Item Details

The Other Ethical Approval: The Importance of Being “Islamic”

Issue: Vol 12 No. 2 (2017) Special Issue: Ethics and Fieldwork

Journal: Fieldwork in Religion

Subject Areas: Religious Studies Linguistics

DOI: 10.1558/firn.35668

Abstract:

The researcher, in carrying the name of the institution, is bound to an ethical standard of behaviour; standards which are maintained through ethical approval that researchers must obtain from their departments before conducting research. There exists another form of ethical approval a fieldworker must obtain, that of their research participants. This Other Ethical Approval is often related to access; a participant must consider the researcher to have integrity in order to allow them the privileged insight into their own lives and behaviours. The article outlines and explores this secondary ethical approval derived from the author’s experience of conducting research as a doctoral student. It is argued that being attentive and conscious of the ethical standards of the research field can only improve the quality and rigour of the research, and is increasingly important in spaces where access is not easily obtained. After outlining the research project, there follows a statement of ethics as the author encountered and negotiated it in the field. It is expressed through statements derived from Islamic sacred texts, structured in a similar way to statements of ethics produced by scholarly associations such as the American Anthropological Association. This reflexive account will be of value to researchers interested in British Muslim studies, as well as to scholars researching contemporary religious communities more generally, who need ethical approval from their research participants.

Author: Abdul-Azim Ahmed

View Original Web Page

References :

Abbas, T.

2010 Muslim-on-Muslim Social Research: Knowledge, Power and Religio-cultural Identities. Social Epistemology 24(2): 123–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691721003749919

Ahmed, Abdul-Azim

2010 Visual Dhikr—A Visual Analysis of Mosques in Cardiff. Masters dissertation, Cardiff University.

American Anthropological Association

2012 Ethics Blog: Full Text of the 2012 Ethics Statement. Online: http://ethics.americananthro.org/category/statement/ (accessed May 23, 2016).

Ammerman, N.

1987 Bible Believers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Atkinson, P.

1990 The Ethnographic Imagination. London: Routledge.

Barton, S.

1986 The Bengali Muslims of Bradford: A Study of their Observance of Islam, with Special Reference to the Function of the Mosque and the Work of the Imam. Leeds: Dept. of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Leeds.

Brown, K.

2008 The Promise and Perils of Women’s Participation in UK Mosques: The Impact of Securitisation Agendas on Identity, Gender and Community. British Journal of Politics & International Relations 10(3): 472–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/
j.1467-856x.2008.00324.x

Bolognani, M.

2007 Islam, Ethnography and Politics: Methodological Issues in Researching amongst West Yorkshire Pakistanis in 2005. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 10(4): 279–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645570701546570

Candea, M.

2007 Arbitrary Locations: In Defence of the Bounded Field-Site. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(1): 167–84. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2007.00419.x

Geertz, C.

1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Gilliat-Ray, S.

2007 Closed Worlds: (Not) Accessing Deobandi dar ul-uloom in Britain. Fieldwork in Religion 1(1): 7–33. https://doi.org/10.1558/firn.v1i1.7

Lefebvre, H.

2004 Rhythmanalysis. London: Continuum.

Sanghera, G., and S. Thapar-Bjorkert

2008 Methodological Dilemmas: Gatekeepers and Positionality in Bradford. Ethnic and Racial Studies 31(3): 543–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870701491952

Strhan, A.

2015 Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/
9780198724469.001.0001

Versteeg, P.

2010 The Ethnography of a Dutch Pentecostal Church. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

Werbner, P.

1990 The Migration Process. New York: Berg.

2002 Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims. Oxford: James Currey.

2003 Pilgrims of Love. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.