around this methodology by suggesting that the process of PV provides a novel and engaging platform for participants to express their experiences. PVD further creates spaces for the performative exploration of embedded power relations and is therefore informative and has the potential to be transformatory and empowering

Użyczanie danych cyfrowych: perspektywa genealogiczna i performatywna

The fate of sociological qualitative data has emerged over recent years as a ‘matter of concern’ (Latour 2004) within the UK and beyond (Thomson et al 2014), with something of a moral panic about whether, where and how historical and contemporary datasets are being preserved; and if they are, whether in a state that makes them fit for reuse by new generations of scholars. This has spawned new fields of interest and investigation, with researchers debating, and engaging in, the archiving and secondary reuse of qualitative data; and grappling with stubborn methodological, ethical, moral, political and legal challenges. One response to these problems has been to try to fix them, all the while taking the phenomenon of data sharing itself as an ontological given. My own interest is in opening up this ontology to investigation: to take data sharing practices as object of inquiry. Drawing on an emerging body of work on ‘the social life of methods’ (Savage 2010, 2013, Ruppert et al 2013), and on theoretical resources from science and technology studies, and feminist studies of science, I take a genealogical and performative approach and ask: How, and with what effects, has data sharing come into being? What concepts and norms are embedded and enacted in the multiple practices that are constituting data sharing as a phenomenon? And can data sharing be (re)made differently?Dalsze losy socjologicznych danych jakościowych stał się w ostatnich latach w Wielkiej Brytanii i poza nią „niepokojącą kwestią”, przejawiającą symptomy moralnej paniki wokół tego, czy, gdzie i jak zbiory historycznych i współczesnych danych są przechowywane; a jeśli są – to czy w takiej formie, która umożliwiłaby ich ponowne wykorzystanie przez nowe pokolenia naukowców. Przyczyniło się to do powstania nowych obszarów zainteresowań i dociekań badaczy dyskutujących i angażujących się w archiwizowanie oraz ponowne wykorzystywanie danych jakościowych i zmagających się z uporczywymi kwestiami metodologicznymi, etycznymi, moralnymi, politycznymi i prawnymi. Dotychczasowe próby rozwiązania tych problemów oparte były na założeniu, że zjawisko dzielenia się danymi jest ontologicznym pewnikiem. Ja natomiast chciałabym zakwestionować tę ontologię, potraktować praktyki dzielenia się danymi jako coś nieoczywistego i wartego dociekań. Odwołując się do wyrastającego korpusu prac na temat „społecznego życia metod” (Savage 2010, 2013, Ruppert i in 2013) oraz do teoretycznych inspiracji ze studiów nad nauką i technologią a także feministycznych studiów nad nauką przyjmuję podejście genealogiczne i performatywne i pytam: W jaki sposób doszła do głosu idea „dzielenia się” danymi i jakie są jej konsekwencje? Jakie pojęcia i normy wpisane są i aktywizowane w rozmaitych praktykach archiwizowania i udostępniania danych? I czy „dzielenie się” danymi da się pomyśleć i praktykować inaczej niż dotąd

Using the Listening Guide to analyse stories of female entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia:a diffractive methodology

This chapter explores emerging feminist posthumanist philosophies of science and their implications for methodological practice in the field of gender and management. Feminist posthumanist philosophies challenge humanist representationalist forms of inquiry, and their assumption that knowledge is produced by an intentional human subject and represents pre-existing entities. They propose instead a posthumanist per- formative understanding of knowledge practices in which the latter are seen as con- stitutive of their objects of study (Barad 2007). Our own purpose in this chapter is to investigate how a feminist posthumanist philosophy of science might articulate itself through the ‘diffractive’ methodology. Our chapter is organised as follows. First, we discuss feminist posthumanist philosophies of science and the ‘diffractive’ methodology that Barad, building on Haraway, proposes for their enactment. Second, we explore how this diffractive methodology reconfigures our philosophical understanding of research methods in the social sciences, and discuss Mauthner’s (2016) concept and practice of ‘diffrac- tive genealogies’ as a means of enacting posthumanist research. Third, we outline the Listening Guide method and how Alkhaled used it to analyse stories of 13 female entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia. Fourth, we present a diffractive genealogy of the Listening Guide. Fifth, we provide guiding questions for undertaking diffractive genealogies of research methods

Archival practices and the making of ‘memories’

Date of Acceptance: 19/10/2015Peer reviewedPostprin